A Different Kind of Freedom

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Just watched a fascinating little documentary about the Svans of Svaneti in Georgia, a mountain-dwelling folk of the Caucasus. At the time of the making of the documentary [2012], the lifestyle of the Svans was very much still rooted in its ancient history, with a primitive agriculture and a society very firmly based on common and collective values and mores. The incursion of modern life was obvious to see in the occasional satellite dish and a mobile phone mast at the centre of the village that was the subject of the documentary, as were the mostly modern clothes worn by all.

Their society was [is] a strictly communal one based around those essential components for a rural, agrarian and isolated [snowed in for six months of the winter] community to survive: family and continual work, religion, pagan ritual, and alcohol. The Svans speak their own, unwritten language, but are all bilingual in Georgian, itself a language that bears no connection with any of the known language groupings of the world of philology. They were traditionally a warrior people who operated an unwritten blood feud code, where a wronged family would take revenge on the perpetrator of a murder or more widely, their relatives themselves. This practice has waned in the modern era, but still lingers.

Altogether, a fascinating glimpse into a semi-medieval society, and interesting insofar as the [albeit patriarchal] societal infrastructure has no inbuilt feudal structure: they operate and live in a cooperative ethos: personal, family work is balanced against a tacit obligation to contribute a certain amount of time to community work, and there is no 'trade' within the community, only with those other communities outside: all is essentially shared. Family focussed but communal. Yes, the gender divides are 'traditional', and yes, there are 'elders' [men], and yes, a woman's responsibilities centre around the home and family; none of which in modern, Western society seems particularly right or fair. But in context, their society works, despite its lack of 'modernity' and amenities. Who's to say which is better: their reductive approach to living or our current state of existence in the West? Let's face it, our 'freedoms' these days are really the  economic shackles foisted on us by the ultra-capitalists and their insane greed: freedom in name only for most of us... 

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