Mathijs Pelkmans calls his book a “biography” of the border between the small south eastern autonomous republic of Achara – 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-eastern Turkey 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 of Achara, 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 populations, 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 – that borders tend to escape state control and therefore attract the close attention of power centers – are crucial in understanding the nature of the divide between (Soviet) Georgia and Turkey…” (P. 215).
An anthropologist who visited the region four times for field study and who, crucially, knows the history of Soviet-Turkish and Georgian-Turkish relations, Pelkmans comes up with some fascinating insights into the formation of social and cultural identities on the physical margins of the Soviet and, subsequently, Georgian state.
His work describes the reality of border life for the local population from the 1920s on, and adds subtleties missed by much of the “border” literature. It reminds historians that Soviet order and its impact on identity was inconsistent both in policy and results. The paradoxes he explores include the unexpected impact of the Soviet Union on the reinforcement of Georgian national and religious myths in Achara. 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 pro-Western 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 paradox is that its inhabitants did not on the whole “return” to pre-Soviet identities…” (Pp. 218-219).
Pelkmans’ observations on the impact of open borders after 1991 (in fact, border crossings eased before Georgian independence), reveal another paradox. Contrary to expectations that an open border would lead to the reestablishment of old cultural and familial connections, including in Sarpi’s case the resumption of village ties, the opposite happened. New cultural barriers were created as Muslim Georgians and Sarpians, facing exclusion by the official nationalism of the new Georgian state, defined their fellow Muslims across the border as the “other.” The border was open, but long separation of communities, the impact of Soviet mythology and values, combined with the new social and economic divisions brought on by capitalism, increased the gap between estranged neighbors. A newly politicized Georgian nationalism led to what Pelkmans refers to as a “fortification of identity.” Among the Acharan borderland population “a contemporary divide that in some regards was more impermeable than the Iron Curtain” emerged (P. 224). This conclusion challenges some of the assumptions in Western “border” literature that borderlands are primarily regions of hybridity and ambiguity. Borderlands are also places of rigidity.
Pelkmans’ work could be enlightening to many constituencies – to Georgian academics who continue to reject the Acharan Muslim legacy as some sort of aberration; to scholars of nationalism who argue that after the collapse of the USSR a pre-Soviet national identity was restored by default, ignoring Soviet modifications to such identities; and to scholars of “border” literature who forget that borders, like the internet, are places where divisions harden as much as soften. Pelkmans concludes by reminding us: “The fortification of identity offers an important antidote to views of hybridity and intermingling on and across state borders. It suggests that in a world characterized by transnational contact and the absence of grand ideological divides between states, it may be cultural boundaries that become more rigid and less permeable. Ironically, in a situation where the border regime relaxed and cold war enmities ceased to exist, the differences between people on both sides of the border did not diminish. Instead, the former cold war border became more ‘truly’ a divide between Islam and Christianity, Georgians and Turks, and Asia and Europe” (P. 224).
My criticisms of the book are minor. It is unclear, for example, whether the author interviews his subjects in Russian or Georgian. Pelkmans’ clarifications of potentially ambivalent translation suggests that he conducted them in Russian. This could have significance in terms of who is interviewed (I suspect Acharians in the hinterland had a weak knowledge of Russian). For interviewees, the nuances of Georgian, especially if Russian is poorly spoken, may convey a different meaning than Russian. Finally, despite a concluding section that deals with post-socialist developments, there is little attention to the peculiar political context of Achara compared to the rest of Georgia. Achara was controlled by an authoritarian leader with its own internal border with the rest of Georgia. Under Abashidze, many Georgians told me it was easier to cross the Georgian-Turkish border than the Acharan-Georgian one. Could it be that the restrictions on this Georgian-Acharan border and the fear of separation from the rest of the country, had its own peculiar impact on the debate about Acharan identity? It should be explored in a book about Acharan borders. However, these are minor criticisms of a splendid book that despite its focus on a small corner of a small country, has significantly broader lessons for students of nationalism, identity formation, and borderlands. This is a fascinating read for all interested in Caucasian identity and politics.