PAUL MANNING
ANN UPLISASHVILI
“Our Beer”: Ethnographic Brands in Postsocialist
Georgia
ABSTRACT Although Georgia is known for its wines, industrial production of beer far outstrips industrial wine production for local
markets: wine consumption occurs in ritual contexts in which new wine, typically purchased from peasant producers, is preferred;
bottled, aged wines are primarily for exports. Beer, therefore, is a key area in which industrial production for indigenous consumers
has been elaborated. Such goods are packaged and presented as being both ecologically “pure” and following “traditional” methods,
often referencing “ethnographic” materials about traditional life in brand images, even as they proclaim their reliance on Western
technologies. [Keywords: semiotics, brand, production, consumption, postsocialism]
GEORGIA IS THE LAND OF WINE. In fact, many Georgians
believe, and it is not an outlandish claim, that
viniculture may have originated on Georgian soil. But this
article is not about Georgian wines but Georgian beers. Our
question is this: If Georgia is known most of all for its wines,
why, under postsocialism, are Georgian beer brand names
more salient in contemporary public discourse and public
consumption? Why, in general, has the marketing of
Georgian beers, and not wines, become the central emblem
of resurgent Georgian national industries after socialism?
Our second question builds on the first: How have Georgian
marketers linked beer to ethnographic images of the
Georgian nation inherited from presocialist and socialist
ethnography, using ethnographic images of Georgian tradition
to build national brands? Here Georgian beer marketers
have capitalized on the fact that while most Georgians
drink only wine in traditional ritual contexts, beer
is the traditional ritual drink in certain remote mountain
communities that are also the exemplary objects of Georgian
ethnography, allowing a drink consumed in informal
contexts of sociability in contemporary urban contexts to
be clothed in the mantle of authentic ethnographic traditionalism
exemplified by traditional technology and ritual
contexts of consumption associated with mountainous regions
of Georgia. Under socialism, the Georgian economy
was noted neither for its branded products nor for its beer.
In fact, socialist-period beer was so bad that toasts given
with such beer generally meant, and indeed still mean, the
opposite of what was said. Under postsocialist capitalism,
by contrast, beer brands have become the most prominent
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 109, Issue 4, pp. 626–641, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association.
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sort of indigenous product and the most well-known indigenous
brands.
But Georgian brand makers produce brands that
ground their products in the ethnographic halo of authentic
Georgian tradition while at the same time indexing European
technology. We will argue that this dual lineage
in which Georgian products are presented as being part
of both Georgian tradition and European modernity indexes
the ambivalent way that Georgia is itself imagined
as an exile or asymptote of European modernity. It also
indexes the ambivalent status of branded goods in general.
Under socialism, brand was almost by definition an attribute
of goods from the “Imaginary West” (Yurchak 2006).
Hence, the category of “indigenous brand” would appear
to be a contradiction in terms, unless such goods can be
shown to have a dual lineage that is both Georgian and
Western.
THE SOCIALIST CONTEXT OF POSTSOCIALIST BRANDS
Part of understanding this story entails understanding how
socialism is imagined in relationship to capitalism, especially
regarding the category of brand. The Soviet Union
may no longer exist in reality, but it continues to live a rich,
second life as a mythological, demonic Other in the world
of Western neoliberal discourse. The productivist ideology
of the USSR, it is said, privileged production for production’s
sake—hence ignoring the consumer. And that, the
argument continues, was why it died: it subscribed to an
outdated ontology that privileged needs over desires, and
on this basis presumed to produce for, and dictate, the needs
Manning and Uplisashvili • “Our Beer” 627
of its people, rather than cater to the desires of its consumers
(Verdery 1996:20–29). And it failed even to do this: its products
were shoddy, nonuse values parading as use values,
and often there were not enough of them (see Fehervary
2005:ch. 6 on the “shortcomings of ‘shortage’ ”). Even when
there was enough, there was not enough choice between
them: there were no brands. The Soviet economy failed to
produce, and part of this failure was that it failed to produce
a symbolic, immaterial component (brand) to complement
the material product. An entirely typical example of this
mythology is the following extract from a vociferous “defense
of brands,” which posits the West as a land of brand
abundance in contrast to the grey and joyless wasteland of
brandlessness of the erstwhile workers’ paradise. Here the
essentialism favoring need over desire is complemented by
one favoring the material over the immaterial, the product
over the brand.
THE CASE FOR BRANDS
Although in the West we increasingly bemoan consumerism,
brands are anything but superficial. They are
an important indicator of economic health. At its most
basic, a brand is a way for a product or service to distinguish
itself from another. Like a string of would-be
suitors, brands compete for our attention. To win it, they
must offer a superior product, a lower price or some intangible
attraction such as exclusivity, from which consumers
stand to gain. The more brands there are and the
more ferociously they compete for our hearts and wallets,
the more benefits we will garner. Critics of brands
like to claim that big brands stifle competition and reduce
choice. To see how wrong that argument is we only
have to look at the former Soviet Union. In communist
Russia, brands did not need to exist because there was
no competition. Everything was supplied by state-owned
companies at set prices. Since there was no incentive
for suppliers to improve quality or innovate, the result
was economic stagnation and falling living standards.
[Ahmad 2005:14]
In this popular definition, the term brands has two components:
first, they are distinctive and unique associations of
product to producer and, second, they are like “a string of
would-be suitors,” addressing the desires of the customer.
According to this story, the Soviet economy did not have
brand in either sense. And we know the Socialist economy
died. All we need to make an argument is to add the word
therefore.1
But the (Soviet) socialist legacy on this, like many other
issues, is far more complex than this simple-minded story
would have it. The postsocialist phenomenon of brand,
which is the topic of this article, reflects this complex
heritage. Socialist products in certain sectors were indeed
branded. Items defined as basic, everyday needs (bread,
cheese, butter, milk, etc.) may well have been brandless use
values, but “common luxuries” and novelties also proliferated
and were distinguished by brand names: for example,
there were cigarettes like Kazbek, Kosmos, and Stiuardessa,
and there were brands of chocolates, cognac, wine, and,
most of all, vodka, and so on (Gronow 2003). In this way
the distribution of brand under socialism seemed to illustrate
a basic ontological divide in socialist culture between
orders of products: staples and luxuries, bread and roses,
universal human needs (brandless) and specific human desires
(branded). Importantly, the same sphere of common
luxuries (Soviet or Western) like chocolates, perfumes, and
alcohol that were branded in the socialist economy also
played an important role as prestigious gift valuables underlying
the second economy of informal blat (informal
exchanges; for more on blat gifts, see Ledeneva 1998:ch. 5).
Such indigenous branded goods also formed material
core of the Soviet concept of “culturedness” (kul’turnost).
Culturedness stands for state-directed changes in socialist
consumption, sometimes mistakenly identified in neoliberal
consumerist discourse as a sort of socialist embourgeoisement,
evidence that socialism is simply covertly a
form of capitalism, whose motivational categories (such as
consumers and desires) are taken to be natural and universal.
Culturedness (and branded goods were part of the campaign
for culturedness) was a state-directed campaign to reform
everyday life in general, including matters of personal
hygiene, public comportment, and home d´ecor. In general,
culturedness could be displayed in the consumption of everyday
objects like curtains and lampshades as well as high
culture like the literature of Tolstoy and Pushkin (kul’tura;
Dunham 1976; Fitzpatrick 1992; Kelly and Volkov 1998). As
Catriona Kelly and Vadim Volkov describe it,
The brilliance of the kul’turnost ideology lay partly in
the fact that it was a fusion of two value systems previously
thought incompatible, those of the bourgeoisie and
the intelligentsia. . . . Kul’turnost also achieved the hitherto
impossible feat of equating consumer goods and cultural
artifacts, both now respectable appurtenances of the
new Soviet citizen. . . . The ideology of kul’turnost deconstructed
the binary opposition, creating a world in which
a nicely bound collection of Tolstoy’s works could, with
perfect dignity, stand next door to a lustreware teaset,
looking down on a tea-table laid with lace doilies and a
tablelamp. [Kelly and Volkov 1998:304–305]
Just as socialist ideologies of kul’turnost (“directed desires”
in Kelly and Volkov’s felicitous phrase) are uncannily
similar to embourgeoisement of consumption, so too
socialist brands are uncannily similar to capitalist brands,
yet at the same time irreducibly different. There is no mystery
about the source of these similarities: such common
luxuries, the objects of Soviet “cultured trade,” were socialist
competitors with, and imitations of, both Western
goods (Hessler 2001:458–459) and luxury goods that had
been consumed by the former Russian nobility (Gronow
2003:33). The differences also emerge from the same dynamic:
the kul’turnost model for consumption (and “socialist
brands”) illustrates how Western bourgeois consumption
as well as presocialist aristocratic consumption serves as an
external model for emulation (not imitation) to create a
specifically socialist modernity to which the idea of cultured
trade was connected (Hessler 2001:459). As a result, here
the categories of socialist modernity are uncannily familiar,
628 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007
and, yet, strange, in a manner that parallels other such
categories, such as public versus private, which as Susan
Gal argues are also “so different . . . yet so eerily familiar”
(Gal 2002:80) because they are addressed to overcoming
binary oppositions within the social imaginary inherited
from Tsarism (Manning 2004a), creating a new Soviet citizen:
homo Sovieticus.
At the same time, actual Western brands (or imitations
of them) also formed a category internal to socialist
consumption: alongside these socialist branded goods
(images of kul’turnost) circulated “firm” (Georgian: sapirmo;
Russian: firmennye) goods, these being goods bearing labels
and brands from Western or East European socialist countries.
If socialist brands represented state-directed emulation
of Western capitalist consumption, firm goods represented
(incarnated) the almost mythical “imaginary West” itself
(Fehervary 2005:ch. 6; Yurchak 2006:ch. 5). For our purposes
what is relevant here is that, on the one hand, socialist
brands existed and defined a sphere of state-directed desires
(kul’turnost) in consumption, but, on the other hand,
the category of brand itself seemed to betoken capitalist
“firm” goods by a kind of stereotypic association. The result
was that brandlessness versus brand, firm goods versus
indigenous brands, and even the opposition between state
and black-market goods all produced complex, stable hierarchies
of value internal to the socialist economy (Fehervary
2005:ch. 6; Yurchak 2006:ch. 5): in effect, a hierarchy of
qualitative orders of goods with entailments on their circulation,
forming a sort of socialist version of “spheres of
exchange” (Bohannan 1955; Lemon 1998:39–44).
The mass arrival of goods with Western brands with
the so-called transition from socialism to postsocialism in
the early nineties changed this stable hierarchy, producing
a “crisis of values” (Humphrey 2002:43; Lemon 1998). It became
possible to compare socialist brands and Western ones
concretely, at least those affordable luxuries that remained
within the means of increasingly impoverished consumers.
At the same time, the penetration of everyday consumption
by certain salient Western brands (Snickers in Russia
[Humphrey 2002:48] and Magna cigarettes in Georgia) allowed
these brands to serve as “metasymbols” (Miller 1998)
of the more general predicament of the transition (“the
snickerization of Russia” [Gorham 2000:629], “the Epoch
of Magna” in Georgia [Manning 2006a]).
Therefore, the legacy of socialism with respect to brand
is a mixed one. Socialist modernity here, as elsewhere, is
an uncanny other of Western modernity, involving oppositions
both at the level of imagined stereotype and actual
practice. Therefore, in broad outlines socialism remains relevant
to understand the practices of brand producers in the
postsocialist world (which is the focus of this article). On the
one hand, brand serves as a stereotyped diacritic to distinguish
Western goods (all of which were branded) from socialist
ones (only some of which were); on the other hand,
there were socialist brands but they indexed a rather different
sort of real and imagined relationship between the
producer (the state), the product, and the consumer than
under capitalism. Indeed, in a market context that was by
definition noncompetitive, the “goodwill” associated with
brands in capitalist contexts can serve neither as a competitive
advantage nor as a form of intangible asset, a monetary
valuation of the brand name as property, two of the
most important elements of brands in Western capitalism.
Therefore, whatever it is that socialist brands accomplish in
terms of identification of the producer cannot be explained
using the same terms. Similarly, socialist brands were aimed
at inculcating and directing desires as part of the creation
of a “cultured” homo Sovieticus (Fitzpatrick 1992; Kelly and
Volkov 1998); they were not aimed at recognizing some naturalized
or autonomously formed consumer desire (as are
“lovemarks”; see Foster 2005).
The point is that brands are not semiotically transparent
symbolic accoutrements to material goods, spontaneously
springing up by an additional corollary to humankind’s
alleged natural propensity to truck and barter
(and consume), nor are they completely transportable, carrying
the same transparent meanings wherever they go,
little vanguards of capitalism that could flow into the
brandless vacuum of the socialist or postsocialist space unchanged
(Yurchak 2006). Brands, like the commodities they
are attached to, are material semiotic forms whose circulation
defines a broader social imaginary (Lee and Li Puma
2002), whether it is the market, the nation, or the empire
that in part gives them meaning; in turn brands serve as
metonymic symbols of these entities, as Coca-Cola serves as
a handy “metasymbol” of Western capitalism, imperialism,
globalization, homogenization, and so forth (Miller 1998).
The transition from socialism to capitalism, therefore,
was not simply a seamless transition from brandless to
branded products. There was indeed an explosion of brandedness
in the postsocialist economy, yet at the same time,
not only did much socialist production disappear, along
with it disappeared many of the socialist brands associated
with them. New “firm goods” flowed in in large quantities:
brand names that had served as rare icons of the “imaginary
West” (Yurchak 2006) before were now encountered
as everyday, usable, if not affordable, products (Humphrey
2002:ch. 3; Manning 2006a). Disappearing socialist brands
in turn became objects of discourses of nostalgia: in fact,
many were revived as capitalist brands. At the same time,
there was also an explosion of brandlessness, as the promissory
quality associated with brands—a component of what
is generally called “goodwill,” the idea that a brand on a
bottle indexes a specific producer and a specific style of
product—was undermined on several fronts. The absence
of state regulation under “wild capitalism” allowed the proliferation
(real or imagined) of all manner of brandless
wildlife: products with no brands; the explosion of brandless
goods made in microfactories (e.g., soft drinks mixed in
bathtubs with generic labels); and the outright falsification
of brand names, local and international (Pelkmans 2006).
Lastly there were the misgivings, suspicion, and paranoia
of a population whose socialist expectations had not been
domesticated to adopt the category of brand, and who in
general doubted the content of any message, especially messages
on bottles.
Manning and Uplisashvili • “Our Beer” 629
How, then, does one domesticate a population that is
not only suspicious about brands but also has not yet fully
accepted any premises about what brand means in general?
In other words, how does one not only create goodwill for
one’s own brand but also forge a kind of “generalized goodwill”
for national brands in general (as opposed to Western
“firm goods”)? What we wish to show here is how Georgian
brand makers, particularly in the thriving Georgian beer
market, partly counter these doubts and anxieties by reassuringly
grounding their brands in a latently socialist productivist
imaginary of traditional production. In this article,
we show how figures of tradition are utilized to ground new
Georgian industrial products, especially beer products, in
the social imaginary of the nation. These include figures of
traditional production, which suture contemporary Georgian
industrial production of beer to images of traditional
production methods hallowed by time, and figures of traditional
consumption, which link contemporary products to
specifically Georgian scenes of traditional consumption.
Despite superficial similarities, these discourses of traditionalization
of production and consumption remain very
different from the way the opposition between tradition
and modernity is elided into an opposition between artisanal
techne and industrial technoscience, and the discourses
of relative distinction related to these, in Western
countries (see Meneley 2004, this issue). In Georgia, where
much agricultural production is indeed still (or is once
again) done by peasants, there is no discourse that privileges
artisanal production over industrial production. Rather,
contemporary industrial methods of production are seen as
providing highly desirable links between the product and
European modernity, while traditional images of production
link the product back to Georgian national soil and
tradition. In effect, postsocialist Georgian brands attempt
to represent their products as having the desirable properties
of Western “firm” goods as well as being autonomously
produced by and for an autarchic national economy (like
socialist brands). Instead of producing a stylistic distinction
within production that opposes consumer products as being
“artisanal” versus “industrial” and linking these to discourses
of distinction (aesthetic, moral, class, or what have
you), as in Europe and North America, Georgian manufacturers
seem to prefer a dual lineage, which seeks to link tradition
to modernity in each and every product. Because it is
not craft production per se that is important, any aspect of
the commodity’s trajectory, from production to consumption,
can be emphasized as being “traditional.”
The imaginary that allows such a linkage is a nationalist
imaginary of the nation as a longitudinal unity since
time immemorial but one that is also moving forward in
time into (European) modernity. Within this imaginary,
the divided temporal moments of tradition (the past in the
present) and modernity (the future in the present) are linked
together. At the same time, the divided spatial moments
of production and consumption are also linked together
within the same imaginary of the nation. In this linking,
there is a latent socialist notion that the nation should be
autarchic (national production for national consumption)
and an imaginary in which (socialist or capitalist) modernity
is understood as a primarily technical set of innovations
(see also Chatterjee 1992 for a parallel articulation),
which allows the Georgian traditional cultural life of the
nation to continue in essentially unchanging form: socialist,
capitalist, or European in (technical) form, national (traditional)
in content.
BRAND SEMIOTICS
Brands are potentially Janus faced, now indexing a figure of
the producer, now a figure of the consumer. They are Janus
faced in another way as well, in that they are somewhere
between the material world of commodities and an immaterial
world of signs, representing an incursion of the material
category of “wealth” into the “immaterial” world of signs
(“immaterial wealth” such as “goodwill”; Manning 2006b).
In both of these ways, they can be compared to linguistic
signs (Moore 2003): the discrete moments of production,
distribution, and consumption can be modeled in terms of
the participants of a speech event—speaker, utterance, and
addressee—and like language, the phenomenon of brand
oscillates between the immaterial type (Saussurean langue)
and individual material token (Saussurean parole). Robert
Moore characterizes brand as
centered semiotically upon a composite object, or, more
accurately, an unstable conjunction of a product (prototypically
at least a material, tangible object) and a mark,
logo or brand name. . . . “Brandedness” as a semiotic process
immanent in the contemporary commodity experience
unfolds in relationships between two parties—
producers and consumers. These relationships can be
modeled as events of communication in several respects.
“Brand” summons people to participate in the market,
it interpellates people to act as consumers, in particular
ways. In the same moment, brand is now the dominant
means by which the producers—corporate entities,
usually—extend themselves (in the ordinary as well
as philosophic sense) into the world inhabited by their
erstwhile (or sought after) consumers, indeed, into the
world of contingency (success or failure) itself. [Moore
2003:335]
If the pragmatic function of the utterance that foregrounds
the speaker’s involvement in it is usually called
“expressive,” we might call the function of a mark on a
product that foregrounds the involvement of the producer
a “productivist” function of brand (on productivism as a social
ontology more generally, see Manning 2004b, 2006b).
The phenomenon of brand in the West is most often rationalized,
of course, as a unique identifier of the source of the
product, a market equivalent of a signature or a fingerprint.
It links products to the distant producer, serving at minimum
as a simple conventional diacritic that differentiates
the products of different producers, and perhaps even indicates
the real presence of the actual producer. As Rosemary
Coombe (1996) points out, these two very different ways of
linking product to source are often conflated in discourses
of branding2
:
A mark must attract the consumer to a particular source
that, in mass markets, is often unknown and distant. A
630 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007
logo registers fidelity in at least two senses. It operates as
a signature of authenticity, indicating that the good that
bears it is true to its origins—that is, that the good is a true
or accurate copy. It is exactly the same as another good
bearing the same mark, and different from other goods
carrying other marks. . . . The mark also. . . registers a real
contact, a making, a moment of imprinting by one for
whom it acts as a kind of fingerprint—branding. [Coombe
1996:205]
In indexing the producer, however, both of these moments
do not figure equally in all types of products in Western
discourses of branding; rather, they seem to be constitutive
of the stylistic opposition of different kinds of value
within the world of goods between “industrial” and “craft”
production (Meneley 2004, this issue). The conventional
sign of the producer—the logo, mark, or brand name—is
like a conventional linguistic sign: a type-level entity that
is reproduced identically through individual copies or instances,
what we call “tokens,” in exactly the same way that
an industrial good is definable as a type of product, an individual
token of which is indistinguishable from any other.
This sort of interchangeability operates both at the level of
brand and of branded product, and it results in a kind of
goodwill: that one product bearing the same mark will be
as good as or identical to any other bearing the same mark.
Such goodwill and absolute interchangeability is the hallmark
of industrial production. Let us call this “type-level”
branding. The second sense of mark, the “real contact,” is a
unique imprint of an individual craftsman. It is more typically
associated with the individuated products of craftsmanship,
of nonindustrial production, in which the individual
variations and noninterchangeability of products all
index the (highly prized) variability of craft production,
which seems to offer direct contact with the real producer,
who is made present in flaws and minute variations of the
product. Here, individual products are connected to their
real, individual producers (or at least so represented). We
can call this “token-level” branding. In the West this generates
a completely different kind of goodwill: the goodwill
associated with elite, rather than mass, consumer items:
Consumers are urged to buy products which have the
identities of producers evident in them, in contrast to
industrially produced goods, which, as Marx noted, rendered
the labour of the worker, and the connection between
the consumers and producers, invisible. It is ironic,
and perhaps a testimony to the remarkable malleability
of capitalism that this un-erasure of the labour of
the producer is a key element in making extra virgin
olive oil a valued commodity for those who bemoan
the anonymity and mystified origins of industrial food.
[Meneley 2004:173]
The productivist concept of brand here is a stand in
for the producer, indexing (in different ways) a specific
known source for a product. As Coombe points out, that
aspect of brand is linked to the related economic concept
of “goodwill”:
the mark that accompanies all of one’s goods and makes
them recognizable attracts the “loyalty” of consumers,
and this loyalty and good feeling is a valuable asset—
goodwill. The positive value of one’s trade is congealed
in the exchange value of the sign. The trademark marks
the point of origin of the good—and serves as a surrogate
identity for the manufacturer—in a national market
in which the distances between points of mass production
and points of consumption might be vast. [Coombe
1996:210]
But the problems associated with creating goodwill (or
trust, more generally ) between producers and consumers
where production does not immediately attend consumption
is not merely a problem created by “vast distances.”
Rather, it is a more general problem, a problem of fears
of “conspiracy” and claims for “transparency,” that confronts
not only economic processes, in which consumption
is separated spatially and temporally from production,
but also, indeed, any form of mediated discourse, be it economic,
political, or interpersonal (West and Sanders 2003).
For Georgians, in particular, fears that any and all branded
products they consume may be inauthentic, poisoned, or
falsified have been rife since the late 1990s, and there are obvious
parallelisms in the suspicions with which Georgians
approach other forms of linguistically mediated public discourse
(Pelkmans 2006; Manning 2007).3
These suspicions, in the case of branded products, are
particularly compounded by the fact that brands really
are not immaterial wealth at all; in fact, they are all too
material—that is, like all signs, they take the form of material
objects (empty bottles and labels that can be forged or
purchased). We tend to think of brand as belonging rather
more to the order of the immaterial (often conflated with
“immaterial wealth,” like goodwill, for example). However,
one problem Georgian producers have is that brands exist,
are realized, through real material objects (the containers
that contain objects are as real as the objects that are contained,
so, too, the brand is impressed on labels, and so on):
that is, brands, token instances of brand, are as concretely
material as the token instances of commodities they attend.
This makes them subject to all the contingencies that
any other material object is subject to. And this is a problem,
because the materiality of brand—labeled bottles, for
example—is easily separated from the objects in question,
either by reusing the bottles with the same labels attached
or by forging them. Georgians producers and consumers
alike confront an economic situation in which the claim
that the material semiotic form of brand uniquely indexes
the producer is continuously called into question. And as
with political discourse, so with economic: in such an environment
of rampant falsification (or rampant “occult cosmologies”
of falsification of production [West and Sanders
2003]), goodwill is something that all products lack to some
extent. Goodwill is not a problem for an individual brand,
or even local goods versus “firm” goods in some cases, it
is a problem for branded goods in general (see Pelkmans
2006:188–194).
Through brands, however, products are also attached to
figures of consumption: idealized consumers. In the West,
attending a general shift from a social ontology of productivism
to one of consumerism, there has been a general
Manning and Uplisashvili • “Our Beer” 631
move from brand as a figure of production to a figure of
consumption (Mazzarella 2003): a semiotic transition from
trademarks of production to so-called lovemarks of consumer
loyalty (Foster 2005). This perspective on brand seeks
to see the “value” of brands as being a joint product of
the labor of both producers and consumers. Branded objects
attract to themselves not only properties of the subjects
(“person-alities”) that produce them but also, by association,
the subjects that consume them. Robert Foster
describes this as the
reattachment of the alienated product to another personality,
that is, to the consumer. It is this reattachment
that is achieved through branding. I hasten to add
that branding involves more than the labour of special
workers who design logos and devise advertising campaigns.
. . . Branding also involves the work of consumers,
whose meaningful use of the purchased products invests
these products with the consumer’s identity. . . . Put differently,
the persons of consumers enhance the value of
brands. [Foster 2005:11]
Foster hastens to add that the resulting value (another
kind of “goodwill”) becomes not the property of these consumers
but, rather, is another form of labor that is appropriated
by the brand owners (goodwill, let us remember,
is a form of property, immaterial wealth). Such a subject–
object nexus that now links types of objects to consumers
by association and produces loyalties thereby foregrounds
consumer involvement in the brand and are what have
been called “lovemarks.” However, as Foster reminds us, this
Maussian moment of consumer appropriation overcoming
alienation (“lovemarks”) is just as instantly confronted by a
Marxian one in the very real, consequential way that these
lovemarks are themselves alienated to become immaterial
property (“goodwill”) of the brand owners (more generally,
see Mazzarella 2003:192–195).
The concept of the “lovemark” seems to be embedded
in a very different milieu than that faced by Georgian producers
and consumers. In some ways, Georgian concepts
of brand remain strongly rooted in a generally productivist
model of the economy, particularly because there is no sense
that a “generalized goodwill” exists in the economy: because
of brandlessness, falsification of brands, and unreliability
of producers, all branded products are to some extent
suspect. Moreover, Georgians do not seem to evaluate the
distinction between industrial and nonindustrial production
in the same way that North Americans and Western
Europeans do; there is no arts and crafts movement legacy
that causes Georgians to prize the defects and minute variations
that separate craft from industrial production and that
make the former more valuable, as in the West. Georgians
prize local production of fruits and vegetables, it is true, and
the accusation that a food product is from a foreign country
implies that it may be dangerous, but the main concern is
that the product is Georgian.4
In Georgia, the phenomenon of brand is closely allied
to the traditional socialist emphasis on production, a
nostalgic image of traditional production within the contemporary
world of consumption. But it should be added
that unlike Western manufacturers, there is no real sense
that Georgians advocate a return to traditional production
methods (beyond making vague references to “nuances” of
traditional technology): this is not the mark of the birth of a
Georgian arts and crafts movement. Nor does the traditional
branding here have anything in common with European attempts
to appropriate or authenticize traditional artisanal
practices or other attributes of localities as legally protected
forms of intellectual property (see, e.g., Coombe et al. 2005;
Meneley 2004). Georgian beer producers we interviewed, in
fact, all strongly avowed that attempts to privatize aspects
of national tradition amounted to incomprehensible nonsense:
the traditional order by definition belongs to everyone.
Rather, we would argue that the referencing of Georgian
traditions of production (without ever, it should be
stressed, appropriating them in production or as property)
reassuringly grounds modern Georgian industrial production
within a genealogy of the nation, a unity in which production
and consumption are reunited within the nation
(autarchy), just as tradition and modernity are reunited.
Contemporary Georgian trademarks and brands do
not so much reconnect distant producers and consumers,
rather they substitute “figures” (in Goffman’s
sense [1974:523–537]) or “surrogate identities” (Coombe
1996:210)—what William Mazzarella (2003:187–192) calls
“prosthetic personalities”—for absent producers (and consumers).
The figures used as brands, then, do not index
and try to link up the distant producers and consumers of
products, making them present on something like a model
of the speech situation; rather, they index a larger totality,
an autarchic model of the nation in which the different
moments of production and consumption can both
be contained. In Georgia, these figures of production and
consumption that mediate within the imaginary of the market
are drawn from figures mediating within the imaginary
of the nation; the social field of alterity constructed
by folkloric and ethnographic discourses to organize persons
within a nation is adopted and transferred to organize
products into brands for a national market.
Something similar to this process of grounding brands
in broader social imaginaries has been attested elsewhere.
As Coombe, for example, has noted, these figures that mediate
within the imaginary of the market are also mediating
figures within other imaginaries, drawing on a “symbolic
field of social alterity” (Coombe 1996:212) of the nation,
the frontier, or empire to structure the field of the market
(see also Richards 1990:ch. 3; McClintock 1995:ch. 5). As
Coombe argues with respect to 19th-century U.S. brands
and trademarks,
dominant U.S. culture was preoccupied with the nature
of civilization and its alters, and with the prerequisites
of nationhood and its connection to frontiers. . . . Images
and descriptions of African-Americans, Indian peoples,
and Hispanic and Meztizo subjects . . . were massproduced
and projected on a national scale through the
medium of trademarks. [Coombe 1996:210]
U.S. consumers were “constituted in relation to the embodied
otherness” of the savage alterity of the U.S. frontier
632 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007
(Coombe 1996:209). In the Georgian case, this is not radical
otherness (“civilization and its others”) but an otherness
that verges on asymptotic identity: an ethnographically
stereotyped version of national self as traditional other, the
mountain dwellers of Pshavi and Khevsureti (Manning in
press). The Georgian appropriation of “autoalterity” here
is quite similar to a process Mazzarella has called “AutoOrientalism,”
which he defines as “the use of globally recognized
signifiers of Indian ‘tradition’ to facilitate the aspirational
consumption, by Indians, of a culturally marked
self” (Mazzarella 2003:138). This general process, in which
“publicly recognized signs of social difference create a pool
of cultural resources within which manufacturers fished for
their own distinction” (Coombe 1996:211), in the case of
Georgia takes two forms: on the one hand, there is an occidentalizing
process by which Georgian goods are associated
with European technology while still remaining grounded
in Georgian traditions (“dual lineages”); on the other
hand, there is an indigenizing process by which the traditional
lineage of Georgian products is specifically grounded
in ethnographic images of Georgianness (“ethnographic
branding”).
DUAL LINEAGES OF GEORGIAN BEER: GEORGIAN
TRADITIONS AND EUROPEAN TECHNOLOGY
After the fall of socialism, industrial production of nearly
all food commodities in the Republic of Georgia virtually
disappeared. Now, unemployed urban and rural Georgians
have retreated to “peasant” subsistence strategies and petty
commodity production and transaction. Many foodstuffs
consumed in Georgia are now produced “traditionally”:
that is, on private peasant plots. The withdrawal of the Socialist
state from production has left “the nation” as the
only alternative model in which the disassociated moments
of production and consumption can be reunited within
a comprehensive social imaginary. In this context, new
Georgian industrial firms seek to ground their own lines
of consumer products—primarily beers and soft drinks—
in “the nation,” not only catering to Georgian consumer
tastes (e.g., the ever-popular tarragon-flavored soft drinks)
but also making reference in marketing to the use of “traditional
methods” in production, “ecologically pure” ingredients
grown on national soil by peasants, and Georgian
ownership. In fact, the sale-ability of “ecological purity,”
not lost on Georgians by any means, seems to have been
one of those rare unexpected windfalls deriving from their
poverty. Very recently Georgian agricultural produce has
become popular in Turkey: because Georgians cannot afford
labor-saving chemicals such as pesticides, by definition
their agricultural products are “ecologically pure.”
Although Georgia is known for its wines, industrial production
of beer and soft drinks for a local market far outstrips
wine production: wine consumption occurs in ritual
contexts in which new wine, typically purchased from peasant
producers, is preferred; bottled, aged wines are primarily
for exports. Beer and soft drinks, therefore, are a key area in
which industrial production for indigenous consumers has
been elaborated. Such goods are packaged and presented
as both being ecologically pure and following traditional
methods, often referencing ethnographic materials about
traditional life in brand images even as they proclaim their
reliance on Western technologies.
The greatest single exception to the generally dire situation
of Georgian industry is the beer industry. In recent
years Georgian beer producers have aggressively carved out
a dominant market share for products produced in Georgia.
The frequently quoted statistic is that something like 94
percent of beer products consumed in Georgia were manufactured
in Georgia in 2004, effectively driving out much of
the foreign competition in just a few short years (Lomidze
2003). The most successful of these new companies is the
Kazbegi Company, which is equally well-known for its soft
drink and iced tea products as it is for beer. Kazbegi is the
first company in Georgia to have developed a successful and
recognizable logo, a picture of one of the national icons
of Georgia, Mt. Kazbek (Georgian: Kazbegi, Qazbegi), from
which the company takes its name, that in turn adorns all
of its products in different lines.5
Moreover, Gogi Topadze,
founder of the Kazbegi company, is frequently credited with
this somewhat miraculous transformation of this sector of
the Georgian economy in the late 1990s into one that is
now virtually completely dominated by Georgian products.
In fact, many have seen the Kazbegi Company in particular,
and the beer market in general, as a model for other industries,
especially the wine industry, because Georgia is particularly
well-known for wines and not beer, and, yet, the
indigenous beer market is prospering and the wine market
is not. As an example of this, one interviewer in the
Georgian press, interviewing a wine producer about the difficulties
experienced in the wine industry from taxes and
falsification, abruptly changed the course of the interview
and began to berate the wine producer to follow Topadze’s
example. The increasingly frustrated the wine producer offered
various cogent reasons why the Topadze model could
not so easily be transferred, to no avail:
Interviewer: I don’t know Gogi Topadze personally, but
I respect him a great deal. Do you know
why? He saturated the market with national
(erovnuli) production. People are no longer
attracted to foreign beers, with pleasure
they drink “Kazbegi,” “Argo.” Why can’t
our wines do that?
Interviewee: Wine has different problems. Gogi
Topadze’s products are of high quality.
But still he won against imported products
by price. Our products are also of high
quality. But as a result of taxation our price
becomes unable to compete. I don’t have
the means to sell my wine for less than 2.5
Lari [a little more than a dollar].
Interviewer: That is, you wine-makers should have stood
firm like Gogi Topadze and not paid artificially
raised excise taxes . . .
Manning and Uplisashvili • “Our Beer” 633
Interviewee: It’s not just a matter of being firm. Vodka,
beer, whisky all compete with wine . . .
Interviewer: Understandable, but what about the fact
that “Kazbegi” and “Argo” were able to
compete with wine and vodka, aside from
that, were able to compete with many foreign
beers?
Interviewee: As a result of low prices! Then, because falsified
production does not represent a hindrance
for them. Get rid of falsifiers and we
will be able to restore the name and dignity
that Georgian wines once had! [Aslanishvili
1999:5]
Topadze’s example has had many imitators. Following
the lead of what Topadze himself calls the “Topadze
ideology,” many Georgian companies have emphasized a
dual lineage for their products, emphasizing both the European
technological modernity of their products and the
way their products embody in one way or another Georgian
tradition. Billboards throughout Georgia for a range of
consumer products often have the same rhetorical juxtaposition
of “European Technology” and “Georgian tradition.”
Of course, Georgian tradition and European technology are
synthesized more at the level of marketing than at the level
of production.
What then, is the “Topadze ideology”? Topadze, an
easygoing, charismatic man, is quite up front about the
linkage of politics and economics in his corporate ideology.
After all, he is a (not particularly successful) political
figure in Georgia, the head of a political party with the suggestive
name “Industry Will Save Georgia.” The billboard
of this party, found outside the Kazbegi headquarters, resembles
a socialist-era propaganda poster, showing in order
all the separated moments of industrial production from
the rows of tea bushes to the ships that carry the products
overseas (see Figure 1). Part of the Topadze ideology is attempting
to create an autarchic link of national production
to national consumption. This happens at the level of marFIGURE
1. Billboard outside the Kazbegi office: “Let’s save industry
and industry will save us!” (Photo courtesy of the authors)
keting (from the use of a logo on all products that links the
company to an important national landmark to the specific
brands, which often index specific areas within the nation);
in production itself (through the exclusive reliance
on Georgian capital, labor, and raw materials); and, finally,
with consumption (Kazbegi is noted for having attempted
to make not only beers for Georgian consumption but also
soft drinks, cigarettes, and many other common consumer
goods).
Not all of Kazbegi’s attempted “national” brands were
equally successful. The beer brand Gagra, named after a
once-famous tourist resort in Abkhazia lost during the war
with that region (1992–93), was patently a failure because it
conjured up a part of the national imaginary that everyone
wanted to forget, a kind of negative nostalgia. Another interesting
example arose during our interview when Topadze
produced a carton of a brand of cigarettes the Kazbegi corporation
had been unable to market. We opened them and
sampled them, as we had his beers and soft drinks: they
were no better or worse than any other Georgian cigarettes.
In fact, the packages sported an appealing and clever design.
Named “Nostalgia” (see Figure 2), these cigarettes visually
reproduced the package illustration of a well-known
Soviet-era cigarette brand, Kazbek, showing a mountaineer
rider riding with the mountain (Russian: Kazbek; Georgian:
Kazbegi, also spelled Qazbegi) in the background (see
Figure 3).
The brand was unsuccessful, Topadze explained, for the
purely prosaic reasons that most Georgian brands fail: competition
from lower-priced contraband. The brand, however,
encapsulates the covert dimension of the Topadze
ideology, inasmuch as it indexes different dimensions of
nostalgia, overtly linking traditional imagery of the mountains
(the Kazbek brand showing a rider in traditional dress
with the traditional symbol of Georgia and mountain traditions,
Mount Kazbek) with a covert nostalgia for the socialist
past and familiar socialist products from that period.
For Topadze, both of these dimensions are linked and extend
to a wide variety of products, not just beer, although
for those who have borrowed the “Topadze ideology,” the
primary focus is beer products.
Kazbegi’s promotional literature reproduces images
from traditional mountain techniques of beer production
drawn from ethnographic works as part of a historical narrative
that also connects Kazbegi with German beer manufacturing
in Georgia (the Kazbegi plant is on the site of the
19th-century German beer plant, the Wenzel Brewery). The
traditions of the mountain-dwelling beer brewers are shown
in illustrations drawn from classic Georgian ethnographies
of their technical apparatus (a massive copper vat with the
legend ludis saxarshi kvabi, “beer-brewing vat,” is depicted)
as well as the ritual apparatus to which beer production
is linked in mountain communities (a Georgian mountain
shrine priest carrying a sacred flag [drosha]; in addition various
sacred shrine buildings, including the beer-brewing
building, are depicted). The images are drawn from a classic
ethnography by Vera Bardavelidze (1941), which was
634 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007
FIGURE 2. Kazbegi’s failed brand “Nostalgia”: Georgian and English versions. (Courtesy of Kazbegi 1881 JSC)
recently rereleased. Opposite them are color photographs
of the contemporary functionally equivalent structures in
the modern Kazbegi factory (see Figure 4). This dual linFIGURE
3. Socialist era cigarette “Kazbek” package design. (Photo
courtesy of the authors)
eage of traditions and technology allows Kazbegi to claim
that they have “restored the traditions of the mountaindwellers,
thanks to ancient national methods of beer production
enriched by new technology” (Kazbegi n.d.).
The French company Castel, too, proclaims the traditionality
of its beer production. For example, in its radio
ads for its “Khevsur beer” brand Aluda, it describes “masculine
traditions brought down from the mountains.” The
rest of its ads emphasize that Aluda is “our beer . . . prepared
with traditional Khevsur methods,” although Aluda is produced
in what may be the most modern European factory
in Georgia by a European company. When asked how this
particular beer, which tasted like any other lager, could be
called “Khevsur beer,” the Aluda representative smiled. It
was, in fact, a stupid question. Of course no one would actually
attempt to produce authentic mountain-style beer because
actual mountain beer is dark, thick, sweet, and prone
to giving powerful headaches, like an evil version of Guinness;
a Georgian friend likened it memorably to sweetened
motor oil. (We note, however, that the 2007 Aluda summer
ad campaign [field notes, 2007] have become more specific,
Manning and Uplisashvili • “Our Beer” 635
FIGURE 4. Dual lineages: traditional Georgian beer production (left) and contemporary European technology (right). (Courtesy of Kazbegi
1881 JSC)
claiming that the “traditional Khevsur brewing methods”
used to produce Aluda boil down to the use of “copper vats”
along with, of course, “tasty Georgian water.” The copper
vats shown in the ad, of course, are not Khevsur copper
vats but simply the standard industrial copper vats used in
breweries all across Europe.) What, then, is the point of appealing
to these mountain traditions of brewing if no one
actually intends to use them?
ETHNOGRAPHIC BRANDS
Kazbegi is not the only beer company in Georgia to market
its products using traditional imagery from the Georgian
mountains. Two other Georgian companies, Lomisi and
Tbilludi, as well as the local branch of the French industrial
giant Castel, have borrowed this aspect of the “Topadze ideology”
to market their products. To ground this new range
of beer products in the “nation,” Georgian marketers for
these companies have created an explosion of brands that
harkens to Georgia’s imagined traditional exemplars: various
groups of ethnic Georgians who inhabit the mountains
of Georgia adjacent to Chechnya. These mountain groups—
such as the Khevsurs, the Pshavs, and the Tush—have, since
the 19th century, been sacralized by generations of Georgian
ethnographers as being the true bearers of the authentic
Georgian way of life (Manning 2004a, in press). Since the
late 19th century, the mountains of Georgia, regions like
Pshavi and Khevsureti, have been understood to represent
the unchanging masculine traditional life of Georgia, the
Georgian past in the present, just as the plains of Georgia,
regions like Kartli where the capital city, Tbilisi, is located,
represent the present and future life of the country:
Here [in the inaccessible mountains of Pshav-Khevsureti],
in this homeland the Pshav-Khevsur have preserved unchanged
until today their ancient, ancestral customs, life,
past traditions. In this respect the Pshav-Khevsur is more
Georgian [kartveli] (if it can be said so), than the Kartlian
[kartleli, resident of Kartli, the central Georgian province]
himself. The Kartlian lives more in the present, in the future.
If he had not turned his back on the past, still, he
avoids facing it. [Khizanashvili 1940:1]
In an ethnographic vision of the nation, these fierce
and free, hospitable and brave mountaineers, spouting poetry
and avenging blood for blood, embody all that is
best about Georgians in general (Manning 2004a, in press).
Georgian advertisers turned to this ready-made iconography
of the nation to articulate their claims to a national
636 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007
FIGURE 5. Ethnographic map of Georgian beer brands. (Courtesy of author)
market, turning idealized figures of ethnographic and folkloric
others into images that could be used to organize an
array of industrial products for a national market. In an interview
as early as 1996, Topadze connected his choice of
the name Kazbegi and familiar national symbol of Mount
Kazbegi as the logo of his products to indigenous ethnographic
traditions of beer brewing preserved by mountain
dwellers:
You will remember, that the population of our mountainous
regions, the Mokhevians [residents of the area around
Mount Kazbegi] and Khevsurs since time immemorial
pursued the brewing of beer with folk technology. In
our own production are inserted nuances of precisely this
technology and for that reason too these names were chosen.
[Tbilisi 1996:2–3]
Whatever these “nuances” of folk technology might
have been, by 2005 the tendency to use different ethnographic
groups from a small region of the Caucasus
mountains bordering Chechnya and to categorize and differentiate
what were essentially all the same Lagers (ethnographic
branding) had reached a high point with no end in
sight. In effect, the beer brands of Georgia today look just
a little bit like the ethnographic groupings of the Georgian
ethnographic museum in bottled form (see Figure 5).
Just as the plains dwellers of Georgia traditionally drink
wine, for these mountain dwellers the traditional ritual
drink is beer. This particular ethnographic fact allows beer
to be seen as a traditional Georgian beverage alongside wine
and, more generally, allows modern industrial beers to be
associated with the timeless ethnographic traditions, rituals,
and general masculinity of the Georgian highlanders.
The labels of the Castel Company’s Khevsur Beer Aluda (see
Figure 6) and the Kazbegi beer Pshavi (see Figure 7) both
reproduce familiar ethnographic images of the typical
Khevsur or typical Pshavian man in traditional dress against
a suggestive traditional landscape.6
Similarly, the rhetoric of commercials for these brands
indexes Georgian traditions of production and consumption
in slightly different ways, but all of them link their
frankly quite novel European products to specific traditional
contexts of production or consumption. A particularly
good example is a commercial for Kazbegi’s Pshavi,
which displays the entire traditional contexts of production
and consumption of beer in an idyllic scene of traditional
Manning and Uplisashvili • “Our Beer” 637
FIGURE 6. Aluda: a Khevsur beer. (Courtesy of Castel Sakartvelo)
mountain life in the mountains of Pshavi. The commercial
opens with springtime flirtation between a Pshavian lad and
lass otherwise engaged in traditional occupations, the Pshavians
being as noted for traditions of romance as they are
for poetry (Manning in press). The commercial then moves
on to an image of an older man (indexing respect for the
elders and tradition) and then to a man engaged in brewing
beer using traditional methods (see Figure 8a). The technical
process of traditional beer production is followed in particular
detail, with traditional implements, and the commercial
notes in particular that the craftsman making the beer
pictured is “certified.” Then the ad moves seamlessly from
scenes of traditional beer production to traditional beer consumption
(see Figure 8b), at last juxtaposing the traditional
Pshavian beer poured from a traditional serving pitcher to
the modern bottled beer brand “Pshavi” (see Figure 8c). The
Pshavians are noted for being poets and their poetic cycles
FIGURE 7. Pshavi: a wheat beer. (Courtesy of Kazbegi 1881 JSC)
are a central focus of Georgian folkloric research; thus, the
ad’s text is in fact set as a traditional Pshavian poem:
Roca k’i gazapxuldeba, gamoighvidzebs kveqana,
When spring comes, the world awakens,
silaghe simxiarule, daseirnoben qvelgana.
Freedom, happiness, walk about everywhere.
[See Figure 8a]
Shasvi pshavuri—et’qvian, xorblis ludia sviani,
Drink Pshavian, they say, it is a wheat beer with hops,
gvitxari rame ghvtis madlsa, erti kartuli gziani.
Tell us something, by the grace of God, having a Georgian
way. [See Figure 8b]
ludi pshavi—kartuli mtis istoria.
Pshavi Beer—the history of the Georgian mountains.
[See Figure 8c]
This commercial by Kazbegi is perhaps the most complete
grounding of a beer in idyllic scenes of traditional beer
production and consumption, appropriate for the Kazbegi
product, which is most directly linked to this project of
ethnographic branding. Other companies have used simpler
gambits to link together some aspect of their product
and this mountain tradition, sometimes emphasizing
traditional production, sometimes emphasizing traditional
scenes of consumption.7
In the case of this commercial, a
whole traditional trajectory from production to consumption
is highlighted.
CONCLUSION: BRAND, CIRCULATORY OBJECTS AND
SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Georgian brand makers invoke ethnographic figures of
Georgian mountaineers as a basis for their brands in part
simply because it is there, in the Georgian mountains, that
indigenous traditions of beer production are found. But
emphasizing ethnographic traditions of production is not
intended to argue that the contemporary product is concretely
produced by such methods (beyond small “nuances”
or copper vats); this is not an attempt to pass off an industrial
product as a product of craftsmanship (as in the
cases discussed by Meneley 2004). Rather than opposing
tradition to modernity as craft production to industrial production
(as in the Western “Slow Food” movement discussed
by Meneley 2004), Georgian producers seek to create
a “dual lineage” for their products, which supposedly represent
both an indigenous tradition and European modernity.
This “dual lineage” is something that Georgians like
to imagine themselves as having with respect to Europe
in general. Georgia, a country on the uncomfortable shifting
border of an imagined geographic opposition between
Europe and Asia, does not like to emphasize the alterity
of Europe to Georgianness as modernity to tradition, for
that would consign them to be forever in the “backwards”
status of being traditional, non-European, and nonmodern
(for a more general discussion of Georgia’s recent history,
see Manning 2007; Pelkmans 2006). Such an untroubled
nostalgia for tradition is, perhaps, diagnostic of those
who feel that their claim to modernity is unchallengeable.
638 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007
FIGURE 8. Screen stills of a Pshavi beer commercial: a. traditional Pshavian context; b. traditions of Pshavian beer production and consumption;
c. linking the traditional Pshavian beer to the modern brand “Pshavi.” (All images courtesy of courtesy of Kazbegi 1881 JSC)
Unlike other colonial situations, such as the situation described
by Partha Chatterjee (1992), Georgians do not oppose
European technical modernity to indigenous Georgian
tradition: they treat them as being variations of the same
thing. Georgians like to say that they were European and
modern before Europe was and that they experienced a humanistic
renaissance before Dante; however, they also sense
that their country is not yet, in fact, European and modern
(Manning 2007).
The same ambivalence attends the marketing of indigenous
production, hence Georgian producers suture together
these uneasy discourses of opposition and assimilation in
Manning and Uplisashvili • “Our Beer” 639
a dual lineage and ambivalently ground their products
both in European technical modernity and Georgian tradition.
The problem that such a strategy addresses is how
to incorporate Georgian goods into the evaluative hierarchy
that confers prestige uniquely on foreign “firm goods”
(goods emanating from the “Imaginary West”; see Yurchak
2006:ch. 5).
Alexei Yurchak has persuasively shown how under late
Soviet socialism, Western “firm” goods, often stripped down
merely to the leibl (label) without the associated use value,
served primarily as physical, indexical incarnations of the
“imaginary West” and resources for constructing imaginary
worlds, rather than guarantors of the value of the associated
product (often no longer present in any case), a tokenmediated
semiotics of presentification opposed to the typelevel
semiotics of authentification and goodwill (Yurchak
2006:195–197).8
Under such circumstances, there is a poeticization
of the semiotic apparatus of brand, wherein
(the fantasy of all brand theorists) the material signifier of
brand (leibl) becomes detachable from its putative object,
self-referential and self-valuable. The function of brand here
is displaced from a productivist or consumerist semiotic
orientation that locates goods in relation to producers or
consumers to one that indexes the imaginative geography
within which the goods circulate, often with what Mazzarella
calls an “aspirational” aspect, indexing a kind of unrealized
desire or yearning for the elsewhere from which
the branded good comes (2003:102). Under such circumstances,
the brand can become the tail that wags the commodity
dog. Mazzarella has argued that Western brands
in India have a similar aspirational, Occidentalist content,
incarnating categories of imaginative geographies such as
“the imaginary West”: so similar, in fact, that the following
could just as well be a description of the semiotics of firmennye
goods under socialism and postsocialism (cf. Fehervary
2005:ch. 6; Yurchak 2006:ch. 5):
Major Western brands became important markers of social
distinction for a small elite. . . . Much of the mystique
associated with these goods depended on their capacity
to serve as physical embodiments of a source of value that
was understood to reside elsewhere. This elsewhere might
in shorthand be called “the West,” but in fact it was conceived
as at once concrete and abstract, as a real place
and as a mythical location. The de facto magic of the
goods was that they provided concrete, present evidence
of this absent source, as conjured in advertising. Auratic
in Walter Benjamin’s sense, at hand, tactile, yet transcendently
irradiated, these brands reverberated with what
one might call a kind of “close distance.” [Mazzarella
2003:256]
The evaluative hierarchy of concrete goods followed
the outlines of the socialist period imaginative geography
into the postsocialist period. Prior to the elaboration of
postsocialist Georgian production, Mathijs Pelkmans has
shown how foreign “firm” (sapirmo) goods and their typifying
material qualities were articulated into complex hierarchies
of value that in a sense reflect an orientalist imaginary
of alterity (which privileges European foreign goods
over Asian ones) but also a socialist one (which privileges
quality [essence] over packaging [appearance]). Thus, European
goods (expensive, good quality, beautiful) outrank
Russian goods (cheap, good quality, but ugly), and these
in turn outrank goods from Turkey (cheap, relatively good
looking, but poor quality; Pelkmans 2006:184–188). What
we have tried to show is that the strategy of “dual lineage”
seeks to overcome the inherited opposition between Western
“firm” goods and local goods. All sorts of food products
(beer, soft drinks, even bread) are advertised as incorporating
European technology with Georgian traditions;
even European-style beers marketed by Georgian companies
(with German or Czech brand names) insist that they
are marriages of German or Czech technology and Georgian
traditions.9
Georgian brands then depict Georgia as an
affinal, rather than consanguineal, kin of Europe.
Because the primary concern of Georgian marketers
is not “traditional craft production,” their invocation of
ethnographic figures of the imaginary of the nation within
the imaginary of the market to create brands for products
is based on a desire to ground the production and consumption
of their product within tradition in general. In
general, then, the phenomenon of brand is something that
does more than merely link producers or consumers to products,
exchanges, and associations of properties of subjects
and objects. Brands also index a relationship between an
individual circulating object and a whole social imaginary
of circulation, whether that imaginary is one of European
modernity or Georgian national tradition. Brands become
like mythic genealogies rather than trademarks ensuring
goodwill; labels become miniature ritual incarnations, affixed
by glue, of whole cosmologies of circulation.
While recent anthropological treatments of brand (e.g.,
Foster 2005; Mazzarella 2003) have taken inspiration from
Maussian exchange theory, we believe that brand might also
be approached from a perspective more indebted to Arnold
Van Gennep: in effect a relinking of Marxian approaches
to economic production and circulation to Van Gennep’s
concern for the linking of spatial classification with spatial
transition or qualitative transformations of persons and
goods in circulation or ritual, the way “boundaries are transcended
through exchanges of persons and goods that both
define and blur those boundaries” (Beidelman 1997:26).
Although social anthropological approaches to ritual were
bedeviled by a sharply drawn but ill-defined “you know it
when you see it” sort of opposition between “technical” and
“ritual” (“symbolic”) transformation of objects (see, e.g.,
Galaty 1983:366–368; Pfaffenberger 1992), it remains that
this older literature represents some of anthropology’s most
sustained consideration of materiality and meaning, the intersection
of causation and signification (Keane 1997:18–
20, see also ch. 3). The “technical” production of goods is at
the same time a “symbolic” or “ritual” reclassification. Both
involve transformations of the potentially meaningful qualities
of objects (Peircean “qualisigns”; Keane 2003; Munn
1986): sociotechnical (indexical, causal) transformation of
object qualities (“quali-”) and their symbolic reassignment
as signs (“-sign”; see Galaty 1983:367; Keane 1997:18–20,
640 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007
see also ch. 3). This process of semiotechnical transformation
of qualisigns, involving transformative moments of
both causation (quali-) and signification (-sign), does not
end with the production process but continues through exchange
(Keane 1997:ch. 3; Munn 1977, 1986).
Production, exchange, and consumption involve interlinkages
of circulation and qualitative transformation of
objects in which sociotechnical transformations of object
qualities and their semiotic transformation into meaningful
qualisigns in production or subsequent circulation are
all asymptotic moments of one single process of transformation
(Munn 1977). Just as acts of production of individual
commodities are akin to ritual transformations that
involve both asymptotically symbolic and technical dimensions,
transformations, and associations of the qualitative
properties of subjects (persons) and objects, so too their circulation
involves further transformation, recategorization,
and both material and metaphoric “rites of passage” so that
goods presuppose and create the social categories of space
and time (“space-time”) in which they move (Lee and Li
Puma 2002; Munn 1977, 1986).
The material and semiotic properties of the circulatory
object itself that mediate these space-times becomes particularly
analytically important here, in that a given circulatory
object can be treated as a “condensed space-time,
and may be analyzed to give a fuller account of the wider
intersubjective space-time in which it operates” (Munn
1986:10). Brand is just such a semiotic property of a circulatory
object that allows it to act as a “condensed space-time,”
with respect to both economic and political imaginaries.
Semiotic phenomena like brand involve a semiotic apparatus
that stands in a metasemiotic relation to the process of
circulation, and this semiotic apparatus can be reflexively
attached to the circulating object (a label) and also exists
independently of it (a TV advertisement). The semiotic apparatus
of brand does not merely serve to locate objects as
vendible goods with respect to purely economic imaginaries
like the market, it also serves to locate them in terms of
other cosmological systems, including the imaginative geographies
of Orientalism, Occidentalism, and nationalism.
PAUL MANNING Department of Anthropology, Trent University,
Peterborough, ON, Canada K9J 7B8
ANN UPLISASHVILI Faculty of Social Sciences, Chavchavadze
State University, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia
NOTES
Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank Emzar
Jgerenaia, who put us in touch with one another. Paul Manning
would also like to thank Rob Moore, without whose work and encouragement
this project would never have begun, and the “In Focus”
section editors, Deborah Heath and Anne Meneley, for giving
us the always helpful input and a context for finishing it. And both
authors give thanks to Gogi Topadze, for making good Georgian
beer, at last.
1. There are many similar, essentially neoliberal, academic arguments
that locate the historical reasons for the demise of socialism
in its paternalistic productivist neglect of the desires of the consumer.
Such literature on “consumption” often presents the consumer
as a universal agent standing outside history; homo faber
is replaced by homo emptor. For different examples (from otherwise
seemingly very different disciplinary and political orientations), see
Miller 1995:16 and Aslund 2002. For a critical approach to universalizing
consumerist social ontologies in other contexts, see Mazzarella
2003 and Fehervary 2005.
2. These two methods of linking product to source are conventional
representation versus what we might indexical “presentification”
(Vernant 1991) and type mediation (“true and accurate
copies”) versus token mediation (“moments” of “real contact”).
3. This is what Georgians call palsipik’acia: falsification, the
antonym of production, standing as “lies” to “truth” in linguistic
communication just as goodwill in a sense stands to trust. ExPresident
Eduard Shevardnadze often quipped that in Georgia
“there is more falsification than production” (field notes, 2001–
02).
4. As noted, Georgians cannot afford chemicals in agricultural production,
so their products are ecologically pure by default.
5. See, for example, Figure 7, top and center. On the significance
of Mt. Kazbegi, see Manning 2004.
6. The Castel Company’s Khevsur Beer Aluda is named after a Khevsur
hero named Aluda Ketelauri from a famous poem by Pshavian
poet Vazha Pshavela. In addition, the name Aluda also recalls the
Georgian and dialect words for beer (ludi, aludi).
7. Space does not permit us to discuss these companies here. This
topic will be addressed in a chapter of a book in progress on Georgian
drinking culture.
8. According to some, it was precisely the possession of a leibl that
made a thing a “firm” good (firmennye). Hence, it is not surprising
that the “use value” of a firmennyei good would be, in essence, the
label.
9. Some bread companies in Georgia now insist that their traditional
breads are cooked on Italian stone ovens.
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