Article Death in Rural Georgia: A Historical Comparison of Georgians and Ossets in the Kistauri Commune Tinatin Zurabishvili 1 , Rennie Lee 2 and Rebecca Jean Emigh 3 Abstract This article examines the factors influencing age at death in the multiethnic villages, comprised mostly of Georgians and Ossets, in the Kistauri commune in the eastern Republic of Georgia between 1897 and 1997. The data are analyzed with Cox proportional hazards models using age at death as the dependent variable, and ethnicity, gender, marital status, residency status, and year of birth as the independent variables. The results show that Georgians lived longer than Ossets. Individuals who had ever been married lived longer than those who had not. The results perhaps reflect harsher living conditions for Ossets, the ethnic minority, despite Soviet ideologies about equality. Keywords historical age at death, ethnicity, Ossets, Georgians, structural inequality, ethnic violence After the breakup of the Soviet Union, numerous reports of violent ethnic conflicts and separatist movements in the Caucasus region, which includes the country of Georgia, reached the forefront of the US news media. 1 Geopolitical rivalries and power struggles may have caused some tension; ethnic and religious differences and grievances may have caused others. Identifying possible histor- ical roots of these tensions, however, is difficult, in part because there is virtually no reliable infor- mation about ethnic relations before the early 1990s when much of this region was part of the Soviet Union. Thus, it is nearly impossible to evaluate how much—if any—of the conflict was generated by relatively long-standing historical conditions. This article takes one step toward providing some con- text for ethnic relations by examining historical differences in age at death, which can serve as an overall measure of well-being and institutional discrimination between Georgians and Ossets (or Ossetians)—an ethnic group originally from the mountainous region of the Northern Caucasus— 1 Department of Sociology and Business Law, University of Bologna, Italy 2 Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA 3 Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Rebecca Jean Emigh, Department of Sociology, University of California, 264 Haines Hall, Box 951551, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. Email: emigh@soc.ucla.edu Journal of Family History 2020, Vol. 45(4) 457-478 ª 2020 The Author(s) Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0363199020929679 journals.sagepub.com/home/jfh