Ethnographic Examples Research Articles

Cell phones for the spirits: ancestor worship and ritual economies in vietnam and its diasporas

Religion has been thriving in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since đổi mới, the onset of market reforms in the late 1980s. Votive paper offerings, part of spiritual and economic well-being, play a crucial role in performing religious practices in the socialist country as well as among diasporic Vietnamese. In urban Hanoi, material objects made from paper are traded in marketplaces and later burned in the streets, in temples and pagodas, in private yards and other places on special occasions in order to be transmitted to the ancestors. In the past few years, the range of votive paper offerings produced, traded, and sent to the deceased has expanded to include new forms and references to new media. Drawing on recent debates in the role of media in religion and in particular on technologies of mediation, I focus on the use of votive paper offerings in the sociocultural context of the Vietnamese spirit world. I explore how new media and media technologies are embedded in multilayered processes of mediation in Vietnam and its diasporas. Taking religious practices of burning votive paper offerings as an ethnographic example, this essay aims to contribute to ongoing debates on popular religion and the sacred life of material goods in late socialist Vietnam, on its transnational ties, and on the entanglements between religion, media and materiality.

Governing youth as an aesthetic and spatial practice

The Graffiti Transformation Project was a City of Toronto, Canada sponsored programme funding ‘marginalised youth’ to paint over graffitied walls with public murals. I argue the imperatives driving the project extended beyond the reaches of policy concentrated on youth remediation, to include concerns of urban governance as a spatial and aesthetic problematic. I explore the manner in which practices of graffiti eradication and community mural making generated a set of calculations that were informed by globally mobile aesthetic norms and were, in turn, aesthetically informing. These calculations were used as an epistemological baseline for assessing, at least at the level of appearance, a host of urban problematics including Toronto’s desire to position itself globally as a functioning multicultural city. Turning to Jacques Ranciere’s thoughts about the space of political aesthetics, I draw on an ethnographic example to tease out a moment of aesthetic engagement in which youth artists interrupted the codes and practices associated with creative city entrepreneurialism to render another configuration of politics, another way of being social. Implications for broadening the scope of urban youth policy scholarship to include analysis of an aesthetic turn are considered.

The discrepancy between macro culture and individual, lived psychology: An ethnographic example of Chinese moral behavior

This paper seeks to explain the fact that particular cultural structures, artifacts, policies, and values often do not generate corresponding individual behavior/psychology that they are expected to produce. This discrepancy is troubling to the science of cultural psychology/sociocultural activity theory that seeks to understand the cultural organization of psychology; and it it is troubling to policy makers who strive to organize behavior (religious tolerance, diligent work habits, educational learning) through cultural structures and policies. I discuss two explanations for this discrepancy. One is that individual processes contradict cultural influences on psychology. The other explanation is that culture is multifaceted, and cultural factors other than an expected one, are influential in organizing a psychology. I illustrate the second explanation with a case study of moral behavior among Chinese elementary students. These youngsters disobeyed moral teaching in school because they were more influenced by outside influences, ranging from Chinese traditional relations called Guanxi, to modern commercial, privatizing practices. This paper uses individual variations and contradictions in cultural psychology to refine the epistemology and ontology of cultural theory.

Maya Intimacy with the Mountains: Pilgrimage, Sacrifice and Existential Economy

AbstractIn this paper, I present two very different and yet very similar ethnographic examples of mountain-related pilgrimage and sacrifice ritual performed by the present-day highland Maya. The question I ask is why the sense of sacredness, animation and power of the mountains endures among the traditionalist as well as Pentecostal Maya in spite of the extensive transformations of the world today. In so doing, I examine the native concept of the mountain not merely as a social or cultural representation, but as an expression of everyday lived experiences and existential relationships between people and the physical and spiritual world they inhabit. Finally, I argue that the experience of interaction, communication and intimacy between the Maya and their mountain deities can be best defined as a dynamic participation in the course of the world – an existential economy of ‘working the world’.

In/visible--In/secure

In the introduction to this theme section we attempt to disentangle the webs of in/visibility and in/security by tracing out their diverse iterations. We construct a series of conversations between two of the four key terms relevant to this discussion—security and insecurity, visibility and invisibility—as a means of analyzing the different ways in which their various articulations engage meaningfully in the production and reproduction of contemporary security cultures. Ethnographic examples accompany each iteration, drawn from the work of contributors to this theme section, as well as from other contemporary research. These examples not only illustrate the multiple and shift ing intersections of in/visibility and in/security in today’s security-minded world but also remind us of the unique contributions that anthropology can make to the critical study of security.

“Up” and “Down”. “Zomia” and the Bru of the Central Vietnamese Highlands

The 2009 publication of J. Scott’s epoch-making book, The Art of Not Being Governed. An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia initiated a long-standing debate about the ethnohistory of the Southeast-Asian Highlands (“Zomia”) and, more generally, about lowland-highland relationships, “nativeness”, state evasion, self-government, and “secondary primitivism”. This article joins the discourse based on one concrete ethnographic example, the Bru, a Mon-Khmer speaking dry-rice cultivator hill tribe in the Central Vietnamese Highlands. Using detailed ethnographic and ethno-historic data, it argues that the Bru are, if not “native”, at least the oldest known inhabitants of the area inhabited by them — a fact that does not contradict Scott’s deep insight concerning their state evasion.

A review of Indigenous tourism in Latin America: reflections on an anthropological study of Guna tourism (Panama)

ABSTRACT Using ethnographic examples from long-term anthropological fieldwork with members of the Guna communities of Panama, undertaken between 2003 and 2013, this paper critically evaluates the effects of tourism on Indigenous communities in Latin America from a new theoretical perspective. It focuses on how some Latin American Indigenous groups are developing a new responsible way of producing tourism, exemplified by the Guna case. The Guna sustainable tourism model is an illuminating example of good practices in Indigenous tourism. Tourism is now not viewed as a threat for Indigenous groups but as an opportunity for the empowerment and development of communities, thanks to the establishment of a new link between the local and global in tourism arenas. The author's research findings reveal that the success of this sustainable and responsible Indigenous tourism model is supported by (1) the local control of resource access; (2) Indigenous resistance to external sociocultural control and the resultant refusal to accept predatory tourism models; and (3) the resilience, adaptation and cultural capital of Indigenous groups. The paper provides suggestions for a more appropriate Indigenous tourism development and for a responsible “cultural fine-tuning” of their identities in the global context in which tourism is now managed.

A 600-year-old Boomerang fragment from Riwi Cave(South Central Kimberley, Western Australia)

A small fragment of a carefully shaped wooden artefact was recovered from Riwi Cave (south central Kimberley, Western Australia) during 2013 excavations. Directly dated to 670 ± 20 BP, analysis of the artefact’s wood taxon, morphology, manufacturing traces, use wear, and residues, in addition to comparison with ethnographic examples of wooden technology from the Kimberley region, allowed for the identification of the tool from which it originated: a boomerang. In particular, this artefact most closely resembles the trailing tip of a hooked boomerang, providing rare insights into the presence of these iconic fighting and ceremonial items in the Kimberley some 600 years ago.

Potters and herders at the southern edge of the Andean world: Risk management and mobility in Northwestern Mendoza, Argentina

This study addresses the risk-management activities of Andean pastoralists in northwestern, Mendoza. We compare data from one high-altitude site, Agua de la Cueva, located near a spring and an excellent hunting ground, and a domestic pit house at the site San Ignacio in a nearby mountain valley. We analyze data from roughly contemporaneous contexts dating to 1100–1400 cal BP. Osteometric measurements of camelid post-cranial bones and comparisons to modern camelids with multivariate statistics confirmed the presence of wild guanacos and vicuñas as well as castrated and uncastrated domestic llamas. Hence, this is one of the southernmost areas where Andean pastoralism was practiced. Petrographic analysis of pottery and comparisons to local geology suggest strong similarities between the sites. Similar fabrics suggest a closely-connected group that probably made effective and complementary use of these two environments. Previous studies have established the presence of vessels from the other side of the Andes indicating long-distance contacts between populations on both sides of the Andes. These contacts may have been made via caravans that included castrated llamas, which are ethnographically preferred among drovers. The possibility of caravans is a hypothesis to be tested with future research. Our data suggest these groups participated in seasonal and perhaps long-distance movements in addition to other activities such as hunting, herding, and storing food. The combination of these risk-management strategies provided a stable economic base for the potters and herders of northwestern Mendoza. This case can be broadly compared to better-known archaeological and ethnographic examples from other parts of the Andes.

Rethinking music's status as adaptation versus technology: a niche construction perspective

ABSTRACTIn this article I critique F. R. S. Lawson's evolutionary theorising about music that appeared in a recent issue of Ethnomusicology Forum. Moreover, I argue that asking whether music is an adaptation or technology, as Lawson does, artificially splits the interwoven, dynamic co-evolutionary forces at work. In my view, in cases of complex, dynamic co-evolution, the distinction between the ‘biological’ and the ‘cultural’ is undermined. I suggest that human musicality is one such example, calling into question the adaptation/technology distinction that frames Lawson's theorising about music. In place of that research framework, I offer a niche construction perspective, with reference to several brief ethnographic examples, and a ‘socio-cognitive niche’ picture of the evolution of music that takes seriously co-evolution and the project of developing empirically constrained, phylogenetically plausible scenarios for the evolution of music, in a general context of hominin evolution. I identify areas of research where ethnomusicology can weigh in on debates concerning the evolutionary career of music, including, importantly, data for phylogenetic modelling and analysis.

Experimental basis in lithic arrows usage and hafting at the end of the last glaciation in the French Alps

Abstract To identify lithic arrowheads from Prehistoric sites is very difficult because there is a great variability in their morphology and in the ways of hafting and throwing them. Variables playing in their use are numerous. Some experimental approaches try to explain traces in prehistorical lithic points by mean of paying attention at some of these variables. Many researchers have used morphological parameters to distinguish spear from arrowheads, showing which characteristics define the potential of each type of weapon in ethnographical examples. However, only an accurate use-wear analysis that pays attention on macro and micro-wear traces and which is grounded on systematically experimentation references, could help to understand their real context of use. Several attempts have yielded results about facts as the absence of traces in used projectiles, breakages at the end of hafts or some characteristics like macro-wear and micro-wear traces. Many of these results were obtained in laboratory conditions by shooting at artificial targets since only few experimentation approaches use animals. We present the results of experimental shots with bows of 53 exact copies of lithic pointed implements, arrows from the Mesolithic and Azilian layers from La Fru and Gerbaix Haut (from the Savoie and Haute Alpes regions in France) sites. Some of the results and conclusions of this experimental approach can be directly transferred to other contexts. Furthermore, methodological discussion is important for further experimental researches and archaeological interpretation.

Nqab’än Repetir las Mismas Palabras: Entextualization as Ideological Constraint in a Bilingual Kaqchikel Maya Wedding

NQAB’ÄN REPETIR LAS MISMAS PALABRAS: ENTEXTUALIZATION AS IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRAINT IN A BILINGUAL KAQCHIKEL MAYA WEDDING Timothy W. Knowlton Associate Professor, Anthropology Berry College This essay is about the decisions bilingual indigenous people in Latin America have to make when speaking authoritatively in public. Only in a few places in Latin America are indigenous languages co-official with a colonist language such as Spanish. Historically, indigenous languages often have been barred from official use in the contexts of government or religious institutions. So what happens when such formal restrictions are loosened? In what ways might centuries of linguistic inequality continue to affect how indigenous speakers perform authoritative discourse in their own communities? In this essay, I document the impact of historical processes of entextualization (Bauman 2004; Bauman and Briggs 1990) on contemporary code choice among bilingual speakers of a Mayan language in Guatemala. Contemporary paradigms in linguistic anthropology (e.g. Bauman 2004; Goodman et al 2014; Kuipers 2013) share with the work of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981; Vološinov 1973) an appreciation of how speakers use techniques like reported speech to lend authority to their discourse. For Bakhtin (1981:342) “the authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher.” One way speakers connect their discourse to this authoritative past is through what linguistic anthropologists call entextualization. Entextualization refers to the process by which discourse is rendered as a detachable unit, a text that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. Once an instance of discourse is entextualized, it can be repeatedly recontextualized within a potentially unlimited number of performances by a potentially unlimited number of persons. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the globe, Richard Bauman (2004) has illustrated how authoritative discourse can be enacted, diffused or challenged through how a speaker chooses to relate an entextualized “source utterance” within the “target utterance” of their spoken performance. Speakers often make choices like these in light of what their audience’s expectations of performance are understood to be (Bauman 2011). My own argument begins with the observation that entextualizing a source utterance presupposes a source code (language variant), at least C 2016 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/tla.12068 47 The Latin Americanist, March 2016 implicitly, as there is no such thing as a code-less utterance. Therefore, in bilingual interactions, code choice serves as a dimension of how one relates an entextualized source utterance with the target utterance being performed. In the Guatemalan case discussed here, I demonstrate that even when formal “high” forms of indigenous language discourse are used in an official context, certain authoritative words continue to circulate as Spanish because of their previous institutional histories of entextualization . Of course, the phenomenon of code choice itself has generated an immense literature across a wide range of grammatical and social settings (Gardner-Chloros 2009). But my narrowed focus here explores its relationship to entextualization in authoritative discourse. I argue that the long-held association of Spanish with governmental and religious institutions in Guatemala acts as an ideological constraint on bilingual speakers, even once legal constraints against using Mayan languages in this capacity have been formally abolished. I illustrate this through an ethnographic case study of an ecumenical civil wedding by bilingual Kaqchikel Maya in the Guatemalan community of San José Poaquil. Historical and Sociolinguistic Background The last several decades have witnessed the growth of ethnic social movements in numerous regions of Latin America (Jackson and Warren 2005; Wade 2010). In Guatemala, where over forty percent of the population is indigenous (Yoshioka 2010), speakers of twenty-one different Mayan languages have struggled to establish their rights as citizens and to valorize a pan-Maya ethnicity (Asociación Maya Uk’u’x B’e 2005; Cojtı́ Cuxil 1997; Fischer and Brown 1996; Montejo 2005; Warren 1998). The ethnographic case study presented here involves bilingual speakers of both Spanish and Kaqchikel Mayan languages in an overwhelmingly indigenous community. Before proceeding with the case study, it is important to first review the relevant historical and sociolinguistic data regarding Kaqchikel’s status relative to Spanish. Kaqchikel is a Mayan language currently...

Europe's failed ‘fight’ against irregular migration: ethnographic notes on a counterproductive industry

ABSTRACTDespite Europe's mass investments in advanced border controls, people keep arriving along the continent's shores under desperate circumstances. European attempts to ‘secure’ or ‘protect’ the borders have quite clearly failed, as politicians themselves increasingly recognise – yet more of the same response is again rolled out in response to the escalating ‘refugee crisis’. Amid the deadlock, this article argues that we need to grasp the mechanics and logics of the European ‘border security model’ in order to open up for a change of course. Through ethnographic examples from the Spanish-African borders, the article shows how the striving for border security under a prevailing emergency frame has generated absurd incentives, negative path dependencies and devastating consequences. At Europe's frontiers, an industry of border controls has emerged, involving European defence contractors, member state security forces and their African counterparts, as well as a range of non-security actors. Whenever another ‘border crisis’ occurs, this industry grows again, feeding on its own apparent ‘failures’. This vicious cycle may be broken, the article concludes, once policy-makers start curtailing the economies of border security underpinning it – yet the challenges are formidable as the industry retrenches along with the political response to the drama it has itself produced.

Processes of Dis–location and Re–location of Knowledge and Power

The paper explores the concept of nomadism as a transitory state in a flux of dynamic processes of transfer of knowledge; the figuration of nomadic subject is described in its political, material and epistemological potentials, making the erring/nomadic subject act as an unstable entity escaping capitalistic norms and hierarchical patterns of the contemporary. Three diachronic ethnographic examples are described to support the revolutionary potential of the nomadic/erring entities: the case of scientific and technological transfer enacted by the British Empire to the institutions of the Raj during colonial times; the politics of expansion of a western corporation that dislocates its Research D the complex patterns of meanings and disciplinary competences converging to define the idea of Anthropocene. All three cases represent instances of dislocation and relocation of knowledge and its fundamental patterns, and show how the condition of nomadism, both intended as material and metaphorical, enables the acquisition of new visions and new empowering perspectives.

Narrative Maps, Collective Memory, and Identities: Through an Ethnographic Example from the Southeast Aegean

Geography and the cognitive sciences provide much reference to the effect that maps are, in addition to tools for orienting oneself in space, special cognitive tools with which man stores and memorizes information. At the same time, as it has been demonstrated through the Greek paradigm among others, in traditional culture is the place, the specific place associated with certain memories and representations; is the experience of space (Kyriakidou-Nestoros 16) in conformity with a general phenomenological concept that was formerly postulated by M. Heidegger in his argument that spaces receive their being from locations and not from 'space' (Heidegger 152; cf. Basso 106).What interests me is how this experience permeates collectivity through narratives and how it ultimately, and largely, mediates the community's values in terms of a system. Here the concept of acquires the meaning of a representation of imprints on space-which means that we could talk about narrative maps, by way of introducing a new term. Although the term has been recently used in other contexts as well, I need to stress that I perceive it as a complex cognitive function for memorizing and mapping through bodily transfers and collective memory. At the other end, to what extent is a community able to preserve collective memory with its maps spontaneously, without imposing realms of memory? (see Nora). This paper thus links two distinct representational practices, maps and narratives, which are quite common and self-explanatory in their daily uses.The island and the community of reference for this connection is Lipsi, where long fieldwork enabled me to understand the local cosmology and conceive, through this ethnographic example, the concept of the narrative map as a mental mechanism for preserving collective memory and appropriating on an island whose inhabitants experience it-even nowadays, to a large extent-as a universe, inferring this way their worldview from their islanders' identity and homeland.2The project began in the summer of 2001, while I was still a research associate with the Academy of Athens, after a chance visit in the summer of 2000. What captivated my attention from the very first moment was the dominant representation in the island's life, which I initially saw as a direction on a road sign, and as a toponym through the opening ramp of the ship that took me to the island for the first time: Panaghia tou Charou (Holy Virgin of Charon).3 A working hypothesis had just taken form in my mind, if only as an outline. The fieldwork started one year later, with institutional support from the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre and a mission to collect folklore material, that is, everything. This gave me the possibility to introduce myself to the community, to gain contact with a relevant number of informants, and to register thick data, from the material culture to the wealth of the island that was always my main focus (see Papachristophorou, Myth, Representation, and Identity and MvS-oc, Aarpsia, Tavrer^rec).In the anthropological context of a system, the representations I perceived on various occasions were obviously interlinked through a dominant worldview and, certainly, cosmology. As I was recording folklore material I was also getting familiar with, and finally started to share, the small community's life;4 through an increasingly participant observation, I gradually grasped its logic through a coherent system of collective representations. The project was finally completed in the summer of 2014, when I was awarded an honorary citizenship of the island and after two books and a considerable body of papers on it had been published.The written testimonies on Lipsi were very few when I undertook my own research, while the levels of semiliteracy still remain high: the island's secondary education schools did not begin to operate until the mid-1980s (see Papachristophorou, Myth, Representation, and Identity 10). …

Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile by Diana Allan

Reviewed by: Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile by Diana Allan Estella Carpi Diana Allan, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. 328 pp. Although the literature on the Palestinian camp of Shatila in Lebanon is already vast, in Refugees of the Revolution, Diana Allan provides a very important and nuanced account of its political economy and the dwellers’ tactics of survival and moral resilience to longstanding oppression and exile. The everyday politics of the Shatila camp dwellers, which she foregrounds throughout six chapters, goes beyond right-to-return campaigns, institutional politics, and ritual public commemorations. The past of the Palestinian refugees, for Allan, is no longer something given once and for all and inherited, but rather a performative and situational process. The author challenges the popular assumption that advocating for the Palestinian cause has the limited meaning of supporting the “right to return” of the families of the refugees who were expelled from 1948 onward due to the foundation of the state of Israel (the so-called Nakba). In Allan’s argument, it is not merely the loss of Palestinian land that undermines people’s contemporary lives, but the destruction of their social fabric as well as the premature aging of young Palestinians. The Shatila camp embodies much more than a community of memory. Allan, from the introduction on, subtly contests how identity is commonly investigated through a retrospective lens, enfeebling collective memory as an efficacious explanation of the present needs and affects of Shatila’s dwellers. As a result, refugee agentivity is internationally framed as merely past-oriented and past-focused, meaning that, with no resolution of their past, the refugees’ present acts of resilience are rarely foregrounded. Through analysis of the camp economy of survival and subsistence, Allan shows how focusing on what I would call retrospective nationalism is ultimately [End Page 673] an immoral dismissal of the Palestinian cause, in that it limits the latter to a rhetoric of return and nationhood. By identifying in camp politics one of the sources of people’s tangible grievance, Allan marks the 1982 PLO’s (Palestinian Liberation Organization) departure from Lebanon as the end of its armed struggle for national liberation, as well as a critical point for a Palestinian laboratory of human rights in Lebanon. In Allan’s account, collective dispossession and return are still substantial components of the present condition of refugee-hood, but are also well combined with an everyday economy of memory and “post-memory”1 (Hirsch 2008)—that is, assuming the memory of earlier generations. In this regard, the first chapter engages with a critique of the international demand for commemoration, which turns into what Allan calls “historical claustrophobia” (2014:61), where Palestinians are unable to turn past memories into a solid basis for better futures. The outsider activist’s desire for a reified justice for Palestinians and what I would call an NGO-fed Nakba industry are questioned here. With a pleasantly balanced analysis of her own life in the camp and her interlocutors’ experiential accounts, Allan goes far beyond the arid binary of refugee victimization and agency. She does not intend to nullify the value of testimony, but rather contends that it should be reworked towards a future-oriented perspective. The snapshots she provides of local struggles over electricity, the Palestinaian performative culture of hope conveyed through sharing dream stories, and other similar mechanisms to cope with chronic uncertainty are all a checkmate to the imperative of nationalist aspirations dominating Palestinian diaspora narratives. Nonetheless, in the second chapter, the nostalgia for the days of the Palestinian Revolution (ayam ath-thawra) before the 1982 departure of the PLO from Lebanon, is not abstract, but, rather, attributes greater significance to the present pragmatics of survival in the camp. Nostalgia, reconsidered as a factor validating present tactics of subsistence, leads Allan to prioritize discussions on the economic safety nets woven by the community of residents, political parties, and NGOs, in their effort to assist the community. Ethnographic examples of these daily acts of mutual indebtedness are the hospitalization and burial of the elderly Shatila resident Umm ‘Ali, the attempt to heal the gastrointestinal infection of a neighbor...

On Critical Times: Return, Repetition, and the Uncanny Present

This article posits that the vernacular understanding of crisis as existing in a different sort of time needs to be mined for what it tells us about social perceptions of temporality. Using three ethnographic examples from Cyprus, I ask here what temporal features we may identify that lead our interlocutors to see certain periods as “times of crisis”. In particular, I propose a notion that I call the uncanny present to refer to a particular sense of present-ness produced by futures that cannot be anticipated. Crisis, I claim, becomes such precisely because it brings the present into consciousness, creating an awareness or perception of present-ness that we do not normally have.

A Windswept Archipelago: Stories of Perception, Time and Landscape in the Orkney Islands

This paper explores the interconnection between individual experience, place and time in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, an island now renowned for the generation and development of renewable energy. I consider and discuss three informant's comments on wind turbines in particular. Each ethnographic example I include expresses its own time-orientation. The aim is to draw out the complexities of the difference in perception and opinion experienced by each example, in order to discuss why and how difference in perception and experience of the landscape occurs and why it matters.

Multiculturalism in a Transnational Regional Community: EU Subsides and Cultural Heritage in Southeast Polad

The Bieszczady region of southeast Poland contains many traces of former multiethnic communities, and the transnational forces that destroyed them. With increasing frequency, the European Union logo marks EU involvement in cultural heritage projects throughout the region. In this article, I explore the interconnections among ethnicity, culture, and politics revealed in the ways Bieszczady residents make use of EU subsidies designated for the promotion of regional cultures. I argue that local agents cater to a vision of multiculturalism that bolsters EU values of cross‑border cooperation and tolerance for diversity, but they do so in pursuit of regional goals. Ethnographic examples show they want to increase regional pride and promote development of the regional tourist sector so that residents will feel less compelled to emigrate in search of employment. Although “transnational regional community” sounds like an oxymoron, it is an apt characterization of the Bieszczady region (and by extension other borderlands of the EU) because the transnational institution of the European Union provides the context in which particular kinds of regional identities become salient, albeit in multiple and fragmented ways.

“There's no rules. It's hackathon.”: Negotiating Commitment in a Context of Volatile Sociality

How do people negotiate commitments to engaging in joint activity while at the same time anticipating and managing the inherent risks of collaboration? We explore this question through the ethnographic example of a hackathon, a collaborative software‐design competition. We focus specifically on the earliest and, in many ways, most uncertain phase of collaboration, in which commitment and activity simultaneously emerge: team formation. We analyze mercurial allegiances in terms of a technoliberal participation ideology closely associated with the mores of the digital economy, which paradoxically emphasizes intensive project‐based collaboration but limited interpersonal responsibility. We examine the verbal and nonverbal resources (such as stance‐taking, politeness, reported speech, humor, and gesture) that prospective teammates use to modulate expressions of commitment, and the ways in which they pursue self‐interested projects while maintaining social relatedness in order to accomplish joint activity in a context of social volatility.