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CHAPTER 1 Overview A lthough his hair was turning gray and his lungs were failing him, Emil was only twenty years old when we met. Physically he was aging too quickly, but socially he was unable to become a grown man. The criminal underworlds that dominated his hometown of Batumi during his childhood in the 1990s had been officially declared a part of the past, but they continued somehow to remain a presence in Emil’s life. State-sponsored material reconstruction of his hometown was meant to be a reminder of the city’s bright future as a tourist resort, but this was not a future Emil believed himself to be part of. Although the past was “no more” and the future was “not yet,” both remained ghostly presences in Emil’s life that acted on his possibilities in the present. Emil, it seemed, was haunted by time, and he was not the only young man in Batumi living with this experience. This book explores the tension between subjective and societal time and the ways in which such tension creates experiences of marginality among under- or unemployed young men in Georgia. Through a focus on the interrelation between individual experience and the larger social matrix, theories of social suffering have examined how social processes and events become manifest as personal distress (e.g., Farmer 2005: 30; Csordas 1994). In what follows, I view this process from a temporal perspective by exploring how state processes of past and future making can interfere with individual experience. Modernity, writes Tim Edensor, is haunted in a particularly urgent fashion by what it has consigned to irrelevance or sought to make past but nonetheless continues to be present (Edensor 2005 [see also de Certeau 1998; Gordon 2008; Stewart 1996]). Yet just as social and political processes render some things past, they also create images of particular futures OvErvIEw • 7 that reside in everyday life. I argue that this double process generates experiences of exclusion in terms of individual experiences of divisions between those who belong to these futures and those who are seemingly stuck in pasts that are no longer seen as relevant. The term social marginality refers to situations where disadvantaged people struggle to gain access to resources and full participation in social life because they have been excluded—socially, economically, politically, or legally (Gurung and Kollmair 2005: 10). Marginality is often viewed within frameworks that either are societal, in terms of, for instance, religion, ethnicity , or gender, or are spatial, in terms of geographical peripheries (ibid. [see also Bourgois 2003; Bourgois and Schonberg 2009; Das and Poole 2004; Green 2005; Harvey 2000; Tsing 1993; wacquant 2008]). Through an ethnographic description of the everyday lives of a group of young men in Georgia, and their subjective experiences of time, this book argues for a notion of marginalization that moves beyond its spatial and social connotations to include a temporal aspect. To be sure, the past and the future are at all times part of the present. However, there are situations where “past” and “future” become distinct, even objectified, parts of the present, forcing some individuals to reflect on their own positions in society. This is exemplified by youth and sociopolitical change in Georgia. The Georgian Context The republic of Georgia has a long and turbulent history. Located in the southern Caucasus, it has been entangled in numerous conflicts either directly with or as a battleground between its neighbors, such as the Ottoman and russian empires, which either held or administered various parts of the country for several centuries (Mikaberidze 2007; Suny 1994). After a brief period of independence, Georgia became part of the Soviet Union in 1921. Despite its small size, Georgia contains linguistically and culturally diverse regions and is the home of a range of nationalities (Funch Hansen and Krag 2002; Nasmyth 2006; Suny 2009). The administrative legacy of the Soviet Union, which had defined levels of administrative autonomy according to ethnicity, created immediate fault lines as Georgia gained independence, causing armed conflict between nationalist and separatist groups throughout much of the 1990s. During Soviet times, the Soviet Socialist republic of Georgia contained two autonomous republics , Ajara and Abkhazia, and one autonomous oblast, South Ossetia. As Georgia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, local leaders in Abkhazia and South Ossetia sought to achieve independence from it (wheatley 2005). The ensuing political and armed conflicts remain unresolved to this day. Independence in Georgia did not entail just political changes, however , but social...

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