Paul Manning

Ch’avch’avadze’s ‘Letters of a Traveler’ is perhaps the single most important political writing of the Georgian generation of the 1860’s, who called themselves Terg-daleulebi (‘those who have drunk from the Terek river’). This term has potentially ambiguous reference in this text, denoting at once a member of the Russian-educated Georgian gentry intelligentsia represented by the narrator, who is Terg-daleuli because he has crossed (‘drunk from’) the Terek, the boundary between Russia and Georgia, in search of enlightenment, as well as a member of the Georgian people, Lelt Ghunia, who as a Mokhevian peasant dwells beside the Terek river in Khevi, and could therefore implicitly be taken as a true Terg-daleuli. The term Terg-daleuli itself undergoes a transformation and revalorization in the course of the text from the first sense to the second, as Ch’avch’avadze becomes disenchanted with the promises of Russian civilization and discovers authentic culture instead amongst the Georgian ...

This chapter takes as its point of departure the singular “Slender Man stabbing” incident in Waukesha, Wisconsin, an incident that defines one extreme of a continuum of “ostension,” an attempt to act out or show the (legend) narrative in real life. I compare this case, which begins with a set of photographs of paranormal phenomena, to the equally singular case of the Cottingley “fairy photographs.” I will compare these incidents to rethink ostension as a kind of indexicality—a sign that works by real existential contact or contiguity, as a photograph indexes its object. I will also attempt to locate discussions of the ostension of this monster within an explicit consideration of media forms for portraying the monstrous. I will treat monsters as a species of “character” defined by its portability, its ability to move across a series of linked genres or media forms.

This chapter takes as its point of departure the singular “Slender
Man stabbing” incident in Waukesha, Wisconsin, an incident that defines
one extreme of a continuum of “ostension,” an attempt to act out or show the (legend) narrative in real life. I compare this case, which begins with a set of photographs of paranormal phenomena, to the equally singular case of the Cottingley “fairy photographs.” I will compare these incidents to rethink ostension as a kind of indexicality—a sign that works by real existential contact or contiguity, as a photograph indexes its object. I will also attempt to locate discussions of the ostension of this monster within an explicit consideration of media forms for portraying the monstrous. I will treat monsters as a species of “character” defined by its portability, its ability to move across a series of linked genres or media forms.

Recent media studies research on 19th-century Spiritualism has foregrounded the technological metaphors that suffuse Spiritualist models of the seance. However, this article shows that the actual phatic channels proposed by Spiritualism consisted almost entirely of mediating chains of human spirits who stood between the bereaved seance guests and the spirits of the dear departed called “strangers.” While the “strangers” were, like the seance guests, departed white people, the authoritative “control spirits” were frequently exotic others such as “Indians” from the American imaginary of the Frontier. Beginning in 1875, the apparent transparency of the Spiritualist seance became the object of critique of an emerging occultist movement of Theosophy, which sought to undermine the authoritative human spirits of Spiritualism by turning the human spirits of the Spiritualist s_eance wholesale into disruptive non-human mediators called “Diakkas,” “Bhuts,” and “Elementals,” and replacing Spiritualism’s authoritative “Indian” control spirits drawn from the imaginary of the American frontier with Tibetan “Mahatmas” drawn from the orientalist imaginary of the Empire. These elementals initially represented noisy non-human “parasites” of Spiritualist channels, but later these parasites take over the channel and become the channel themselves in the form of what came to be called the “elemental essence.” [Spiritualism, Theosophy, Phaticity, Voice, Animation]

In this paper I will attend to two kinds of “Pokémon lore”, “virtual urbanism” and “virtual naturalism”, meaning by this ways in which players of augmented reality games like Pokémon GO propose local 2.5D mappings of real world space to virtual space. In the first half of the chapter, under the rubric of “virtual urbanism” I will collect together metonymic entanglements of the real and the virtual worlds in which aspects of the urban environment is “gamified”, that is, translated into categories and affordances of game play.  In the second half of the chapter I will attend to the way players attempt to resolve the apparent discontinuity between the real urban paces in which the game is played and the largely imagined world of pristine nature in which the Pokémon live by proposing a metaphoric mapping of urban second natures onto the imaginary first nature of the wild Pokémon animals, a “virtual naturalism” that explores potential resemblances between real urban landscapes and the natural ones of the game world (see Santry this volume). AR game play in Pokémon GO (but not in Ingress) emerges as a weird hybrid of urbanist exploration and naturalist butterfly collecting, “botanizing on the asphalt”.  “Indoorsy” and “Outdoorsy” Virtual Worlds.

(this is the prepublication draft please write to me to ask for the published draft)

In research on Massively Multiple Online Games and Worlds (MMOs) like World of Warcraft, Everquest or Second Life, the term “worldness” addresses how the various layers of a virtual world–the animated 3D pictorial spectacle, the interactive world of mobile nonplayer
characters, the virtual community of other players– all hang together as an autonomous “world.” This article deploys Bakhtinian concepts of chronotopes operating at different scales to explore the worldness of one such online “world” (Ryzom’s Atys). I will show that these different layered chronotopes become visible at moments of crisis. In each crisis, the chronotopic worldness of Atys affords developers and players not only a domain for potential conflict, but also political collaboration and engagement.
(This is a prepublication draft, please contact me for the published paper)

Here is the road map: first I will talk about what we mean by virtual world, then world, then animation, then a new media genre parasitic on the animation of virtual worlds, machinima, basically a live action film shot in an animated world.  My questions are on the relation of genres of animation, including machinima, to worldness. How does animation help create worldness?  What genres of machinima are produced in what kinds of virtual world?

Ryzom is a long-running (from 2004-present) science fantasy MMORPG (henceforth MMO) set in the science fantasy gameworld of the planet Atys, an entirely organic " rootball " teeming with alien life forms. The most oft-cited distinctive properties of Ryzom in the MMO world is the way creates not only an immersive sense of " worldness " , but a living, breathing, organic world.

Each of the papers in this collection makes reference to a singular
“Slender Man Stabbing” incident in Waukesha, Wisconsin, an incident
that defines one extreme of a continuum of “ostension,” an attempt to
act out or show the (legend) narrative in real life. Using this incident to
rethink ostension is central to all these papers, and each author makes
important contributions to the definition of ostension. Peck usefully
replaces the term “ostensive action” with “ostensive practices,” locating
ostension within a series of genres of ostension (including continuum
from recognizable generic fan practices like costume play and
pilgrimage to the aforementioned murder) that circulate within a
networked, collaborative, self-aware, social “community of practices.”1
Tolbert is particularly concerned to show how in the first instance
Slender Man isn’t a “real” monster of a “real” folkloric legend—a
legend being a narrative represented as being historical or belonging to
“the real”—but a “fictional” folkloresque monster assembled from the
vocabulary of real folklore so as to encourage a sense of legendary
believability. Kitta draws our attention to the “double stigma” of a
character who is both supernatural and who circulates on the Internet,
showing that the unarticulated experiences Slender Man gives voice to
belong to an online environment and specifically acknowledge an
“unacknowledged common experience of being watched” (72)

Pixies were a late addition to the British taxonomy of fairies.  They could indeed be called 'Mrs. Bray's creatures', since it was largely through her writings that the pixies entered the canon of British fairylore.  Anna Eliza Bray (1790-1883), protégée of the Poet Laurete Robert Southey (a Lake Poet along with Wordsworth and Coleridge), was already an accomplished novelist with six published novels by the time she began to write about pixies.  Pixies come onto the stage of fairydom in her A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy of 1836, in which they play a minor, but significant, role within a larger description of the picturesque locality of Dartmoor, and only take on a leading role against the backdrop of the same landscape in her A Peep at the Pixies of 1854. In the case of pixies we can watch in detail how a local spirit is integrated into the emergent assemblage of the British fairy mythology, starting with their adoption in Keightley's Fairy Mythology of 1850. While Bray, the first British female collector of folklore avant la lettre (Silver 1999, 30), first brought the 'folkloric' pixie into public view, she simultaneously fashioned the 'folkloresque' pixie, a creature able to move from the relatively homogeneous oral networks of transmission of local folklore into the extremely heterogeneous, multimedia and multiplatform, 'folkloresque' networks of transmission that sustained the late Victorian to Edwardian popular literary and visual culture of 'fairyland' (on which see Gordon 2006, 40-41).

Erik Scott’s book Familiar Strangers begins with a tantalizing paradox:
How did Georgians, a small people numerically, come to play a role as
internal diaspora out of all proportion to their numbers in the Soviet
Union from start to finish? I argue that in the thread that ties together
the many examples of Georgian ethnic strategies (including the changing, but continuous, presence of Georgians in political and cultural
life of the Soviet Union), Scott rightly focuses on the varied affordances of the Georgian table, both the “edible ethnicity” of Georgian
food and wine but also the traditions of hospitality centered on this
commensality and the forms of networking arising from it, which
took hold in Soviet Culture beginning with Stalin. When Soviet citizens
became guests at the Georgian table, a paradoxical inversion of
guest-host relations occurred, so that the whole Soviet Union became,
in effect, the guests of Georgian hosts. As Scott argues, it was precisely
through making their own food, drink, and attendant rituals of hospitality
central to Soviet rule and Soviet life that Georgians moved from
being metaphoric ethnic guests in a host society to hosts within the
imperial capital itself.
Keywords: internal diasporas, commensality, hospitality, Stalinism,
food

This article explores anxieties about the unhauntability of the landscapes of New World, expressed in the aphorism “No Ruins. No Ghosts.” I argue first that ruins have material agency and produce destabilizing affects affording the imagination of haunting anthropomorphic figures to animate the landscape. For settler colonials in both North America and Australia, the absence of homely haunted “picturesque” ruins in the “sublime wilderness” of the New World becomes a diagnostic predicament of both folkloric and literary narratives, speaking to a broader colonial anxiety of “unsettlement.” In the final sections I explore how Americans fashioned new kinds of ruin and new forms of haunting, including imagined sublime ruins of vast age that predate European settlement. In these imagined ruins I see the genesis of an aesthetics of haunting materially inspired by New World landscapes: the aesthetics of the American weird tale.
keywords ruins, materiality, animation, haunting, narrative, chronotope

The Georgian Rose Revolution of 2003 brought with it a radical, almost millenarian, epochalism, a desire to wipe the old Georgia from the face of the earth and erect a new Georgia in its place. But there is certainly nothing new in these revolutionaries' belief that they are living in a time of
change. After all, they came of age in another period of dynamic change, the chaotic "transition" of the early 1990s, and they define their revolution as a fulfillment of the promise of this period, a reaction to the trauma of it, or maybe both. Of course, the term transition itself contains a not very well
hidden teleological narrative: that this transition is heading somewhere specific, that it has a goal of some sort. But wherever it is going, there is no question what the transition is from: socialism. Like some sort of Zeno's paradox, the socialist past will continue to haunt the present for as long as postsocialist reformers and revolutionaries continue to seek to expunge every trace of it. Hence, it follows that "westernization" must always be
approaching, never arriving, in the same way that the socialist past leaks, keeps leaking, into the postsocialist present, so that the whole pre-Rose Revolution period from socialism to Eduard Shevardnadze seems to these revolutionaries as one undifferentiated, unredeemable era vaguely iden
tified with socialism or its pervasive taint in the forms of corruption and criminality.
In both these periods of dramatic change, certain kinds of western
symbols, especially western brands, became symbols of revolutionary change. What I am interested in examining is not the semiotics of brand as such, but the way that brand can serve as a semiotic resource to articulate these epochal changes in two somewhat different ways.

My objective here is to show how Longworth’s interested encounter with Circassia,
and his search for a Circassian polity that he could engage in a practical
manner, led him into more detailed analysis of Circassian political structures,
and, indeed, of the basic presuppositions of Liberalism (itself a universalizing
and naturalizing framework) that he was using as a vocabulary of analysis.
Longworth’s strategy to understand the alterity of the Circassian political
order was to cast it heuristically into the language of Liberalism itself, so as
to reveal the different presuppositions that prevented the translation of an
alien political order into Circassia. Bell, by contrast, typically represented the
alterity of Circassian institutions using indigenous terminology (lending him
greater ethnographic authority, in retrospect). But for all of Bell’s valuable
factual exposition (down to daily temperature readings), he never seemed to
understand what these institutions meant for his own project of political translation.
Despite repeated failure, Bell never really discarded the basic premises
that he shared with Urquhart that Circassians in effect needed but a symbol to
rally around, and their self-evident moral unity (of language and custom) would
lead automatically to the formation of a polity. In Longworth’s case, the frustration
of their initial direct translation and transplantation led to a more
complex analysis of Circassian political orders, still cast ambivalently in
terms of Liberalism. This allowed him to see the Circassian polity as being
essentially “just like England”: to see in Circassians a kind of approximation
of English yeomanry, and in Circassian political structures a kind of implicit
Liberalism. However, it also allowed him to determine what was the cause  of their frustration: their concomitant inability to locate state-like structures that
could be the germ of a Circassian state.
The difference between the two men would seemto boil down to a difference in
translational styles: Bell’s style emphasized the denotational semantico-referential
aspect of translation, which is presumably why he is considered the better,
“more objective” ethnographer. Longworth highlighted the pragmatic or performative
effectiveness of translation (Silverstein 1979). Bell’s faithfulness to
Circassian terminology emphasized an Orientalizing alterity, while Longworth’s
use of terminology from British Liberalism stressed an Occidentalizing
identification between Circassian and British institutions, even as it allowed
him to represent the unfamiliarity of Circassian institutions on a ground of
essential familiarity.

Approaches to the semiotics of brand are troubled by the lack of any
accepted analytic definition of the phenomenon, as well as capacious,
almost metaphysical, extensions in which brand becomes identified with
semiosis as such, and thus everything is a brand. In addition, studies of
brand tend to focus on highly visible or successful brands, as often as
not as a proxy for a real object of analytic interest that lies elsewhere.
Brand discourse defines brand in opposition to the material properties of
the product, leading to a dematerialization of brand, which erases the
messy materialities, contingencies, and hybrids that continually arise
in the material semiosis of brand. Rather than attempt a definition of
brand, the recent literature on brand semiotics is explored along several
material and semiotic dimensions of the variousness of its relationship
to its universes of circulation and in different professional discourses
and historical and cultural contexts

What, then, are the questions we are encouraged to ask when, as Webb
Keane recommends (2003), one places the materiality of the sign front and
center as the focus of analysis? In the first section, we examine the topics
that one studies when focusing on the materiality of the medium itself,
aspects such as entextualization, participant structure, and remediation.
In the second section, we discuss analyses that result when one takes
mediated communication to be the opposite of immediacy, when the
central analytical dichotomy is between mediated communication and
co-presence. In our third section, we discuss how a focus on materiality
has the potential to transform who or what counts as a mediator, framing
in unexpected ways the roles humans and non-humans might play in
mediating communication.

Why does the Caf é Central need a theory? And what kind
of theory would a Caf é Peripheral need? Caf é s can express
modernity in very different ways, depending on whether the
caf é s are themselves at home among friends and family in
European modernity, or whether they are the vanguard of
modernity elsewhere. Prototypical Western European caf é s
like the Caf é Central in Vienna or the Caf é Riche in Paris
(Grafe and Bollerey, 2007) instantiate a model kind of caf é
in the metropolitan heart of European modernity (what I am
calling generically the “caf é central”). But caf é s located in
the European periphery and not the metropole (what I am
calling the “caf é peripheral”) cannot help but measure themselves
against the prototypical “caf é central.” Such caf é s
express both aspirations for modernity as well as abjection:
the deeply felt absence of the very modernity it sought to
express. An incarnation here and now of an urban modernity
better instantiated elsewhere, the caf é peripheral is constantly
threatened by its physical situation on the periphery.

If the supra was to become a spiritual
domain identified most of all with the act of thematic toasting, this domain
presented itself initially as an exclusively material one. Indeed, the material
odds and ends out of which the contemporary nationalist supra is assembled,
as Ram points out, are themselves a skein of cosmopolitan fragments: the
fact that the supra iself is a term of Safavid origin reminds us that the traveler
Jean Chardin witnessed drunken feasts in the Georgian royal court at
Tiflis nearly identical to those he saw in the Safavid court in Isfahan, the
same vast amounts of wine imbibed only with a minor difference in the
large range of selection of drinking vessels, the Georgians having drinking
horns alongside the other material paraphernalia of drinking. The food at a
contemporary supra is typically Georgian (which itself bears resemblances
to other regional cuisines), but the distinct mode of presentation, not served
à la russe in services but with dishes artfully stacked sometimes three stories
high, nevertheless occludes that these are Georgian dishes designed to be
eaten cold, in the manner of Russian zakuski, and the menu of a contemporary
supra bears little to no relation to what we know of the alfresco feasts
of Tiflis street peddlers (kintos) in the fabled gardens of Ortachala. I leave
aside the jumble of words of non-Georgian, variously Turkic (tolumbashi,
alaverdi), Circassian (tamada), and Persian (supra) origin that are used at
the table. If the cosmopolitan origins of thematic toasting at the supra are,
as Ram convincingly argued, covertly Russian and European, other poetic
and musical forms associated with the supra (the mukhambazi) place the
supra in a distinctly Safavid milieu of drunken feasts held in gardens.

The actual paper can be found at http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.3.006

This article engages with Teri Silvio's 2010 challenge to treat animation as a central trope for understanding the relationship between selves and media. We discuss how animation can illuminate aspects of interactions that performance, the current dominant trope, can not—such as addressing what it means to be human when what distinguishes the human from the nonhuman is how one is being controlled. We discuss how focusing on animation can shed light on social interactions both in virtual worlds and with media practices in which online and offline exchanges are inextricably intertwined. This article begins with a set of " what if " questions: what if we moved beyond performance as the dominant trope for addressing the relationship between selves and new media? What if we drew from animation instead as a productive metaphorical lens that people use to explain their lived experiences of new media under contemporary capitalism? What if the paradoxes inherent in having a coherent character created by a team of inkists, colorists, voice actors, and so on offers a useful take on the trials and tribulations of being a mediated self? What if this trope of animation sheds light on dilemmas otherwise obscured when one interprets interactions based on a self divided by the tension between character and actor, between performance and true self? These are what if questions inspired by Teri Silvio's 2010 article " Animation: The new performance? " where she argues that animation as a trope calls attention to some of the many ways in which people currently experience being a self when surrounded by a capitalism dominated by brands and flexible corporate selves. For the purposes of this article, Silvio offers a suggestive vantage point for analyzing the contemporary ways people use technologies designed for mediating selves such as avatars and Facebook profiles. In this article, we compare people's experiences with virtual worlds and people's experiences using media to accomplish the tasks of daily life to see what animation reveals that performance has obscured. We want to explore how

In a recent article titled “Kartuli Mama-p’ap’uri Seksi” (Georgian Ancestral
Sex), Aleko Tskhitishvili asks the following question: “was there ever sex
[seksi] in Georgia, or not?”1 But what is sex? The Georgian term seksi is a recent
loan from English, inheriting many of the ambiguities of the English word
sex.2 If “sex” (seksi) is defi ned in terms of its prototypical biophysical referent,
(heterosexual) vaginal intercourse, potentially leading to pregnancy, then,
Tskhitishvili argues, of course there has apparently been a lot of sex through
the ages in Georgia, given the large number of Georgians alive today. But if
“sex” is meant as sex decoupled from biological reproduction, then sex has indeed
been relatively absent from Georgia. The author is seemingly searching
for traces of another kind of sex, a kind of sexual sociability, a purely elective,
“play” form of sex, pursued entirely for its own sake and unencumbered by
any connection to biological reproduction or marital obligation.3
This is a kind of sex defi ned by absence (it seemingly doesn’t exist in
Georgia) and alterity (it is normatively quite alien to Georgia). According to
the author, “Among us, there is no sex!” was the oft -heard lament from the
“frigid” Homo sovieticus decrying the absence of sex in Georgia. It is also the
battle cry of postsocialist Georgian traditionalists decrying the appearance of
a Georgian-language Playboy (with Georgian models): “In the land of Queen
Ketevan and Nestan-Darejan, Playboy should not exist!”4

მას შემდეგ, რაც საქართველოში დავიწყე მუშაობა, კერძოდ, 1992 წლიდან, ბევრი რამ
შეიცვალა. პოსტსოციალიზმის მთელ ისტორიას ჯერ კიდევ „გადასვლა“ ეწოდება, რაც
გულისხმობს, რომ ეს ცვლილებების ეპოქაა. ამ ტერმინს, სავარაუდოდ, იმისთვის
ვიყენებთ, რომ ხაზი გავუსვათ კონტრასტს „სტაგნაციის“ პერიოდთან, რომელიც წინ
უძღოდა „გადასვლას“. ცხადია, ამ ტერმინში გარკვეული მიმართულება იგულისხმება _
სვლა გარკვეული მიზნისკენ, ვთქვათ, კაპიტალიზმისკენ, დემოკრატიისკენ, ლიბერა-
ლიზმისკენ ან ქაოსისკენ, ანარქიისკენ. შესაძლოა, ეს, უბრალოდ, ერთისა და იმავეს
გამომხატველი სხვადასხვა სახელებია. ფაქტია, რომ გადასვლა სოციალიზმიდან
კაპიტალიზმში არათანაბარია. მაგალითად, დღევანდელი ხელისუფლება, როგორც ჩანს,
ყველა ხერხით ცდილობს სოციალისტური წარსულის უკანასკნელი ხილული ნიშნების
ამოშლას. ამის უამრავი მაგალითის მოყვანა შემიძლია, მაგრამ, ვფიქრობ, ერთიც
საკმარისი იქნება _ თბილისის მეტრო

Теории «центрального кафе»
Одна из наиболее известных работ о кафе
в целом — это статья Полгара «Теория цент-
рального кафе» [1926], представляющая со-
бой фельетон-манифест, написанный за-
всегдатаем одноименного венского кафе.
Возникновение подобной теории неудиви-
тельно: кафе на самом деле является не-
которым выражением субъективности со -
временных городских жителей. Меня
ин тересует лишь заглавие. Почему цент-
ральному кафе нужна какая-то теория? И ка-
кая теория нужна периферийному кафе? На-
пример, такому, как кафе Лагидзе — без-
алкогольному кафе в Кутаиси, а затем
в Тбилиси, которое на протяжении ХХ в.
олицетворяло грузинское стремление к
европей ской городской модерности. Распо-
ложенное на периферии, оно могло олицет-
ворять лишь глубоко ощутимое отсутствие
той самой модерности, к которой так стре-
милось, и, несмотря на то что время от вре-
мени ему удавалось олицетворять город скую
модерность, оно постоянно находилось под
прессом своего периферийного положения.

One of the more curious side effects of the " branding " of localities in the War on Terror was the production of certain kinds of fantastic places, such that certain otherwise unremarkable places came to be diagnosed as " Terror bases. " This chapter explores a curious dual apperception of this place within two " folkloric " discourses. Within the discourse of Georgian folklore, Pankisi is at best peripheral, within the discourse of the Folklore of Terror, Pankisi briefly became central. Finally, I show how the peripherality of Pankisi to " the nation, " and centrality to " terror, " became a resource of legitimate violence for the Georgian State.

The figures of the kinto, the urban street peddler, and the qarachogheli, the urban guild craftsman, form the core of the received orientalist urban mythology of Old Tbilisi.  First, we show how the postsocialist kinto figure moves between standing for an ethnic or cosmopolitan exoticism of the urban landscape to standing as a figure of eroticism, standing for a submerged bohemian world associated with homosexuality.  Secondly, we explore the nineteenth century kinto as an exotic cosmopolitan figure by which urbanizing Georgian aristocracy and intelligentsia emplaced themselves within their new urban home.  Initially opposed to the Georgian peasantry and folklore, the disembodied voice of the kinto mediates genres associated with urban life (poetry, theatre, feuilleton).  Finally, the kinto becomes an effeminate figure of urban markets opposed to a masculine figure of production, the qarachogheli.  This gendered and sexualized opposition moves the emphasis of the kinto figure from exoticism to eroticism.

In the mid-1990s at least two peculiar art exhibitions were held in Tbilisi.  One of them was called chemi tojinebi (‘My Dolls’). What is peculiar about these exhibitions is that they were exhibitions of dolls, made by Georgian artists and intellectuals.  These exhibitions of dolls illustrate the emergent antinomies of Georgian urban life under postsocialism in several ways. What could be more dissonant than the grim realities of everyday life in Tbilisi of the mid 1990s, a period of war, chaos, poverty, gloom, and the happy childlike figure of the doll? ...
In a curious way, then, the figure of the doll reflects all the antinomies of the lives of the intelligentsia authors who made them, of the crises of urban life in Tbilisi in the mid 1990s. The doll becomes a symbol, not only a metaphor, but also a metonym, of the conditions of Tbilisi urban life, an irruption of the world of childhood in the hellish reality of adult life.  The doll, now exhibited as ‘high’ art, now sold as a ‘low’ commodity, also becomes a symbol of the predicament of the intelligentsia who under socialism had defined themselves and gained salaries in the high arts, who are now reduced to making the prototypical low art form, dolls and puppets, sold as simple commodities, just as high art is sold to tourists at the infamous dry bridge, the place where high intelligentsia art and dreams becomes a low commodity serving reality.  Surely, in the grand scheme of things, the doll exhibitions in Tbilisi, the very fact that there is a doll museum in Tbilisi, founded, by some horrible irony, at the height of the great purges in 1937, and the fact that it was robbed of its most precious items in this not quite equally horrible period, seem as trivial as the dolls themselves.  Because it is difficult to think of dolls in any other way than as trivial childish objects at best.  But we wish to show that the imagining of low culture in Tbilisi throughout the socialist period can be reflected through the figure of the doll, a childish object without pretensions, but which, as Scott Shershow argues in a brilliant analysis, is full of a ‘dizzying multiplicity of meanings’.

Middle to Modern Welsh relative clauses feature two binary formal oppositions of complementizer selection and gap realization that have typically been taken to be in some sort of parallel distribution, in such a way that a single independent variable (traditionally, constituent structure 'depth') can account for the realization of both. It is demonstrated that the two formal variables cross-cut one another distributionally, in such a way that no one single independent variable can account for both sets. This paper shows that the first set of complementizer selection in many construction types, particularly relativization on notional 'possessors', behaves in a manner that resembles case-marking as well as construction-type marking, so that relativization on objects of prepositions in possessive constructions coding possessors behaves in a manner systematically different from either objects of true locative prepositions or objects of prepositions that mark 'experiencers'. Although complementizer selection and gap realization are not correlated distributionally, complementizer selection in possessive clauses enters into correlation with other variables of morpho-syntactic form, including PP NP word order, that are also diagnostic of clauses coding notional 'possession'. It is argued that only a construction-based or 'coding view' of syntax can take account of these data.

Approaches to the phenomenon of ‘talk’ have been polarized between very different, apparently
irreconcilable or incommensurable, antinomic approaches to the phenomenon (and the kinds of data,
‘real’ or ‘imagined’, that can be used), characterizable as ‘technical’ versus ‘normative’, ‘generic’ versus
‘genred’ views of talk. By looking at how Starbucks baristas recount dialogs with ‘stupid’ customers as
part of ‘rants’ or ‘vents’ about service work, we find that there is a common model of conversation
widely shared by both members and analysts based on peer conversation, which serves as an implicit
model for barista critique of service interactions and understanding barista rants about customers.

This chapter, then, is about the romance of the mountains in Georgia, which, it could be argued, is a central Caucasian paradigm for the Georgian tradition of ethnography, since Khevsureti is the central focus of Georgian ethnography, the place in which exemplary Georgians are also exemplary Caucasian mountaineers.    It is, in the first instance, about ‘real’ mountaineer romance, that is, Khevsur traditions, and particularly traditions of romance, sts’orp’roba, that have captured the imagination of Georgian intelligentsia.  It is also about the romance of the mountains: the association of romance in general, a rather more denatured form of romantic associations, with the general constellation of exotic ethnographic features otherwise associated with Khevsureti and the mountains in general (some of which, of course, are in part a general inheritance from Russian romanticism (Layton 1992)).  The theme of sts’orp’roba forms a central part of this more general romance of the mountains, allowing a more general romantic exoticism with regard to the mountains to be elided more specifically into love and desire.  The romance of the mountains allows Khevsureti to be a paradigmatic locus for the Georgian ethnographic imagination, mountaineer romance allows Khevsureti to become a paradigmatic locus for ‘traditional’ love stories, particularly filmic ones.
Secondly, this chapter is about a second Caucasian paradigm, namely, the imagined and real relationship between the indigenous intelligentsia and the ‘people’, as figured in this ‘Romance of the Khevsurs’.  This relationship is often figured as featuring the same conflation of general romanticism about Khevsurs with a more concrete romantic relationship of a Georgian man (intelligentsia) with a Khevsur woman (folk).  Echoing the way Russian romantics moved from ethnographic alterity (and fantasies of conquest of savage mountaineers) to romantic alterity (fantasies of sexual conquest of Circassian mountain maids) (Layton 1992), the Khevsur moves from being the prototypical object of the intelligentsia’s romantic ethnographic imagination to being the prototypical object of intelligentsia romantic desire.

Categories of ‘belonging’ and ‘owning’ have reflexes in both linguistic and broader social spheres, in which the same cover terms lead a curious double life in both linguistic and social scientific terminology. For example, the opposition
between ‘inalienable’ and ‘alienable’ possession exists both as a linguistic category and a category relevant for exchange (gifts versus commodities), and has generated immense parallel and unrelated literatures in both linguistics (e.g. Chappell and Mcgregor 1996, and references there) and anthropology (e.g.,
Carrier 1995 and references there). This paper explores the changing pragmatics of a single Welsh linguistic form which indexes ‘belonging,’ to understand which, I argue, one needs to understand broader changes in the way that social and political-economic categories of belonging and ownership are differentially infused with affect from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries.

Welsh philologists  have long noted that non-finite clauses headed by a verbal noun display considerable  variation  in the marking of the notional  subject of intransitive  verbs. This argu­ ment  is sometimes  marked  like  a transitive  agent,  sometimes  like  a transitive  object.  This paper demonstrates  that two systems of independent  variables,  the intrinsic  denotational  con­ tent of the intransitive  subject NP and the aktionsart  and control characteristics  of the lexical verb. serve to constrain this variation to only a small residue. These variables  are shown to be articulated  one  to another  hierarchically,  rather  than  paradigmatically.  The  resulting  case­ marking  system is thus typologically  a 'fluid'  rather than 'split'  intransitive  system in the ter­ minology of Dixon (1979). It is argued that the particular  case-marking  model employed  ('the coding view')  allows partially  variable  'fluid'  systems like the one described here to be com­ pared extensionally  (rather  than intensionally)  with other  partially  variable  'fluid'  and cate­ gorical  'split'    systems  (including  Tsova-Tush  and  Georgian,  respectively).  A  particular approach  to the  theory  and  typology  of grammatical  variation  in case-marking  systems  is advocated  in terms of this model. It is further argued that the proposed typological  distinction between  'split'  and 'fluid'  intransitivity  is nothing other than a more general, orthogonal  vari­ able of 'categorical'  versus 'partially  variable'  case-marking  splits readily observable  in other case-marking  domains  and not specific to intransitive  subject case-marking.

Discourses about Georgian churches have since the nineteenth century treated the material quality of ‘ancientness’ associated with existing churches as being among their essential defining properties. This paper first explores how different material qualisigns of churches, including oldness and qualisigns attendant on oldness, allow churches to be interpreted as secular objects, by ordering them with theatres (as expressive of ‘civilization’), the natural landscape (expressive of
an aesthetics of the sublime) or other monuments, including texts (expressive of culture). One result of such discourses is that the contemporary Orthodox Church finds it difficult to have ‘new’ churches accepted as being churches at all. These
nineteenth-century discourses thus provide a context for the complex and contested reception of old and new Orthodox churches, as well as other religious structures, such as mountain shrines, which have a more ambiguous relation with Orthodoxy. keywords Semiotics, materiality, churches, ruins, monuments

The Georgian “Rose Revolution” of 2003 was preceded by events in November 2001, in which students protested against a government raid on a popular TV station, Rustavi 2, and forced then-President Shevardnadze to request the resignation of the Georgian cabinet as the students demanded. This article describes these events in detail to show how political transition in Georgia has been carried out and exemplified by new political rhetorics and metarhetoric that expressly confronted entrenched logics of reception. The article illustrates how shifts in state formation, in postsocialist contexts in particular, are tied to shifts in representational modes.

A B S T R A C T Sociolinguistic debates about the fate of the Welsh language have since at least the mid-20th century posited the relationship between language and political economy as a central factor in the death or rebirth of the Welsh language since the Industrial Revolution. Such studies have been concerned primarily with empirical head counts of actual speakers and the movements of populations and distributions of languages as determined by political economic independent variables. This article argues that the relationship between language and political economy was also crucially and consequentially construed in the 19th century in terms of " imagined " exemplary speakers of Welsh. In the imagined voice of the Welsh slate quarrier, Welsh elites of the 19th century found a " modern " Welsh-speaking figure who participated in industry while remaining Welsh, both linguistically and culturally, thereby associating the Welsh language itself with the desirable properties of modernity, particularly industrial productivity, and this allowed it to be imagined as a language at home in modernity. (Welsh, political economy, language, ideology, modernity.)*

The Georgian “Rose Revolution” of 2003 was preceded by events in November 2001, in which students protested against a government raid on a popular TV station, Rustavi 2, and forced then-President Shevardnadze to request the resignation of the Georgian cabinet as the students demanded. This article describes these events in detail to show how political transition in Georgia has been carried out and exemplified by new political rhetorics and metarhetoric that expressly confronted entrenched logics of reception. The article illustrates how shifts in state formation, in postsocialist contexts in particular, are tied to shifts in representational modes.

In this paper I am concerned with the superstitions of mining, specifically folkloric ideas about Jews and Fairies and Jewish fairies in Cornish mines.  I am also interested in the changing social ontology that underlies these beliefs, including changing forms and formulations of anti-Semitism, as well as changing notions of nature and economy, from medieval to modern Cornwall that underlie these superstitions.i  But, in a move that will surprise no one, I will argue that these beliefs are embedded in technical and financial and other institutional of their mining context.  Part of this context is the rise of Cornish-style capitalist modernity.  It includes changing ideas about nature and exchange that would bring dead Jewish miners to life as nature spirits, and then later, banish them from nature to the hazy supernatural half-life of folklore.

In 1893 a Welsh poet with the bardic name Glan Elsi uttered a remarkable vati-cination that seemed to unite the fate of the Welsh language and the Welsh slate quarrier: Dearest old Welsh, if ever it dies, From the lips of a quarrier, I think, will come the final word. 1 What is immediately remarkable is that such an identification of a modern proletariat (as opposed, for example, to a vanishing traditional peasantry, as would be so common elsewhere in Europe), as a linguistic kulturträger of the Welsh language was by this time so unremarkable. Even more extraordinary, perhaps, is that this was a by-product of the slate-quarriers' own self-mythologizing. In the nineteenth century a chance convergence between the natural order (slate rock) and the cultural order (the Welsh language) became naturalized in Welsh semiotic ideology in the figure of the person who metonymically straddled these two orders: the Welsh slate-quarrier. This chance empirical convergence made it possible for the Welsh slate quarrier to become an exemplar of the Welsh and their language. However, it was the slate quarriers' own ideas about the relation of language and geology that transformed the slate quarrier into the exemplary Welsh speaker, ideas they expressed in one or another variation on a wry aphorism to the effect that the reason the Welsh had to work the rock was that " the rock did not speak English. " With such slogans, the Welsh slate quarriers naturalized the relationship between the activities of slate-quarrying and speaking Welsh, indirectly making

This paper explores two non-intersecting discourses, discourses on language and discourses on political economy, to explore the reasons for the apparent non-existence of language discipline of the political economy of language. Abortive attempts to encompass economic categories by categories of linguistics and semiology were suggested by Saussure's only initial analogy between linguistic and economic 'value'. Such an attempt to assimilate the economic to the linguistic order tends to dematerialize commodities. From the other perspective, the apparent exclusion of language from political economic discourse revolves around definitions of wealth and productivity. Linguistic performances were excluded from the category of wealth, the object of political economic discourse, by being assimilated to the category of perishable 'services' rather than durable 'wealth'. In order to understand the possible articulations of language and exchange, we need to accept the historicity and cultural locatedness of both language and exchange: to understand whether language can be considered a form of wealth or value, we need to investigate what is considered to be wealth or value in each historical case.

Language reform movements of nineteenth century Wales derived from philological traditions
that combined apparently contradictory professional commitments to language reform
which were, at the same time, grounded in a model of language that held that language change
was fundamentally asocial and natural. The Oxford Welsh movement used linguistic facts
about ‘Celtic’ (VSO) and ‘Non-Celtic’ (SVO) word orders to construct genealogies of
authentic Celticity in both political and linguistic fields to naturalize their linguistic reforms
and broader political projects and authorize them against the equally naturalizing laissez-faire
principles of nineteenth century Liberalism and print culture.

In insider discussions of Massively Multiple Online Games, the recent proliferation of supernumerary avatars (“alts” for “alternate characters”) in online environments  has been given a playful pathological diagnosis: ‘altaholism’ is a playful term for someone who can not focus on just one character in an online game, usually known as their main, and who grows an often large inventory of alts or alternate characters.  Alts are explorers of systems: they can play as many roles or perform as many functions as the game systema nd game world affords.  While “alts” are attested from the very beginnings of online games, older alts often represent “alternate personas”, affording forms of escape from the singular identity of the main character.  Contemporary alts, by contrast, often play alongside the main character: here alt often takes on a range of subservient functions in relation to  the main character.  But alts also proliferate in the ecosystem of affordances provided by the system that they inhabit and feed upon, so that it is impossible to define in advance what the possible range of functions an alt may fulfil is in relation to a main character.  That is, an alt exists partly as a parasitic relationship to a relationship of identity between a player and a ‘main character’.  Like the parasite following Paul Kockelman’s recent discussion (2010), the alt is a “really a joker, or wild card, who takes on different values depending on its position in a system.”  Debates about the proliferation  of alts, including humorous diagnoses such as ‘altaholism’ and actual attempts to ferret them out, reveal differing media ideologies about when an alt moves from being a human to a non-human actor (‘bot’) and the role of third party softwares in mediating this transition (multiboxing to multibotting) and as parasites of a legitimate game world ‘host’.

This is a paper with Zaza Shatirishvili about the cultural politics of the making of different editions of the poem "Knight in Tiger's Skin" by Shota Rustaveli, the late nineteenth century deluxe edition of 1888 and the 1937 socialist edition.

Note: We haven't worked on this paper since about 2013. This work has been unpublished for a long time but has been circulating in incomplete samizdat for for long enough that people have occasionally read and cited it. The citations are as yet incomplete, as are some passages, it remains complete enough, and unlikely enough to be completed, that I am circulating it as a samizdat.

Ryzom is a long-running (from 2004-present) science fantasy MMORPG (henceforth MMO) set in the science fantasy gameworld of the planet Atys, an entirely organic " rootball " teeming with alien life forms. The most oft-cited distinctive properties of Ryzom in the MMO world is the way creates not only an immersive sense of " worldness " , but a living, breathing, organic world.

Of all the fantastic goblins of contemporary Georgian folklore only one, the Kaji, can be found haunting both the village and the city. One day, as I was taking leave of my friend Elizbar in a village near Tbilisi, we were taking one last walk through the village as I waited for another friend to pick me up and take me back to the city. Elizbar, who had recently returned from Tbilisi to this, his childhood village, saw his next door neighbor wandering the street, glaring toward his own house and shaking a farm implement in that direction. Elizbar gave me a weary, sympathetic smile as he explained that his neighbor had a bad infestation of Kajis on his roof, and was trying to drive them off. Kajis? I had never heard of anyone who actually believed in real Kajis. Looking at this man's face up close, it was clear he had his share of inner demons, but his concern was these damned Kajis: five in number, they sat on his roof all day cursing him and throwing things at him, and by night, they were apparently sneaking into his house to rifle through his things and pilfer goods and documents. My friend from the city, Nugzar, arrived not a half hour later and I left. I told him about the neighbor's problem with Kajis, which made him laugh, and then we got onto the general subject of Kajis, of which, for the average urbanite, there are two broad types: those that are mitiuri (mythical) and those that belong to zhargoni (slang). From such a perspective, Kajis are mythological first because they do not exist in the normal sense; they have no home in the disenchanted ontology of modern naturalism, belonging neither to the opposed domains of material reality (nature) nor religion (supernature), they rather belong to a superseded, backward, and superstitious mythology of animism (Descola 1996). Kajis are also mythical because they are not creatures one could believe in personally, but instead belong to the category of reported speech; Kajis belong to someone else's mistaken or outmoded beliefs. If you believe in Kajis, you are either a small child, superstitious, insane, or perhaps have assimilated Kajis to an Orthodox religious cosmology as a kind of devil. Kajis dwell in the superstitious minds of peasants as something that lives in the woods or in caves and torments rural Georgians, especially those that are not aware that there is no such thing as a Kaji. Such urbanite views about these " superstitious, animist " beliefs have been hegemonic since at least