Defending the Border

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.

Mathijs Pelkmans is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

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.

Georgi Derluguian, author of Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography:

No global trend can have reality unless observed in empirical micro-situations. In the tiny and exotic Ajaria, Mathijs Pelkmans discovers the fascinating juxtaposition of ever-shifting borders among ethnicities, religions, states, and economic systems. The talk of a flattening globalization perhaps has been premature.

Ronald Grigor Suny, Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History, The University of Michigan:

Mathijs Pelkmans has written a biography of a border and the surrounding frontier between Georgia and Turkey, which was also for seventy years the divide between the USSR and Soviet socialism on one side and the opposing world of NATO, capitalism, and Islam on the other. Based on his extensive fieldwork in Ajaria (southwestern Georgia), this gifted ethnographer shows how shifting borders-sometimes permeable, other times an insurmountable barrier-shape and reshape identities and cultural understandings. Rich in a sense of place, this is one of the finest evocations of a vital, if damaged, Georgian culture.

Paul Manning, Trent University:

Defending the Border is an excellent and timely ethnography of an amazingly interesting region of the postsocialist world. Mathijs Pelkmans's ethnographic writing is strong, engaging, and provocative.