Mathijs Pelkmans is senior lecturer in anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is a specialist in the anthropology of the Caucasus and Central Asia and has conducted extensive field research in Georgia and in Kyrgyzstan. He is author of Defending the Border: Politics, Religion, and Identity in the Republic of Georgia (Cornell UP, 2006) and editor of Conversion after Socialism: Dirsuptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith in the Former Soviet Union (Berghahn, 2009) and, most recently, of Ethnographies of Doubt: Faith and Uncertainty in Contemporary Societies (I.B.Tauris, in press).