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February 21, 2005
What is a state?
In 2000, Dov Lynch and Eric Baudelaire travelled through the breakaway, ex-Soviet states of Transdniestria, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh, asking themselves, "What is a state? Lines on a map, or the will and identity of a people? An act of imagination, the consequence of a series of actions, or acceptance by other states?"
This was the result. The journal is inevitably an absurdity harvest, infused with that same awareness, which recurs in all Soviet bloc travel narratives, that "Rules that govern the rest of the world simply don't apply here." It's also a thoughtful account of the arbitrariness of "statehood".
Photograther Eric Baudelaire's visual narrative of Abkhazia.
Posted by michele at February 21, 2005 4:25 PM