This book is an excellent example of thick anthropological description (after many months of on-site fieldwork) of the society of Ajaria, a southwestern seaside region of Georgia. Ajaria was an administrative autonomy within the Soviet Republic of Georgia for the most of the twentieth century. This autonomy was partly justified by the fact that Ajarians have been mostly Muslim (under Turkish influence) although remaining Georgian linguistically. This torn identity, complicated by the historical vicissitudes of the last century, makes the case extremely suggestive and anthropologically “tasty.”

The case of Ajaria is also suggestive for all who tackle the social scientific problématique of the border, famously proclaimed by Frederick Barth in the late 1960s. Ajaria is a border place in many senses: it is at a border between Islam and Christianity, between Georgian and non-Georgian, and between nation-states — initially the Russian and Ottoman Empires, then the Soviet Union and Turkey, and finally independent Georgia and Turkey. The book's primary merit lies in the “anthropology of borderland” it presents.

State borders and ethnic boundaries may be different phenomena; they are indeed interactive, they may converge and diverge, and even create each other, as Pelkmans aptly shows. The ethnic boundary of a “Turkisized” people hints at the political games that were involved in creating Russo-Ottoman and Soviet-Turkish state borders. Then the iron curtain-style Stalinist border fixed in the mid-1930s divided the Laz ethnos into two impermeable parts (one in Soviet Georgia and another in Turkey), thus creating two subgroups whose difference outlasted the Soviet Union. Finally, new post-Soviet state borders were drawn, thus instigating an identity quest among Ajarians either to join the “Georgian Eastern Orthodox nation” (a mainstream tendency) or to develop Turkey-oriented Islamic sensitivity (a minor tendency).

In each of these cases, we see how political and ethnic borders create and question each other. Borders can both connect and divide, states Pelkmans, emphasizing connections rather than divisions in the “creole cultures” of borderlands. This is, once again, a response to the pre-Barthian dominant vision of the nation-state as a clearly defined and circumscribed “container.” Barth's thinking remains a tuning fork, a thesis-to-be-tested for Pelkmans' entire study. The Soviet case, with its iron-like closed border, he argues, is not exactly in line with this Barthian thesis. Pelkmans shows how “cultural stuff” has been mobilized and imbued into Ajarian minds and lives by Soviet ideological practices, through the “invented” traditions of stretching ethnic history. The post-Soviet Georgian identity policy moved in a different direction, emphasizing Christianity and “mobilizing the cultural stuff” in new ways. The entire study eventually suggests that, contrary to, or in a twist of, the Barthian thesis, “cultural stuff” certainly matters. I think it to be a wise, golden mean position that partly bounds the excesses of the constructivist, imaginative emphasis centered on the border as such.

Another merit of Pelkmans' work is its historical sensitivity. The author carefully deconstructs layers of meanings, leading back to remote historical threads. He works with the layers of myths in two ways: he demystifies them, and he analyzes the effects of myths on people's minds. A particular success in this sense is Pelkmans's interpretation of the impact of the Soviet period. He positively rejects a rather common idea of the “deep-freeze” — namely, that cultures “frozen” under Soviet rule automatically came back after the Soviet Union collapsed. The Soviet Union was not just a senseless interregnum, just historical “brackets” now “closed” (p. 10, 58, 218); he even rejects the term “postsocialism” if it means the oblivion of socialism (p. 8). Pelkmans provides solid evidence of how Soviet cultural “stuff” did define ethnic identities and the life and cultural transmission of a few generations. The Soviet period was not jut an “interlayer.” It was something that did create today's Laz culture (in Sarpi village, one of the sites of the author's fieldwork). Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Pelkmans shows that we must neither underrate nor exaggerate the effects of Soviet socialism while deconstructing opposite myths, such as a myth of homo sovieticus as a sustainable and general cultural type.

Religion is the main focus of the second part of the book. Pelkmans deconstructs the post-Soviet “religious revival” myth, which has been promoted by policy-makers and engaged scholars alike. He clearly shows how the Soviet period had “radically altered” the role of religion and its relation to the concepts of “state” and “nation” (pp. 109–110). The author then shows how Ajarians have moved from Islam to Christianity to fit into the new nation-project of Orthodox Georgia. They do not “revive” the real past of their Turkisized Muslimhood, but they do “revive” an imagined past of their “primordial Christianity.” Once again, the author shows how the Soviet impact was crucial: Muslim identity was downplayed in the Soviet era; Islam became a private refuge and a cultural “inner bottom” paradoxically compatible with the Soviet rule, while after the Soviet Union dissolved, Islam lost its function and again became repressed, this time by the grand narrative of the Christian Georgia (p. 121). Pelkmans studies personal conversion stories (pp. 144–155) and concludes that in this new situation, Ajarian Islam seems not to be able to provide a comprehensive alternative worldview (especially for young people), which is the main reason behind the dominant trend of Christianization.

Finally Pelkmans moves from religion to other, more material attributes of his borderland culture. He considers commodities such as shoes and clothes and cars, engaging himself in an essay on what I would call “consumer metaphysics.” He shows how commodities may be “evil” or “sacred” depending on their provenance and their connection to social and cultural realities (p. 184ff). He then moves to a consideration of buildings, providing a sort of “metaphysic of construction” that he labels “the social life of empty buildings.” The construction of mighty, prestigious buildings, which frequently remain empty, has become a symbolic investment commonly interpreted by Ajarians in terms of power and social semiotics. These final chapters complete a more microscopic picture of the previous chapters with a wider view on the socioeconomic and political development of Ajaria within Georgia, with inevitable discussions of “transition,” a concept Pelkmans calls in question as an ideological and thus distorting reality.

Overall, Pelkmans's book, with its thorough methodological self-analysis, empirical validity, wide comparativist erudition, and theoretical thinking, is a good example of a solid research of the extremely rich and complex Caucasus area — a paradise, if still understudied, for social and cultural anthropology.