
































Secret Sex, Anonymous Desire 

Review by Victor Cova 

Love Stories: Language, Private Love, and Public Romance in Georgia 

by Paul Manning 

University of Toronto Press, 2015

Love Stories is a historical and linguistic ethnography of desire among Khevsurs in Georgia at the

beginning of the 20th century, and the desire they continue to inspire at the end of the same century. It

is  based on ethnography written at  the time by both indigenous Khevsurs as well  as the Georgian

intelligentsia.  More  specifically  it  focuses  on a  type  of  relationship,  called  sts’orproba or  “casual

lovers,” between young men and women that stood apart from kinship and materialized in sexual acts

of  ts’ola-dogma,  or  “lying  down  and  getting  up.”  Manning  focuses  on  the  social  and  linguistic

codification  of  this  relation,  as  well  as  the  continuing  fascination  it  has  exercised  over  Georgian

intellectual life and popular culture ever since. As part of a collection of ethnographies written “with

the undergraduate in mind,” it provides a great introduction both to linguistic anthropology and to the

anthropology of sexuality. The language is clear throughout and most of the analytical concepts are

well explained, without over-burdening the text with references to academic debates. Moreover, the

material is presented in such a way as to grasp the reader’s attention first  with descriptions of the

encounter itself, before introducing historical and geographical contextualisation much later. Yet the

book  should  also  find  readers  beyond  the  undergraduate  classroom  because  of  the  extraordinary

material it presents and its subtle analysis by the author. 

The first four chapters focus on the different stages that lead to young khevsur men and women

lying down together. First, an elchi, or “ambassador,” chooses two people suitable to be a couple. The

first chapter focuses on analyses and explanations of the rhetorics she would use to persuade a girl to

follow her to a young man’s house, and a boy to accept lying down with a girl.  For a pair  to be



elligible, they must not be able to marry each other. Because Khevsur kinship is exogamous, this means

they are primarily chosen among people from the same village. “Lying down and getting up” is itself

highly codified, as chapter 2 explains. The lovers must lie next to each other, on their backs or, if they

are more familiar with each other, on their side, the girl’s head on the boy’s arm. They might touch the

arms and head but not the neck or chest, and especially not each other’s genitals. They may also kiss,

but  on  a  first  encounter,  would  most  likely  talk  with  each  other  through  the  night.  Because  the

encounter takes place with other people sleeping nearby, any disagreement would quickly lead to the

pair being discovered and shamed. If all goes well, however, the pair would meet again regularly and

become “sworn brothers.” This longer-term engagement would take the form of gifts, notably of bottles

of vodka stolen by the girl from her own family and kept hidden away to be consumed with her sworn

brother.  The  fourth  chapter  considers  another  durable  outcome  of  such  relationships:  love  poetry.

Poems of  praise  or  blame for  a  lover  would  circulate  like  the other  gifts,  and eventually  become

immortalized. It is also through these poems that the contents of such secretive encounters could be

made public and codified. 

The last  three  chapters  and the  conclusion  describe  events  that  changed the  form of  these

encounters  and  led  to  their  eventual  disappearance,  whilst  simultaneously  becoming  an  object  of

curiosity and fantasy for the Georgian intelligentsia. First, a new “style” of lying down appeared in the

early 20th century. Young people wanted to touch each other more, going so far as lying on top of each

other rather than side by side. They also increasingly wanted to marry their sworn brothers, instead of

marrying out. These two moves were probably encouraged by increased interferences from the State

and the Russian Orthodox Church, which made divorce much more difficult than before. Marrying a

known and trusted partner would have become more appealing than an arranged marriage. Second, the

development  of  the  press  led  to  the  constitution  of  a  national  intelligentsia  and the production  of

knowledge about “the people.” It is in that context that distorted accounts of the practice of “lying

down” became part of national discourse as simultaneously an object of desire and repulsion. Two

khevsur ethnographers, one of them a woman, also wrote elaborate accounts of Khevsur social life,

including the practice of lying down, which form the basis of the analysis in the first three chapters.

Finally, these accounts in turn formed the basis for films and novels in the second half of the 20th

century, and allusions to lying down circulate even now in advertisements for beer and on internet

chatrooms. 

The  book  revolves  around  various  forms  of  anonymous  desire  that  question  lyrical

understandings of desire that focus on the subject and its object. Khevsur personhood for both men and

women valorises self-restraint in the expression of desire. This self-restraint is justified by a belief in



the all-consuming power of desire. Originally, men and women would be so consumed by their desire

for each other that they would whither away. God dispersed desire among other objects and invented

the rules of lying down in order to control the power of desire. Lying down, as a “free” domain for the

expression of desire, both takes it to its highest intensity but also prohibits it from ever bearing fruits.

Although having “laid down” with many people makes one more desirable,  modesty prohibits  the

naming of one's partner(s). It is crucial to show that one has many partners without ever mentioning

who these partners are. Manning is particularly good at showing the forms taken by these anonymous

demonstrations. In particular, he shows that both vodka and poetry are singularly adequate forms of

expression and concealment of anonymous desire because of their material properties, their abilities to

circulate without being marked by their origin or altered by time. He also contrasts these to other forms

of  anonymity  that  appear  in  the  20th  century  in  Georgia  thanks  to  the  printing  press  and  the

development of the internet. 

To conclude,  Love Stories is a highly readable and interesting ethnography that will captivate

the  imagination  of  its  readers  as  it  has  Georgian  intellectuals.  Accessible  to  undergraduates  as  an

introduction to ethnography, it will also stimulate those interested in kinship, love poetry, socialism and

post-socialism, queer anthropology and the history of anthropology. 

Victor Cova was recently awarded a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews,

Scotland.  He  works  in  the  Ecuadorian  Amazon  with  Shuar  people,  North  American  Evangelical

missionaries, and indigenous travestis sex workers. 

© 2015 Victor Cova


