Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia by Mathijs Pelkmans (review)

522 Рецензии/Reviews picture of Russian imperial policies: “the dissenters’ leading role in tsarist empire-building” (P. 299) clearly overstates the importance of the case. Kemper’s debunking of similar simplistic colonial views is far less effective. Not many scholars will be able to appreciate the richness in detail and analytical nuances Kemper ’s study provides. The general reader interested in Russian imperial power and Islamic borderlands will quickly lose sight of the bigger picture concerning the triangular relation of dominion, law, and religion for the Muslims of Dagestan in the context of the Russian conquest. Better than Breyfogle, Kemper succeeds in dissecting the intricacies of the autochthonous developments without depreciating the hegemonic factor of Russian imperial power: “The Jihad state is therefore no doubt an externally induced political structure, brought to the fore by the defensive struggle, but it is also the culmination of [Dagestan’s] own history.” (Kemper, S. 413). The author has titled his conclusions “The ten findings of this study.” Not unlike Moses’ ten commandments, these findings are unambiguous, compelling and succinct; but for the awestruck audience it remains a mystery, where exactly they come from. If only the author had worked his way back from these conclusions to restore the balance between the richness of historical evidence and the lucidity of the main arguments. Stephen JONES Mathijs Pelkmans, Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia . (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). xvi+240 pp.Appendix, Glossary, Maps, Tables, Photographs , Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 0-8014-7330-2 (paperback edition). Mathijs Pelkmans calls his book a “biography” of the border between the small south eastern autonomous republic ofAchara – located in Georgia – and Turkey. The book is split into three parts, each part is a study of a different type of border. The first part concerns the border village of Sarpi populated by Laz, a tiny national group that was separated from its brethren across the border in north-easternTurkey by the Soviet border; the second part investigates the Muslim populated villages in the Acharan hinterland, focusing on the Islamic-Christian cultural border within Georgia; the third part looks at post-socialist developments in Batumi , the capital ofAchara, including the social and cultural reverberations from a newly opened political border , the spread of capitalism, and a post-Soviet leadership committed to new national and cultural myths.The study raises fundamental questions about the permeability/solidity of borders, the role of the state in shaping identities on borderland popula- 523 Ab Imperio, 1/2007 impact of the Soviet Union on the reinforcement of Georgian national and religious myths inAchara. Pelkmans supports much of the Western literature on this point, but illustrates that in Achara – with biographies and interviews – locals were weaned from their Islamic identity to a modern European one that generated significant support for the proWestern and pro-Christian policies that followed the collapse of the USSR. Soviet education and propaganda convinced Muslim Acharans that they were originally Christian, an identity that dovetailed with Georgians’own national perceptions and goals. In fact before 1917, native Acharans fiercely rejected Georgian identity. Here and elsewhere, Pelkmans points to the crucial role of the USSR in post-socialist identities, and convincingly refutes the idea of unchanged national and religious identities reemerging from “cold storage” after the Soviet collapse. He writes: “…the new [post-Soviet] era as an absolute new beginning [is] a view that violates the complex flow of memory, community, and culture in which people live their lives. Instead of assuming that forms of identity miraculously survived Soviet rule, or that they were willfully invented after the Soviet collapse … it is crucial to analyze how these forms of identity were shaped and modified to fit changing social and political contexts. The Ajarian tions, and the impact of political and economic changes on the local Acharan population in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. He writes: “A view from the border highlights the contradictions and imperfections in the grand narratives of nations and states. It shows that the rhetoric of the state becomes problematic at its edges and that along borders nationalizing policies are regularly defeated, ignored or redirected…. The changing balance and interlocking of these characteristics...