This paper explores how the Russian occupation of the Georgian territory of South Ossetia disrupts local practices pertaining to death, burial and good afterlives.

The 2008 Russo-Georgian war and its aftermath caused the long-term displacement of thousands of ethnic Georgians from South Ossetia as well as highly precarious living conditions in the borderlands between Russian and Georgian controlled areas. Over the past decade, the construction of a hard, militarised “border” between the territories restricts movement and hinders displaced families and local village communities from accessing native places and people. This is not only so in terms of the concrete territories and contemporaries of “this world”, but also pertains to the territories and beings in “the other world”.

The paper will show how Russian rule is undoing the social and spatial connections between the world of the living and the world of the dead, by leaving ancestors and dead kin uncomfortably out of place: Families are prevented from visiting family graves, pay their respect, and fulfil obligations to their deceased kin. The dead must be buried in the wrong soil away from where they would naturally belong. Close relatives are prevented from reunification in the afterlife, etc.

By preventing proper relations between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the dominance exercised by occupation extends itself to the afterlife and threatens to undo senses of social continuity. However, it also fosters resistance and creative attempts at re-making it.

This article explores local experiences and consequences of Russian “borderization” and “creeping occupation” along the administrative boundary line (ABL) between occupied South Ossetia and Georgian-controlled territory. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in borderland villages, the focus moves beyond the immediate physical manifestations and geopolitical consequences and draws attention to the social effects produced by these practices. By examining the relationship between the specific political situation affecting livelihoods along the ABL and local notions of kinship and place as foundations of good lives and social continuity, the article unpacks the ways in which fundamental ambiguities and uncertainties characterizing the borderlands extend beyond the physical terrain and into intimate social relationships and practices. I conclude by arguing that in this context otherwise mundane notions of individual mobility, kinship obligations and ancestral place are infused with a sense of urgency, which takes on both existential and political significance.

This book brings together a strong and international team of linguists, historians, and social and political scientists renowned for their expertise on North and South Caucasus. Their contributions paint a compelling picture of the region’s contested past and highlight some of the enduring challenges still confronting it. Taken together, the ten chapters of the book enhance our understanding of the region’s ancient languages, shed light on historical events of crucial significance, and uncover mechanisms behind political conflict and cooperation in the tinderbox that is the Caucasus.

Bok review: Boundaries of Displacement: Belonging and Return among Forcibly Displaced Young Georgians from Abkhazia Minna Lundgren Östersund: Mittuniversitetet 2016, 168 sider. ISBN 9789188025807

Georgian Portraits chronicles everyday life in the Republic of Georgia in the decade that followed the Rose Revolution of 2003. Recent anthropological developments argue for the use of “afterlives” as an analytical notion through which to understand processes of socio-political change. Based on a series of portraits, Martin Demant Frederiksen and Katrine Bendtsen Gotfredsen employ the theory of social afterlives to examine the role of revolution in the formation of a modern Georgia. The book contributes to a deeper understanding of life in the aftermath of political reform, depicting the hopefulness of the Georgian population, but also the subsequent return to political disillusionment which lead them to a revolution in the first place.

This article connects a specific generational experience of having been dispossessed of former social status and political influence to suspicious theories of conspiracies and hidden connections. Th rough ethnographic cases from Georgia I argue that while acting as an explanatory framework for the personal experience of being economically and politically dispossessed, conspiracy theorizing may also work as an everyday means of reappropriating a morally meaningful social identity through the mirroring of a general form of political rhetoric and power. The theories analyzed in the article draw on socially and culturally recognizable registers and tap into a general atmosphere of suspicion and opacity in which mistrust of official accounts and rhetoric is reasonable and appealing. They thus work as a means of repacking generational and economical marginality into a broader framework that is of concern to the wider community and may be seen to represent an effort of reclaiming a moral high ground and being reinscribed into wider social and national domains.

The chapter explores the formative relationship between perceptions of macro-politics and everyday micro-politics in the Republic of Georgia. “Politics” in the Georgian context, I suggest, may be understood as a grey zone that is simultaneously, in emic terms, considered highly uncertain, immoral, and external to ordinary life and yet, analytically speaking, formative of everyday concerns and micro-political interactions. I discuss different aspects of perceptions of politics as opaque and inaccessible and the consequences this bear for people’s engagement and disengagement with their socio-political surroundings. I argue that due to a profound lack of trust in public institutions and political personae everyday social and economic security is pursued ‘invisibly’ through personal networks, connections and informal transactions. ‘Invisibly’, in the sense that these connections are often known only to the people involved – at least as characterized by the perceived outsider. Finally, I propose that everyday responses to political opacity and uncertainty, in the end, contribute to their reproduction in perception and experience. That is, the idea of public macro-politics as being opaque and uncertain, and the ways in which citizens appropriate and act towards this idea, in the end, produces and reproduces political practice as such. Micro-politics – maintaining and relying on informal networks and connections – is simultaneously a response to an uncertain macro-political reality and the continuing production and confirmation of this reality across socio-political scale.

In contemporary Georgia and beyond, nostalgia for the Soviet past is often ridiculed and dismissed as a reactionary wish to turn back time. In this article, however, I explore generational nostalgia as temporal displacement of present political struggles. Drawing on life story interviews with middle-aged and elderly people in the provincial town of Gori, I argue that nostalgic longings may be understood as active attempts to presence personal pasts and futures that have publicly been rendered absent by an official rhetoric and practice that explicitly rejects the Soviet past. From this perspective, post-Soviet generational nostalgia temporally connects several dimensions of absence: the experience of one’s personal past being publicly cast as void; a perceived lack of social security, influence, and significance in the present; and a dynamic whereby these two dimensions render former dreams and visions for the future obsolete.