SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This epilogue summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book has offered a double-edged critique of transgressive sanctity. Rather than attempting to dismantle the ideological constellations that hold transgressive sanctity together, it examined the concept's visceral and verbal power. It explored transgressive sanctity's literary genesis while attending to the elements of its aesthetic and affective form that compel and inspire insurgents to sacrifice their lives. It engaged with how Chechen, Daghestani, Russian, Georgian, and Ossetian literature from the late tsarist and Soviet periods intertextually reconstituted the anticolonial jihad in cultural memory. It concludes that transgressive sanctity reinscribes sovereignty from the vantage points of the governed. In documenting the refashioning of violence by vernacular insurgency, Ranajit Guha has laid the groundwork for a form of dominance that is at once hegemonic and generated of freedom. In the Caucasus, as elsewhere in the world, transgressive sanctity calls on the subject to become the hero of his or her own existence, to authorize, and to revise his or her own fate. If transgressive sanctity can help extract from the violence of the colonial encounter a form of social life that substitutes for the state's coercion the agency of the colonized and violated, it will have fulfilled its function by rendering itself obsolete.