Barbare "Varia" Kipiani (Georgian: ბარბარე "ვარია" ყიფიანი; 4 February 1879 – 1950-1965) was the first Georgian trained as a psychophysiologist and is recognized as a pioneering woman scholar of Georgia. Born into a noble family, Kipiani and her sisters were raised by her father after her parents' divorce. After graduating from St. Nino's School in Tbilisi in 1899, she taught in a school in Khoni for two years. Moving to Belgium, where her father had relocated, she entered the medical faculty of the Free University of Brussels in 1902. Unable to afford her tuition, Kipiani was mentored by Polish academic, Józefa Joteyko, who paid her school fees and allowed her to work in a laboratory. She wrote a paper titled "L'ergographie du sucre" ("The Ergography of Sugar"), which evaluated the use of sugar in alleviating fatigue. Her study won a silver medal from the Association des chimistes de France et des colonies ('Association of Chemists of France and the Colonies') in 1906. After completing her coursework in the medical faculty in 1907, Kipiani lectured at various universities and continued research with Joteyko on nutrition and fatigue. They jointly were awarded the Vernois Prize of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine in 1908 for their work on vegetarianism.
Impacted by biases against women scientists, the two women shifted their career studies toward child development, focusing on the emerging field of paedology. They studied various aspects of memorization and the senses, attempting to develop teaching methods that could improve society. In 1910, Kipiani received the Valentin Haily Medal at the Congrès des Typhlophiles ('congress to benefit the blind') in Paris for two papers she wrote about educating blind students. Among other studies, she published works on sensory psychology, the use of both muscles and vision in learning to write, auditory versus visual learning, and tropism. She was a proponent of teaching students to be ambidextrous and to use physical exercise to create bilateral symmetry in the body. Her works on ambidexterity argued that training both the dominant and weaker sides of the body would enhance motor and intellectual capacity and allow quicker recovery if one side of the body or brain was damaged. At the end of World War I, Kipiani briefly returned to Georgia, but when the Russian Red Army invaded the country, she moved back to Belgium. As paedology did not survive as a field of scientific study, upon her return to Brussels, Kipiani taught French and Russian at the University of Brussels.
In addition to her scientific work, Kipiani was one of the Georgian exiles who worked to preserve Georgian culture. Between 1910 and 1913, she curated and directed the collection of Georgian historical and ethnographic artifacts for the Palais Mondial ('World Palace'). The museum was founded by the Union of International Associations as a repository for collecting the world's knowledge. She also was responsible for preserving some of the estate of Salome Dadiani and her husband Prince Achille Murat as significant Georgian heritage. Although mainly forgotten after her death, 21st-century academics have begun to reevaluate her role in promoting vegetarianism in Belgium and France at the turn of the 20th century and her contributions to protecting Georgian culture.
Barbara Kipiani, known as Varia, was born on 4 February 1879 in Kutaisi, in the Caucasus Viceroyalty of the Russian Empire, to Anastasia Eristavi and Nikoloz Kipiani. Ketevan the Martyr was an ancestor of her mother and her father was the oldest son of Dimitri Kipiani, a Georgian nobleman, scholar, statesman, and proponent of protecting Georgian culture from Russification. Kipiani grew up on her grandfather's estate near Kvishkheti, but when her parents divorced, she and her older sisters, Elisabet "Veta" and Nino, went with their father in 1883 to Batumi, where he was working in the judiciary system. Their brother remained with their mother after the divorce. Her grandfather was exiled to Stavropol in 1886 and assassinated the following year. The shock of his father's death caused health problems for Nikoloz, who moved abroad in 1890 to seek treatment, leaving his daughters in Tbilisi to attend St. Nino's School. He lived in France, Holland, Italy and Switzerland before settling in Belgium in 1895 and becoming the chair of Russian language studies at the Free University of Brussels. Kipiani attended St. Nino's School under a national scholarship program and graduated with honors in 1899.
First Belgian period (1902–1919)
After graduating, Kipiani taught at the St. Mary's School in Khoni until 1901, when she decided to join her father in Belgium. She enrolled in the medical faculty at the University of Brussels in 1902. Within two years, Kipiani was expelled because of an inability to pay her tuition. After making a presentation which was well-received at the Sixth International Congress of Physiologists held in Brussels in 1904, the Polish scientist Józefa Joteyko invited Kipiani to work in her laboratory at the Solvay Institute of Physiology and paid for her tuition. The laboratory focused on studying physiology, and specifically those functions that provided power to living organisms. Kipiani began studying how sugar could be used to combat fatigue. At the time, Armand Gautier in Paris and Auguste Slosse in Brussels were studying the diets of workers in their respective cities to evaluate whether the nutritional level of the population was adequate to maintain the level of their industrial activities. Her aim in conducting the studies was to contribute to the understanding of how nutrition and physiology could be applied to improving society. Findings on a study promoting vegetarianism sparked international discussion in newspapers, like The New York Times, women's magazines such as, Life & Health, and a book, Good Health and How We Won It by Upton Sinclair. Kipiani completed her studies in the medical faculty and graduated in 1907.
Kipiani became involved in protests in Brussels, sparked by the 1905 Russian Revolution and aimed at the Russian tsar and ruling class. As a means of furthering knowledge about Georgia and its culture, she began collecting Georgian art and cultural artifacts throughout Europe. With other Georgian students, in 1908 she performed at the Diamont Palace in an evening event which featured Georgian literature, music, and dancing. The students performed in various segments offering glimpses of Georgian culture. They acted in a drama, recited poetry, sang, and danced traditional dances in national costumes. In 1910, she attended the Congrès mondial des Associations Internationales ('World Congress of International Associations'), where it was proposed that the Palais Mondial ('World Palace') be established as a central repository for the world's knowledge. The original plan was to utilize one of the buildings from the Brussels International Exposition, but a new location had to be found after fire destroyed several sections of the exposition site. Kipiani curated and directed the collection of Georgian historical and ethnographic artifacts for the Palais Mondial, now known as the Mundaneum. She wrote to organizations in Georgia encouraging them to send books, pictures, or other items that could be added to the exhibit in order to improve exposure to Georgian achievements in education and technology. In 1913, when the collection was installed, she wrote to Giorgi Kereselidze, one of the leaders of the Georgian independence movement, urging him to print at least 100 copies of a flyer to publicize the collection to members of the Georgian diaspora.
In 1908, Joteyko founded and became editor of the Revue Psychologique, a journal which explored developments in the field of psychology from a scientific and educational perspective. Kipiani was hired as its executive secretary. She published several articles in the journal between 1908 and 1914, as well as various studies examining muscle memory, the adaptive multi-sensory practices of people with limited or no vision, vegetarianism, and ambidexterity. Kipiani lectured on psychophysiology and psychology at various universities, including her alma mater, the University of Liège and the University of Paris. In 1911, she worked as a laboratory assistant to Joteyko who that year founded and developed the curricula for the International Paedological Faculty of Brussels. The goal of this facility was to scientifically study children and their development to improve educational methods for the benefit of society as a whole. She also taught a course for the faculty in paedology practices, conducting laboratory studies on children's development. Paedology was an emerging science at the time, and the researchers of the International Paedological Faculty attempted to examine childhood development from both a physiological and psychological view as a basis for improving education. By 1913, Kipiani had been awarded medals by several learned societies and become a laureate of the Académie Nationale de Médecine in Paris. She was one of the invited speakers who participated in the Fourth Vegetarian Congress, held in The Hague in 1913. The following year, with the onset of World War I, all of the major universities in Belgium were closed. Joteyko left the country in 1915.