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Ritual and style across cultures 185

An often made, explicit compliment in a toast is that someone is a good Geor-
gian. Being Georgian is an omnipresent moral value, which confirms on an
everyday level the importance of national independence, won only a few years
ago. Throughout Georgia “doing being Georgian” is one ritual layer within the
process.
By contrast, in Germany today “Germanness” does not represent a recog-
nized value; at the best, “Europeanness” can fill this role. Persons who proclaim
their “good Germanness” unavoidably assume a political stance associated with
rightist fringes of the political spectrum. Thus, for many German guests in
Georgia the repeated praise of “good Georgianness” seems a little suspicious.
Likewise, the praise of qualities like “proper virility” in mixed company gather-
ings furnishes much material for jokes among guests from the West.

5.4. Toasts that honor parents

The toast presented in Data 1 is in no way a special or unusual event in Georgia.
To make this clear I present as Data 2 a toast recorded in 1990 at an evening
gathering of young, well acquainted academics in Tbilisi (the Georgian original
can be found in Kotthoff 1995).

Tamada Badri (T), Goc ˇa (O), Gia (G) and a young married couple (E:):
Data 2
First toast in a round of young intellectuals in Tbilisi
1 T: I want to offer you a toast
2 (–) to our earthly gods,
3 to our parents, mother and father. (1.0)
4 anyway I have taken it as a rule
5 not to ask the participants at this table
6 if their mother or father is missing. (1.0)
7 even if a parent is already dead,
8 he or she is not dead but alive,
9?: (? ?)
10 T: as long as a gram of their blood still flows in someone else.
11 because of that they are earthly gods, (––)
12 because their earthly children
13 when they do not dwell on this earth anymore.
14 do not let the memories of them decay.
15 gaumarˇ Zos to our earthly gods,
16 to our parents, to our mother and father.
[gaumarˇ Zos.
17 ?: [cheers to them. (? ?) ((everybody drinks))
18 T: I wish them well-being, health and good luck. (1.0 drinking)