All through the 1990s, I meandered from academic studies to music (and back). After numerous concerts and two CDs, I finally retired as a musician and concentrated on anthropology. In 2000, I graduated with a work on anthropological research on war prisoners in WWI (University of Hamburg). My Ph-D thesis (published 2006) is dedicated to “Post-Soviet Feasting: The Georgian Banquet in Transition”. Before becoming a member of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, I taught Social Anthropology at the Tbilisi State University (Georgia) and worked as a freelance copywriter and online-editor. Currently, I am a visting professor at the University of Campinas, Brazil, teaching a course on the "Anthropology of Citizenship in Post-Totalitarian Societies" and working on my book on "Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia". Besides, I am editing a volume with Sergey Sokolovskiy on "Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia", as well as a Portuguese reader dedicated to Postsocialism with Omar Reibeiro Thomaz.