Although much has been said for modern principles of self-determination, there is often comfort and security in established, even externally imposed, sources of self-identity. If the Soviet Union was a prison of nations, then it was—whether imperfectly, perniciously, or opportunistically—also an answer to national questions that might otherwise have been solved with more difficulty and less satisfaction. In the aftermath of the USSR efforts to ask and to answer those questions have sometimes been coupled with semicompulsory expectations of self-determination that have threatened to substitute one form of repressive identification for another. Nowhere has this led to greater problems than in the Caucasus.

Drawing upon Heraclitus (a stranger neither to the southeastern Caucasus nor to conflict), Hegel famously claimed (and G. E. Moore famously denied) that all things are defined by what they are not; that is, things derive their “internal” content through their “external” contrasts with other things. Rejecting Hegel's metaphysics, Marx gambled on his vision of mass self-invention. Gambling on Marx, the Soviet Union turned narcissistically inward on itself. The chips, when they fell, were the fragments of the shattered mirror.

Yet heaps of tarnished shards are an anthropologist's stock in trade, and it has fallen to Mathijs Pelkmans to pick up the chips and work them into a rather colorful collage of contemporary identities in the historically ambivalent southwestern region of Georgia, known as Ajaria. Pelkmans traces the history of identities in this region, finding that whereas these identities were relatively fluid, even mutually inclusive, a century ago, they have undergone a subsequent reification that sometimes issues in rather assertive juxtapositions, even when these are borne by the same individual. For example, the book opens with the progress of a corpse on a tripartite, funereal odyssey that was compartmentally negotiated in spatial, temporal, and confessional terms. Those who knew the deceased were incapable of arriving at a coherent conception of his identity at the end of his life, suggesting that the task of self-identity had also outlived the deceased. Of course, the elaborately self-deceptive features of the funeral and the challenges that they raised, less for the deceased than for the survivors, are a metaphor for the demise of the Soviet Union and the issues of identity that it has raised all across its former breadth, from one corner to another.

Not that Pelkmans has failed to find a particularly interesting corner. Ajaria appeals from its subtropical agriculture and obscure national groups to its centuries of tension between Orthodox and Islamic faiths and its proximity to the Cold War curtain that divided East from West. This was literally a curtain in Ajaria. Pelkmans explains that at the height of Soviet repression, people along the border suffered persecution if they were suspected of passing information to those on the Turkish side through the illuminated windows of their homes at night. Blackout curtains consequently became a matter of survival, and many homes simply bricked up windows facing south. Yet while those bricked windows were iconic confinement, they were also solutions to a cluster of identity issues. When the Ajarians could not gaze out of their own windows toward the homes of their neighbors, they were unable to consider the differences in the contents of their homes or the contents of their heads. Ironically, as Pelkmans explains, the “fall of the iron curtain and renewed movement across the border went hand in hand with increased attempts to defend ideas about self and homeland” (p. 215). He contrasts this observation with “the currently fashionable approach to treat the two sides of a border as an organic whole that differs from the respective centers” (p. 216), as a “zone of interaction rather than a divide.”

Yet whereas such overlapping entities are undeniable in many parts of the world (the El Paso–Juarez metropolis, in this author's experience), Pelkmans suggests that they are at least partly inapplicable along post-Soviet borders. Having been freed for so long from efforts to define themselves in relation to one another, the primary task is now the construction of these differences. Now that the border is being dismantled, it is being defended, as Pelkmans puts it, all the more jealously. For him, the “disappearance of these ‘Soviet certainties’ meant that people were forced to reconsider the very basis of self. When religion returned to the public sphere, when ethnic kin from across the border appeared on one's doorstep, and when ideas about progress were challenged by the realities of post-socialist change, combinations of identities became increasingly problematic” (p. 223). He adds that in the midst of new uncertainties, “the inhabitants created new divides, fortified them with stereotypes, and solidified them with ethnicized versions of culture and religion. These processes had the paradoxical effect of creating a temporary divide that in some regards was more impermeable than the Iron Curtain had been” (p. 224).

Now this is the point that Marx missed: We cannot single-handedly invent ourselves from the inside. Rather, as Hegel understood, we derive an internal content only through our contrasts with all that is around us. We become what we are only by being what we are not.

The Iron Curtain turned out to be a looking glass. The identities of those who stood inside it were artificially rigid and two-dimensional. Now that the Iron Mirror has shattered, it is up to those same inhabitants to establish real multidimensional identities that are drawn and developed through contrast and conflict with those along all of the webwork of boundaries and connections that dynamically define and redefine every man and woman.

While Pelkmans explores these and other implications of his study, the reader sometimes wishes that he did so at greater breadth and depth. His is the intimate, often unself-critical, methodology of an anthropologist. Though frequently engaging, his micromethodology sometimes seems to miss the point. Population surveys and electoral analyses are beyond the scope of his book, but there might have been some effort to show the points at which broader investigations (that incorporate such methodologies and that also place this micro-study within the context of broader regional developments) might productively have been connected to his work. Most strikingly, Pelkmans makes little effort to generalize his conclusions regionally, to the cases of Chechnya and Ingushetia, for example. Still, these are fairly minor concerns in a masterful work that will be of interest to every student of the Caucasus and the post-Soviet sphere.