Male Friendship and Honor on the Birzhas of Tbilisi

Tbilisi birzhas are associated not only with tough guys, street code and the obsession with sunflower seeds, but also with dzmakatsoba – the specific form of male friendship.

When discussing dzmakatsoba with Georgians you can often hear that with its special high values and obligations of friends to each other this form of friendship is unparalleled in other cultures.  From the case of dzmakatsoba we learn how friendship may resemble kin relations, become subjected to ideology and act as an instrument of social status and control.

Throughout October PPV will be looking at 'Birzhastation' - inspired by the Georgian practice of birzha, a type of informal gathering in public space - interrogates neo-liberal ideologies of architectural transparency in the post-socialist world (and in the global “wild capitalist” reality of the 21st century). Named in a fiddly, imaginative cocktail of Georgian, Russian and  English, Birzhastation provides an archi-ethnographic exploration of the possibilities and pitfalls of fine ideas (transparency, openness, horizontality, togetherness, the commonness) in a time of an ideological crisis, amid a global rise of the new types of militarized police regimes. While in many countries of the world we are still naively enamored by architectural transparency as a metaphor of political openness and economic honesty, in Tbilisi (in part, perhaps, as a result of former President Saakashvili's failed attempt to combat police corruption and brutality by decreeing the construction all-glass police stations) people are equipped with a more cautious mindset.