Guest Star: Yuki Nagato.

Here are some things I am currently working on -- final versions may always be found on the CV page:

Why are the Dolls Laughing? Tbilisi Culture between “High Art” and Socialist Labor. Zaza Shatirishvili and Paul Manning

‘Renters’ and ‘Real Tbilisians’: Historicizing the Georgian ‘city’ as an ethnolinguistic category— (first circulated 2004)

The Theory of the Café Peripheral: Laghidze’s Waters and Peripheral Urban Modernity - to appear in Anthropological Forum

The Theory of the Café Central and the Practice of the Café Peripheral: Problematic Publics on the Periphery - AAA version

Can the Avatar Speak? - September 2009

Semiotics of Brand - November 2008

The Hotel/Refugee Camp Iveria: Symptom, Monster, Fetish, Home. - November 2008

Khevsur Romance - AAA 2008

Book Manuscript -- Georgian Drinking Culture

Fairies and the order of nature - revised version November 2008
Fairies and the order of nature - June 2008

Circassian Liberalism

A semiotic analysis of the common cocktail

Sprites of Capitalism? Jewish ghost-fairies and other fairy ‘hybrids’ in British science of folklore

How (not) to order a Grande Non-fat Mocha: A guide to analyzing (Starbuckese) discourse and barista ‘rants’

Barista rants about stupid customers at Starbucks: What imaginary conversations can teach us about real ones.

Idolaters without images and images of idolatry: Orthodox and Intelligentsia discourses about the Georgian ‘pagan’ mountain peoples.

Folklore and Terror in Georgia’s ‘Notorious’ Pankisi Gorge

The City of Balconies: elite politics and the changing semiotics of the post-socialist cityscape

The Epoch of Magna: Brand totemism and the imagined transition/translation from socialism to post-socialism in Georgia

Materiality and cosmology: Old Georgian churches as sacred, sublime, and secular objects.

The architecture of exclusion: Why are there three kinds of places in this ‘third place’?