Selected publications: Forthcoming. (editor). Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms, and the Technologies of Faith. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Forthcoming. “Powerful documents: Passports, passages, and dilemmas of identification on the Georgian – Turkish border.” In: Asymmetry and Proximity in Border Encounters, edited by J. L. Bacas and W. Kavanagh. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
2008. (with Julie McBrien). “Turning Marx on his Head: Missionaries, ‘extremists,’ and archaic secularists in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan,” Critique of Anthropology 28 (1): 87-103.
2007. “‘Culture’ as a tool and an obstacle: Missionary encounters in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(4): 881-899.
2006. Defending the Border: Identity, religion, and modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
2006. Asymmetries on the ‘religious market’ in Kyrgyzstan. In The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe, Chris Hann et al, pp. 29-46. Berlin: Lit Verlag.
2005. On transition and revolution in Kyrgyzstan. Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology, issue 46, pp. 147-57.
2003. Rural credit institutions in Kyrgyzstan: A case-study in the practice of transition aid. In: Transitions, Institutions and the Rural Sector, Max Spoor (ed.). Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, pp. 183-195.
2003. The social life of empty buildings: Imagining the transition in post-Soviet Ajaria, Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology, issue 41, pp. 121-136.
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Lenin still standing, rather wobbly, in southern Kyrgyzstan
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Mathijs Pelkmans is a specialist in the anthropology of the Caucasus and Central Asia. He has conducted field research in Georgia and in Kyrgyzstan. His first major fieldwork was conducted from 1999-2001. During that time he worked on the anthropology of borders, tracing the social biography of the iron curtain between (Soviet) Georgia and Turkey. By documenting changing patterns of everyday life along the border, he demonstrated why the demise of the iron curtain was unexpectedly accompanied by a hardening of social and cultural boundaries. His recent fieldwork, conducted in 2003-2004 in Kyrgyzstan, dealt with the religious dimension of post-socialist change. Focusing on the activities of protestant missionaries in a Muslim-majority context, this project studied the dynamics of conversion and re-conversion, and analyzed concomitant reconfigurations of the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’. Dr Pelkmans received his PhD at the University of Amsterdam. Before joining the LSE, he held a postdoctoral position at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, was editor of ISIM Review, and taught at the University of Amsterdam and University College Utrecht. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled What happened to atheism? Faith, doubt, and disillusion in a post-Soviet mining town, based on his research in Kyrgyzstan. 