Love Stories: Language, Private Love, and Public Romance in Georgia by Paul Manning (review)

In a way that reminds one of classic ethnographies, Love Stories is a book tightly woven around a paradoxical, and now discontinued, social practice. Sts’orproba was a way of teenage romance in a small and remote community of mountain-dwelling Khevsurs in Georgia 100 years ago. In sts’orproba’s consummative moment, the sts’orperi lovers “lied down” for the night of talk and some carefully restricted physical intimacy. Sts’orproba, however, was understood as a sociable, and not sexual, relationship between affable peers because it was only approved between co-residential, or otherwise socially proximal, young people whose union in marriage was impossible in this exogamous society. Opposite to both sex and marriage, sts’orproba continues to fascinate with the question: What was love in Georgia?

Although of interest to scholars of post-socialism, the Caucasus, and linguistics, the book is that much sought-after, brief, jargonless, and vividly written ethnographic introduction to anthropological “intersections” that brings together a variety of classical anthropological topics, all in about 140 pages. Choosing a wonderful crosshair case of sts’orproba, Manning has built a tale around the cultural construction of desire, age, and kinship; native ethnography; gift giving; semiotic ideology; language and gender politics; religion and folklore; colonial and post-colonial encounters; cultural change; aesthetics of modernity; conundrums of nationalism; and, finally, contemporary Internet worlds. At times, Love Stories reads as a detective novel where Manning carefully reconstructs the kinship, gender, and sexual practices of “secretive Khevsurs” from ethnographic and folkloric sources, which include a native ethnography by a couple whose public openness becomes possible only after their exile from the Khevsur community.

Another organisational setup of the book is a romantic novel that develops chapter by chapter and stage by stage, following the progress of a teenage sts’orproba relationship through the lens of a classical ethnographic depiction. In a chapter entitled “The Ambassador,” we are taken to see a matchmaking teenage girl secretly bringing lovers together, lulling a suspicious mother, persuading the girl who shows female-appropriate modesty, and the boy, whose worth as a warrior could be questioned if he showed interest in girls. In “Spending the Night Together,” Manning explains what could and could not be done while “lying down” together and for what reason. Apart from being a part of sts’orproba, “lying down” could be performed in several genres and for corresponding purposes, which range from sexuality to social obligation to mere necessity of finding a place to sleep. Exploring the themes of transgression and personal autonomy, he demonstrates how much the meaning of “lying down” depended on the genre of talk associated with it and how the genre depended on whether the purpose of lying down was social or erotic.

“Going Steady” is an excellent chapter to introduce the themes of material semiotics and gift giving, where, for instance, the girl first steals, and then presents the boy with, a bottle of vodka – a present of hard spirits that never goes bad – to signify the shift from casual to durable relations. “Invisible Love Poetry” explores the ways in which love poetry, the most public of Georgian linguistic genres, may be a source of knowledge about the most intimate and secret practices pertaining to sexuality, for both the ethnographers and the natives. Manning finds Khevsurs’ love poetry paradoxical in the way that it avoids what could be understood as lyrical mode because the identity of the poetess (only women composed love poetry) and her egocentric, individual desire are erased and replaced by praise for the socially acknowledged desirability of the male object of affection.

Manning follows a classical “tradition and modernity” route in this ethnography by first representing Khevsur culture as a coherent and rather structuralist whole, where neat symmetries and oppositions between social distance and linguistic genre, freedom and obligation, sexual boundaries and marriageability fit and function together. Describing the cosmology of Khevsurs in the chapter entitled “Demons, Danger and Desire,” Manning explains how...