ABSTRACT
In the course of the post-Napoleonic settlement at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Eastern and Southeastern Europe was divided among three great empires. The strong sense of national culture is carried not by formalized sustained drinking and eating, but in the standard approved manner in which the "new," "nonhistone" nations of Eastern Europe attained consciousness. The centralists are not necessarily Russian chauvinists: they may simply be people giving priority to the rights of individuals over the right of cultures. The museum is sustained by a large network of conscientious ethnographic informants: this much-loved culture will remain well documented. In Georgia, a highly ritualized conviviality sustains a network of relationships which have survived both Stalinism and stagnation. In the Georgian heaven, the dead are provided with self-filling wine goblets, and their perpetual topping-off is conditional on the living continuing to drink toasts to their deceased predecessors.
