Professor Mathijs Pelkmans

Mathijs Pelkmans is a specialist in the anthropology of the Caucasus and Central Asia. His first major fieldwork was carried out from 1999-2001. During that period, he focused on territorial borders, tracing the social biography of the iron curtain between (Soviet) Georgia and Turkey. By documenting changing patterns of everyday life along the border, most extensively in Defending the Border (2006), he demonstrated why the demise of the iron curtain was unexpectedly accompanied by a hardening of social and cultural boundaries. His fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, conducted first in 2003-2004 and followed by shorter research trips until 2018, dealt with the religious and political dimensions of post-socialist change. Focusing on the trajectories of militant secularism, nationalism, and both Christian and Islamic missionary movements, this project studied the making and unmaking of conviction, and analysed concomitant reconfigurations of the 'secular' and the 'religious' in a 'post-atheist' Muslim-majority context. Over the past decade, he has published extensively on the shadowy sides of knowledge and belief, such as in the monograph Fragile Conviction (2017) and the (co-)edited volumes Ethnographies of Doubt (2013), ‘Wilful Blindness’ (2020), and How People Compare (2022). Recently having relocated his primary research area back to the Caucasus, he is currently developing a long-term project entitled Trading Truths in the Caucasus: Missionaries, Diplomats, and Spies.

Expertise

Caucasus (Republic of Georgia); Central Asia (Kyrgyz Republic); border studies; historical anthropology; methodology; Islam and Christianity; sociology of knowledge.