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Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia. By Florian Miihlfried. EASA Series 24. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. xiv, 248 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Tables. Maps. $95.00, hard bound.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Tusheti region in highland Georgia, this book explores how local groups on the margins of the state identify with it. Examining questions of belonging and mobility, Florian Miihlfried aims to show how citizenship is not something that is only "at home" in urban settings but can also be detected in rural areas by focusing on the particularities of landscape, history, and society. Due to the various state policies that have historically affected people's livelihoods in this region, Tusheti proves a fruitful location for such an endeavor. Miihlfried highlights the importance of not generalizing Soviet rural development policies and argues for a perspective that examines Soviet regional developments in situ. He achieves this through a thorough depiction of different time periods in Tusheti, from the early days of the Soviet Union to the present. In doing so, he convincingly shows how the end of the Soviet Union was by far the only event entailing ruptures in living and working patterns for Tushetians. Rather, it was merely one link in a succession of events. He argues that this renders politics something that is experienced locally as happening to people and citizenship as something that is experienced as fate. The state was thus something that "came and went" (64), and Tushetians have consequently had to rely on flexible modes of citizenship—a creative and situationally enacted combination of risk minimization and profit maximization. Miihlfried notes in the introduction that he was "unconvinced that citizenship does not have a meaning" for his informants, despite their being reticent about this (15). Although he carves out the possible meanings of citizenship in Tusheti in interesting ways, it would have been interesting to also know more about why they were so reticent and also how perceptions of the state differed between individuals. A more "experience-near" approach to, and analysis of, "being" might have captured this more succinctly. For instance, it is somewhat questionable whether data in the form of a questionnaire can fully unfold the "cognition and experience of citizenship," as is done in chapter 3. Although the statistics presented are enlightening in terms of how people rank the importance of places (whether state institutions, shrines, or landscapes), they do not help explain how these places are experienced on a daily basis by individual members of the community. This methodology thus seems a little too schematic for its intended purpose Despite this, the book is pioneering in its depiction of highland Georgia—an area that has so far received little attention in English-language academic publications— particularly in relation to the role and importance of shrines. Further, it presents an interesting outline of recent historical changes in the model of the state in the Republic of Georgia, from a federalist folk model to a neoliberal pragmatic model to an essentialist and nationalist Orthodox one. The text draws extensively on classic works of theoretical criticism on citizenship and the state, such as those by James Scott and Aihwa Ong. It is, however, through its meticulous historical and ethnological account that the book gains its main merits. As such, it will be of great value to any student or scholar researching the mountain regions of the Caucasus.