Abstract
Martin Frederiksen provides an intimate and compassionate look at the lives of underprivileged young men in the Republic of Georgia. Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia is primarily based on Frederiksen’s dissertation fieldwork, carried out in the city of Batumi in the Ajara region of Georgia during the 2008–2009 academic year. Seeking to understand how the young men who came of age during the chaotic decade following the dissolution of the USSR saw their future, the author followed the lives of 30 men, 18 to 25 years of age, who struggled to fit into the new way of life in Batumi and were either underemployed or unemployed. He is particularly interested in the tension between a rapidly changing social world and individual experiences of those who feel alienated from this material and societal transformation.
Georgian society was profoundly challenged by the onset of insecurity and poverty after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Much like elsewhere in the former USSR, the 1990s were a period of turmoil in which the extant foundations of political, social, and economic organization were shattered while crime and inequality flourished. In resource-poor Georgia, the suffering was compounded by Russian-backed separatist insurgencies in the regions of Ossetia and Ingushetia. While the Ajara region, in which Frederiksen’s research took place, did not experience direct military conflict, it enjoyed de facto autonomy from Tbilisi and was ruled by a local strongman implicated in multiple abuses of power. After President Saakashvili came to power in 2003, Ajara was brought back under the control of the national government. At the same time, efforts to rebuild and modernize the region got underway, entailing ambitious reform and physical reconstruction wherein both social organization and material artifacts of the past were being deliberately overwritten under new leadership eager to prove that the Soviet, as well as the post-Soviet, era had been left far behind. This drastic transition left groups of people unable to navigate the new landscape and possessing few prospects for the future.
The book is organized around three empirical sections. In the first section, we learn about the ways in which the past continued to influence the young men in the study. Importantly, for them, the past was not the Soviet period but rather the wild and lawless decade after the collapse of the USSR. Frederiksen uncovers a lingering presence of multiple legacies (practices, value orientations) of this period that was officially labeled as having already passed; he refers to these legacies as “afterlives.” The second section describes the ways in which the men in the study acted toward the future by focusing on their hopes and dreams as well as the barriers they encounter. The final empirical section sheds light on the way in which the future (defined elsewhere) contributes to experiences of marginality among men who felt that they did not belong in the future “symbolically proposed by the government through the various building projects” (p. 149). According to Frederiksen, the future “haunted” the present of his informants by imbuing it with both promising and threatening possibilities.
Throughout the book, Frederiksen uses the concept of “temporal marginality” to describe the experience of young men lacking clear pathways to a viable adulthood. According to the author, temporal marginality experienced by his informants goes beyond the categories of place, race, class, or religion and was primarily a result of the government-led efforts to define the past and the future. Men in the study described the feeling of not belonging to the dominant societal domains in their rapidly changing homeland. In these conditions, close friendships between young men—brotherhoods—provided the much needed firm ground in an otherwise unstable and insecure environment: “something durable to counter surrounding societal changes” (p. 172).
Frederiksen argues that concepts such as haunting, afterlives, and temporal marginality provide helpful alternatives to the more commonly used foci of class, ethnicity, education, social status, and so on. Yet, reading about the lives and experiences of the young men in his study, it is hard not to wonder whether their situation is indeed best understood through the proposed lens of temporal marginality as opposed to social class, education, and/or ethnic background. In other words, are these men feeling marginalized from the society around them due to “the tension between subjective and societal time” or is this phenomenon of marginalization really a result of their locations within the stratification system and the opportunities/limitations associated with them? Although the author writes that it was difficult to place his respondents “within a particular class or social background” (p. 173), this contradicts his own depictions of the majority of his subjects as sharing the experience of under- or unemployment, lack of advanced education, and perpetual shortage of money. That underprivileged youth experience a sense of profound marginalization is hardly unique to Georgia or even the post-Soviet region as a whole. Likewise, violence and substance abuse plague young men in impoverished communities the world over. The case for the salience of “temporal marginality” per se would be stronger if the author demonstrated that it affected young men from different walks of life rather than just the underemployed high school graduates who made up the majority of his informants.
Frederiksen’s account of the lives of young men in Batumi should be of interest to readers seeking to understand the situation of youth in post-Soviet societies, as well as to anyone with an interest in the Republic of Georgia or the entire Caucasus region. In addition, by focusing his attention on men rather than women, the author contributes to the emerging scholarship on the frailty of masculinity in post-Soviet societies.