Description:
This book, one of the first in English about everyday life in the Republic of Georgia, describes how people construct identity in a rapidly changing border region.
Brief description: Mathijs Pelkmans is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan and Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia, both from Cornell, and editor of Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union and Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies.
Review Quotes: "This book's careful, measured, and rich treatments of the everyday dilemmas faced by the residents of Ajaria provide a welcome and important counterpoint to the abstractions of geopolitics and transition economics that predominate in scholarship on Georgia. But it is no mere compilation of stories and narratives, nor is it of interest only to specialists in the Caucasus region. Pelkmans deftly theorizes borders throughout by attending to recent anthropological thinking on cultural objects and display, religious identities and conversions, and market transformations. Near the border, he suggests, culture, identity, religion, and economy refract in curious and analytically significant ways. To study these issues in one borderland, then, is also to grapple with the entire region behind the iron curtain and its postsocialist trajectories. Borders are of intense interest to all of us." Douglas Rogers, Slavic Review, Winter 2007"