Anxiety Leaks Into <i>Tsqena</i> : Feelings of Hurt Among Georgia's Armenians and Identity Anxiety in the Caucasus

ABSTRACT This paper offers an alternative to the designation of anxiety as an externally oriented affect revealed in worry or mental disorder. It stresses the distinction between anxiety as an identity structure that is historically entrenched in an unstable place and the dominant Western paradigm of anxiety as an affective reaction in response to drastic shifts that upset the normal flow of life. I focus on a region with no memory of normal life and interrogate anxiety as an instability with which ethnic Armenians in Georgia (referred to throughout the paper as Georgia's Armenians, the designation used by my interlocutors) define their identity and belonging in relation to multivocal and contradictory narratives. I draw on the anthropological tradition of acknowledging that emotions take culturally specific pathways and argue that in a disturbed place like the Caucasus, expressions of anxiety can be subdued to bypass aggression and instead can leak into the culturally distinct feeling of hurt ( tsqena ). Tsqena denotes a placid heartbreak in intimate relations and is neither a destructive nor a debilitating affect. By leaking into tsqena , anxiety diversifies to maintain communality and intimacy in a place of violence and hostility.