When the Guest becomes the Host: Review of Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of the Soviet Empire

Abstract

Abstract: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.