Prof. Mathijs Pelkmans

Phone
+43 1 51581-6500

E-Mail
mathijs.pelkmans(at)oeaw.ac.at

 

Biography

Mathijs Pelkmans received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2003. He subsequently moved to the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for his Postdoc, and thereafter settled more long-term at the London School of Economics, department of anthropology, where he was promoted to Professor in 2020. Geographically his research has moved between the Caucasus and Central Asia. His first monograph, based on his PhD fieldwork in Georgia, was published as Defending the Border: Identity, Religion, and Modernity in the Republic of Georgia (Cornell UP, 2006), and traced the social biography of the Iron Curtain. His second monograph was based on long-term fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan. It was published as Fragile Conviction: Changing Ideological Landscapes in Urban Kyrgyzstan (Cornell UP, 2017) and explored the fate of religious and secular ideologies in contexts of intense uncertainty. His recent writings have focused on the instability of knowledge, as seen in his (co-)edited volumes Ethnographies of Doubt (2013), ‘Wilful Blindness’ (2020, with J. Bovensiepen), and How People Compare (2022, with H. Walker), and is central in his ongoing work on missions, mediations, and mistrust. It is this topic that he is now further exploring at the IFI, where he leads the project group Circulating Knowledge in the Caucasus. 

 

Main Research Focal Points

Current Projects

Selected Publications

Monographs

  • 2017. Fragile Conviction: Changing ideological landscapes in urban Kyrgyzstan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • 2006. Defending the Border: Identity, religion, and modernity in the Republic of Georgia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Edited books and special issues

  • 2023. How People Compare, edited by M. Pelkmans and H. Walker. London: Routledge. LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology.
  • 2020. ‘Willful Blindness’, special issue edited by J. Bovensiepen and M. Pelkmans. Critique of Anthropology. 40 (4): 387-507.
  • 2013. Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and uncertainty in contemporary societies, edited by M. Pelkmans. London: I.B. Tauris.
  • 2009. Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, modernisms, and technologies of faith in the former Soviet Union, edited by M. Pelkmans. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Selected articles (peer reviewed)

  • 2025. ‘Capricious states and betwixt citizens across the Caucasus’, Caucasus Review 13: 79-80.
  • 2024. ‘Suspicion and evidence: On online truth seeking in times of Covid’, Social Anthropology. 33 (2): 1-19.
  • 2021. ‘Frontier Dynamics: Reflections on Evangelical and Tablighi missions in Central Asia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 63 (1): 212-241.
  • 2018 (with Damira Umetbaeva). ‘Stuff of Boundaries: Kyrgyz–Russian marriages and the actualization of ethnic difference, History and Anthropology 29 (5): 541-62.
  • 2018 (with Damira Umetbaeva). ‘Moneylending and moral reasoning on the capitalist frontier in Kyrgyzstan’, Anthropological Quarterly 91 (3): 1044-1069.
  • 2014. ‘Paradoxes of religious freedom and repression in (post-)Soviet contexts’, Journal of Law and Religion 29 (3): 436-446.
  • 2013. ‘Ruins of Hope in a Kyrgyz post-industrial wasteland’, Anthropology Today 29 (5): 17-21.
  • 2011. (with Rhys Machold). ‘Conspiracy Theories and Their Truth Trajectories’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology issue 59: 66-80.
  • 2010. ‘Religious crossings and conversions on the Muslim – Christian frontier in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 19 (2): 109-28.
  • 2009. ‘The transparency of Christian proselytizing in Kyrgyzstan’, Anthropological Quarterly 82 (2): 423-46.
  • 2009 (with Chris Hann). ‘Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam, nation-state and (post)socialism’, Europe-Asia Studies 61 (9): 1517-41.
  • 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.
  • 2003. ‘The social life of empty buildings: Imagining the transition in post-Soviet Ajaria’, Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology, issue 41: 121-36.