By Vestnik Kavkaza
Experts who deal with ethnic relations point out a negative trend of growing inter-ethnic aloofness which sometimes turns into hatred. The line of misunderstanding lies between the Russian population of Central Russia and ethnic Caucasian people, according to some experts. Reasonable people have tried to dispel negative stereotypes about the Caucasus for many years.
Alexander Seravin, research director of the center of modern Caucasian policy "Caucasus", says that the center has conducted more than 40 studies within our research programs. “We had three large research units there. For example, we studied the image of the Caucasus in the media of six language groups - the image of the North Caucasus and the Caucasus. For example, for three months we have been monitoring everything that was written about the North Caucasus in the Chinese-language media, in the Arabic-language, Turkish-language, English-language, French-language, Polish-language and, of course, Russian media. We saw that they perceived various information very differently; the news that they perceive in the Caucasus is not the news that we perceive,” Seravin says.
“We did a lot of fieldwork in all 14 subjects, those that we have identified in the Caucasus. For example, we randomly found people for the focus groups, put a sheet of paper and pencil or pen in front of them and asked: "Please draw the political map of the Caucasus." Our ethnographic research shows that about 100-150 years ago people had a common image of the Caucasus. Now we saw that a general image of the Caucasus does not exist. They draw their entity and maybe a close one, but there is no overall image,” Seravin stated.
In 1926 the white-and-black silent Soviet movie was filmed in Armenia - it was called "Namus". “Namus is the special inner essence of Circassian etiquette. Then there were some communications, and now, unfortunately, these connections are lost. That is, it turns out that the Internet and cell phones have brought closer areas that are incredibly far away geographically, and areas that are geographically close became very far away.”
