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This dissertation analyzes the development of the “linguistic landscape” (including street signs, public notices, storefronts, advertisements, and commemorative inscriptions) at a particular intersection in the linguistically, ethnically, and confessionally diverse Bosnian capital of Sarajevo from the late Ottoman period until the present day. Using the combined methods of archival work, discourse analysis, photo-elicitation interviews, and fine-grained linguistic analysis, this dissertation explores how even minute linguistic differences, such as orthography, come to carry significant historical, cultural, and political meanings, particularly when embedded in public space.A key focus of this dissertation is elucidating how competing nationalist conceptions of language in the Balkans both came to interact with each other and came into friction with the local language ideologies through which Sarajevo’s multiethnic population understood the linguistic diversity of their city. This dissertation demonstrates how the various 19th century romantic nationalist conceptions (e.g. Illyrian, Croatian, Serbian), which each sought to overcome confessional divisions in the name of language-based national unity, were disseminated through established confessional infrastructures of literacy, resulting in the ethnicization of Sarajevo’s population largely along confessional lines.This study takes language ideologies and multilingualism from the abstract to the “concrete,” and careful attention is given to the institutions of literacy (i.e. those that (re)produce diverse reading and writing practices and the conceptions of language bound up with them) as they are situated in the urban environment, connected by a shared infrastructure though which public space is constituted. In its treatment of space, this dissertation explores the ways in which spatially situated texts – such as signage in the linguistic landscape – establish indexical relations with the surrounding space (and the structures therein) through the texts themselves. This study shows how this aspect of spatially situated texts can be used in contextualizing practices that root signs into their physical contexts, while nevertheless leaving them vulnerable to displacement and other forms of destruction. By taking a diachronic approach, this study examines the linguistic landscape of Sarajevo over the course of two centuries as the social, economic, and linguistic order was reconfigured under different state formations, including both the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and finally today’s post-socialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was forged in the wake of a brutal war of the 1990s. In each of these eras, this dissertation tracks the significant changes to the linguistic landscape, including the destruction of old signage and the placement of new, with each instance of signage being approached as a lens with which to view the ideological formation that brought it into (or out of) being. Through an examination of the historiographical inscriptions on commemorative plaques (particularly those concerning Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which occurred at this site), as well as the practice of naming streets in honor of historical figures, this dissertation argues that the linguistic landscape, as part of the material structure of ideology, forms a key site of contestation in which textual practices are used to both project the legitimacy of new state formations and suppress (or appropriate) inconvenient narratives of past regimes.

This paper examines the COVID-19 pandemic in light of two key concepts in medical anthropology: syndemics and structural violence. Following a discussion of the nature of these two concepts, the paper addresses the direct and associated literatures on the syndemic and structural violence features of the COVID pandemic, with a specific focus on: 1) the importance of local socioenvironmental conditions/demographics and disease configurations in creating varying local syndemic expressions; 2) the ways that the pandemic has exposed the grave weaknesses in global health care investment; and 3) how the syndemic nature of the pandemic reveals the rising rate of noncommunicable diseases and their potential for interaction with current and future infectious disease. The paper concludes with a discussion on the role of anthropology in responding to COVID-19 from a syndemics perspective.

The paper* describes the features of the Simēk ritual (compare semik in Russian) in different ethnic and religious (Orthodox Christian, ‘pagan’, Muslim) and ethnic and territorial groups of Chuvash. The author shows the key role of Simēk in the structure of rituals of the semik and Trinity block and reveals its links with funerary, commemorative and wedding rites. Simēk is one of the main rituals on the Chuvash ritual calendar. Traditionally, it is associated with commemoration customs of the people and is one of the three compulsory days of commemoration of family ancestors. It corresponds to semik in the Russian ritual calendar and is held either on Thursday (for unbaptised Chuvash) or on the Saturday before Trinity (for the majority of Orthodox Chuvash). Today Simēk is performed in the villages as a commemoration ritual with a visit to the cemetery, which involves both villagers and those family members who live in cities. After visiting the cemetery family members conduct visits, turning a commemoration ceremony into a festival. Thus, Simēk strengthens family links between villagers and city dwellers. With increasing levels of religiosity in society the importance of Simēk as a means of preserving and spreading ethnic traditions has also increased. In modern rituals there is some structural transformation of Simēk among the Orthodox community, but at the same time it is possible to trace the actualisation and expansion of the ritual together with the general trends in unification of the Chuvash ritual complex.

This article* will look at how domestic and sexual violence against women is presented in the Icelandic folk legend collections from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gender-based violence is a subject relatively absent in Icelandic legend collections which were mostly told, collected and published by men (the exception being the collection of Torfhildur Þorsteinssdóttir Hólm). Violence plays a role in the subordination of women, and there is good reason to consider how violence against women is portrayed in the oral legends of the past. I will among other things consider the effect these particular legends might have had on those who heard them and examine the roles of the legends in maintaining and shaping a discourse which in many cases may well have attempted to normalise this violence.

The article* presents a study of the use of family humour in public comedy and the mutual influence of family humour and public humour on comedians’ performances and everyday life. The interrelations between these domains lie at the level of the content of humour, its format, its performance and the interaction between humour producers and their audience. Family and public humour often overlap and interweave in various ways, especially in the experience of those who engage in humour production both in public and in private spheres. The study is informed by interviews with UK-based comedians on their family humorous folklore and its interrelation with their public humour performances. The interconnection between public and family humour was identified on several levels: textual, communicative, personal and conceptual. This multidimensional interplay indicates that family humour is contingent on the context, but at the same time is often conditioned by comedians’ public personae and cannot be fully separated from the humour they perform publicly. The study illustrates the vagueness of the dichotomy between public comic performances and family humour and points to multiple ways in which the boundaries between these domains can become blurry.

This study describes the types of taboo words used by the Acehnese people in Aceh, Indonesia. Ten language informants in the district were interviewed for this qualitative study. The interviews were recorded and then transcribed prior to analysis. The data were then analysed by the procedures of condensation, display, and conclusion drawing. The findings of the research reveal that the most common taboo types used by Acehnese speakers are taboos of vulgarity or obscenity, epithet, and the taboo of disease. This implies that calling people bad names, talking about sex, mentioning incurable or ‘repulsive’ diseases are among the most taboo discussions in Acehnese society. Taboo words related to religion are found the least in the data, which could imply that these words are small in number because the Acehnese people embrace their religion strongly and thus minimise verbal abuse related to it.

This paper* highlights the internal contradictions of museum institutions when they are influenced by neoliberal market-driven policies and new museology from the viewpoint of the museum-working researcher. Museums increasingly interface with the public because they are now part of the leisure market. Recent transformations have affected the roles and responsibilities of museum researchers. Whereas marketing, communication and sales specialists have gained more prominence in museum decision-making, the researchers’ role has been marginalised. Semi-structured interviews at five national museums in Finland and the Baltic States give voice to museum researchers and reveal their subjective reflections. The interviews revealed two discursive patterns: 1) caring for museum collections is more of a priority than conducting research, and 2) if academic results are prioritised, researchers are less involved in servicing the collections. The analysis showed how perceived marginalisation has caused role conflict and ambiguity for researchers, and that current shifts reduce researchers’ motivation to contribute to research.

What children count as their favourite things tell us not only about children but also about their social and cultural experiences. This study,* based on the outcomes of a children’s drawing competition organised by the Estonian National Museum and applying a combined framework of visual sociology and participa-tory research, proposes an innovative angle to using the museum’s experimental approach to contemporary collecting of cultural heritage. This large-sample (n=926) content-analytical study of children’s favourite gifts gives a rich ethno-graphic and sociological perspective on children’s life-worlds. On the one hand, the children’s wishes reflected contemporary global trends in technology and commercialisation. On the other hand, the children’s prevailing dream of having a pet shows loneliness shaped by societal changes, including urbanisation and changing family models and time regimes.

Bandura art is a unique phenomenon of Ukrainian culture, inextricably linked with the history of the Ukrainian people. The study is dedicated to one of the most tragic periods in the history of bandura art, that of the 1920s–1940s, during which the Bolsheviks were creating, expanding and strengthening the Soviet Union. Art in a multinational state at this time was supposed to be national by form and socialist by content in accordance with the concept of Bolshevik cultural policy; it also had to serve Soviet propaganda. Bandura art has always been national by its content, and professional by its form, so conflict was inevitable. The Bolsheviks embodied their cultural policy through administrative and power methods: they created numerous bandurist ensembles and imposed a repertoire that glorified the Communist Party and the Soviet system. As a result, the development of bandura art stagnated significantly, although it did not die completely. At the same time, in the post-war years this policy provoked the emigration of many professional bandurists to the USA and Canada, thus promoting the active spread of bandura art in the Ukrainian Diaspora.

This article looks at the perceptions of fear and ‘the frightening’ in contemporary Mongolian demonology. In the article, I discuss beliefs concerning both human and supernatural – what is supposed to be frightening for humans and what is supposed to be frightening for spirits, ghosts and demons. In daily interaction with the supernatural this mutual ‘fright’ can be regarded as an important part of communication. In this article, I discuss what is believed to be the most frightful for humans and for supernatural agents, what kinds of image this fear relates to and what the roots of these beliefs are, as well as the popular ways to confront and defend against ‘frightening’ in Mongolian folklore. My research is based on fieldwork materials collected during annual expeditions in different parts of Mongolia (2006–2017) and Mongolian published sources such as Mongolian newspapers and journals, special editions of stories about encounters with the supernatural.

To exemplify the legitimation processes of a pluralistic health field this article focuses on representations of Chinese medicine and its most popular spokes-person, Rene Bürkland, in the Estonian media. From 320 media texts published between 2009 and 2018 we chose 12 for close analysis with the aim of detecting specific discourses, untangling implicit meanings, and demonstrating the complexity of the rhetorical formulations used to legitimate Chinese medicine. We identified five key discourses – discourses of Bürkland’s charisma, holistic health, individual autonomy, subtle body, and integrative medicine – underpinning various legitimation strategies which aim to change the position of Chinese medicine from alternative to integrative. Our study reveals that the absence of scientific rhetoric together with key discourses has left Chinese medicine and its spokesperson without the attention of biggest critics of CAM and, therefore, has secured a positive image for Chinese medicine in the public discourse.

This article* investigates, for the first time, the local musical tradition of the Udmurt of Chainsk district (Tomsk oblast). The overwhelming majority of migrants in this region arrived from the Sharkan district of the Udmurt Republic, in Siberia, at the beginning of the 20th century. For a long time they kept their original culture in an ethnically alien environment. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, their singing tradition started to fade under the influence of different factors (such as the disappearance of Udmurt rituals and festivals, as well as mixed marriages). The aim of this article is to compare the ‘Chainsk migrational’ singing tradition to the ‘Sharkan original’ musical tradition. The main collection of audio recordings covering the Chainsk district Udmurt musical tradition is conserved in the archives of the Udmurt Research Institute at the Russian Academy of sciences.1 It is comprised of fieldwork material gathered by researchers from the Institute in 1974 and 2006. We discovered new sources of audio and video recordings of the singing tradition in this territory, which allowed us to integrate more song samples. The analysis of both traditions reveals the basic genres of ritual singing, each of which has been examined from the point of view of the topic of the poetic text, the mood structures, and the metro-rhythmic and melodic peculiarities of their development.

Manasā is a very important goddess of the eastern part of India, particularly for the lower castes of Bengal, West Assam, some districts of Odisha, Jharkhand and Bihar. She is the main goddess for the majority of Rajbansis of North Bengal. The fluid border between deities, witches and human beings is an essential part of both her myth and cult. Being a Tāntric deity, Manasā has an extremely ambivalent character: according to the narratives and ritualistic practice she is at the same time both welcomed and unwanted. Her worship involves negotiation with dangerous divine power, which generates insecurity and uncertainty, but at the same time rewards adepts with wonderful abilities. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in rural places in the Jalpaiguri, Koch-Behar, Goalpara and Darrang districts of West Bengal and Assam, India, among Rajbansis, Bodo Kachari and Assamees. The details of Manasā worship, Behula dance and storytelling by Bengali Monośa gidal, and in a form of Assamese suknāni ojha-palli (with deodhani dance and trance) will reveal a peculiar local knowledge system, directly aimed at overcoming and transforming mundane life crises.

The personal and intellectual biography of Franz Boas testifies to a tireless scientific research and public commitment dedicated to the study of cultures and to the "human manifestations of mental life". Moving from Germany with a background in physics, geography and natural sciences, he arrived in the United States opening the field to cultural anthropology as a discipline, becoming one of the pioneers in ethnolinguistic and ethnomusicological studies. We will therefore try to outline a mapping of these Boasian disciplinary encroachments, showing how they are connected to his geographic crossings, from the first journey through the Canadian ice of Baffin Island (1883-1884), up to the field research carried out in British Columbia from 1885 to 1930.

The article seeks to illuminate the ideologically motivated circumstances of Latvian folklore studies during the period of unconditional Soviet totalitarianism. With the strengthening of the Soviet occupation regime in Latvia in the late 1940s, many interwar folklorists became victims of ideologically motivated disdain and subsequent career limitation. ‘Bourgeois’ scholarship and the methods applied in folklore studies during the interwar period were denounced and recognised as harmful to the new Soviet order. The central part of the article presents a case study of one individual folklorist of the time, Anna Bērzkalne (1891–1956). Both increasing criticism of Bērzkalne’s folklore research approach (the historical–geographical method) and her efforts to accommodate the requirements of the Soviet regime have been analysed.

This study, based on archive document research and analysis of publications by Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR) ethnographers, discusses the process of invention and implementation of Socialist traditions and the role of scientists in this. The introduction of Soviet traditions in Latvia did not begin immediately after the Second World War when the communist occupation regime was restored. The occupation regime in the framework of an anti-religious campaign turned to the transformation of traditions that affect individual’s private sphere and relate to church rituals – baptism, confirmation, weddings, funerals, Latvian cemetery festivities – in the second half of 1950s, along with the implementation of revolutionary and labour traditions. In order to achieve the goals set by the Communist Party, a new structure of institutions was formed and specialists from many fields were involved, including ethnographers from the Institute of History at the LSSR Academy of Sciences (hereinafter – LSSR AS). Ethnographers offered recommendations, as well as observed and analysed the process, discussing it in meetings of official commissions and sharing the conclusions in scientific publications, presentations, etc.

This article* is dedicated to the regional studies movement in Soviet Lithuania, primarily to ethnography, and argues that Lithuanian ethnographers conducted ethnographic research in different ways. The focus is on the Ramuva movement, founded in 1970 at Vilnius University and continuing until 1994. The activities of the Lithuanian regional studies movement were characterised by diverse education and ethnographic practices. I assert that the key to the success of Ramuva’s activity was a creative circumventing of Soviet ideology and practice. Through a discussion of theoretical issues and the results of fieldwork, I analyse the following questions: How did Marxism–Leninism change ethnography in Soviet Lithuania? What were the activities, methods and theory of regional research? Was Ramuva’s policy of knowledge production in opposition to the Soviet regime?

Estonian ethnography as one of the Estonia-related disciplines was tied with Estonian nationalism from the very beginning. Defined as a science investigating mainly the material side of vanishing traditional peasant culture in the 1920s, it fitted rather well with the Soviet understanding of ethnography as a sub discipline of history. Thanks to the major cooperation projects initiated and coordinated by ethnographers from Moscow, Soviet Estonian ethnographers could continue studying Estonian traditional peasant culture. Their favourite research topics (folk costume, peasant architecture and traditional agriculture) supported Estonian national identity, but also suited the framework of Soviet ethnography. Studying contemporary (socialist) everyday life was unpopular among Estonian ethnographers because the results had to justify and support Soviet policy. They did so unwillingly, and avoided it completely if possible. Despite of some interruption during the Stalin era, ethnography managed to survive as a science of the nation in Soviet Estonia.

The lives of Indonesian waria (transgender women) are substantially shaped by spatial dynamics. As a result of social and spatial exclusion, subsequent migration and economic needs, a lifestyle pattern around daily work in beauty salons and street nightlife tied to transactional sex has evolved in many parts of urban Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Indonesian regions of Java and West Papua, I demonstrate that despite tremendous spatial abjection, salons and street nightlife are also productive, transformative and conjoining spatialities that foster waria subjectivity in affective relations with their intimate partners, the community, the phantasmic promise of the transnational mediascape and Indonesia as a nation. The places that waria occupy may spark moral prejudice and targeted violence, but simultaneously they are sites of agency at which waria experience self-affirmation and a sense of belonging while embodying through gendered performance the envisioned mobility at both national and transnational scales. The paper thus foregrounds how spaces and subjectivities are mutually constitutive, forging one another, as well as how certain spatialities hold potential to disrupt the sense of marginality.

Bilingual speakers of Spanish and Juchitán Zapotec (JCH), two languages that have been said to differ substantially in their semantics for expressing information about space, offer a fresh perspective on the classic problem of linguistic relativity because they allow us to test the extent to which cognitive styles may be related to linguistic codes or to other socio-cultural variables. This dissertation aims to combine the theoretical and methodological approaches of linguistic anthropology with some more recent quantitative innovations from other disciplines in order to probe further the question of why cross-cultural variation in styles of cognition exists, and how people come to adopt their particular cognitive styles. In this dissertation, I argue that the typology of the language a speaker knows or is using at a given moment does not reliably predict patterns in spatial thinking. Instead, I argue that different conceptualizations of space emerge in interaction on the basis of different conceptualizations of multiple layers of context. I present evidence from a battery of semi-experimental tasks that demonstrates a mixed profile of spatial reasoning strategies in Juchitán. The distribution of these strategies did not correlate with language dominance or language used on the task. However, variability in frame of reference use by children participating in the elicitation tasks indexes cultural differences among the children, related not obviously to spatial conceptualization but to different narrative and gestural styles. I propose that the particular ways in which language is used and thought of in modern settings, especially the school, may driving conceptual change in Juchitán. This manifests both as language shift from JCH to Spanish, but also as conceptual shift independent of code. Variation in the use of “spatial frames of reference,” then, is potentially indicative of different ways of conceptualizing language in relation to context, and self in relation to world.

Drawing on research for the Pilgrimage and England’s Cathedrals, Past and Present project, this article explores how the project’s medieval case study cathedrals – Canterbury, Durham and York – present their saints and shrines, and how visitors react to and interpret them. While looking at various narratives – predominantly about saints in historical and contemporary contexts – attached to these cathedrals, I also aim to offer some glimpses into how people interact with and relate to space. I argue that beliefs and narratives about saints play a significant role in the pilgrimage culture of the cathedral. I will also explore how the lack of a clear central narrative about the saint leaves a vacancy that will be filled with various other narratives.

Gabor Klaniczay & Eva Pocs, eds. 2017. Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania . Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-319-54755-8 978-3-319-54756-5.

In philosophy, theology or modern social sciences, we can always identify an anthropological axiom, that refers to the genesis, the evolution of the human species as well as the ”human nature”. Starting with the modern period, this type of thinking found itself organized as part of some positive sciences, that can be seen as an actual ”system of anthropological sciences”, put together by British, American, French and German scientists. The English have developed what we call ”social anthropology”. In the United States, several academic disciplines have thrived as part of the ”general anthropology”: archeology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology and applied anthropology. The French are mostly known for their work in the field of ethnography and ethnology. As for the Germans, they focused on studying popular culture (Volkskunde).

The issue raised in the present article is shamanists’ ideas about why there should be unity in drinking in the shamanic community. In the framework of the shamanic worldview, each act of drinking, not only ritual acts but also everyday acts, can comprise the features of worshipping the spirits and making an offering to them. Hence there is the need to make an offering during any domestic drinking, and an obligation to share the drink with everyone present. From the shamanic perspective, by rejecting alcohol a person demonstrates a refusal to subordinate him or herself to the spirits, which can cause problems.

The paper was presented as plenary session at the Archives as Knowledge Hubs: Initiatives and Influences conference (September 25–28, 2017 in Tartu, Estonia). The event was dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the Estonian Folklore Archives.

Traditionally, the curator’s work has been in close connection with the main functions of the museum - preservation, research, and communication. The changes that have occurred at museums over the past few decades have also influenced the profession of curator. Specialisation has taken place inside the museum, and so the curator’s functions have also changed. This article focuses on the curator’s field of work at national museums in Finland and in the Baltic states. The analysis is mainly based on interviews conducted with curators and other museum professionals at the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian History Museum, the National History Museum of Latvia, the National Museum of Lithuania, and the National Museum of Finland. Emanating from the PRC model provided by the Reinwardt Academy as well as the global changes induced by the new museology, the focus is on the curator’s connection with museum collections. The analysis shows that the curator’s role is not similar in all the museums under discussion; there are regional differences in structure, curatorial duties, and priorities. While at some museums the curator is regarded as a collection keeper who can also do some research, at others they are rather researchers and have only infrequent contact with collections.

Yuri Vella (1948-2013) was a well-known personality in Western Siberia’s indigenous world. Unlike most Western Siberia indigenous inhabitants, Yuri Vella was exceptionally skilled with words. He used words in everyday life in order to achieve his goals, among which the main one was to protect his kin and neighbours in the forest from the destructions induced by the oil industry. He was able to hold his own in discussion with the oil industry representatives and to have the last word with them. But how did Yuri Vella use words in private life? That is what months of fieldwork sharing the hut he lived in with his wife allowed me to ascertain. I shall concentrate on patterns of speaking - how? with whom? - and silence in everyday life, outside the attention of an audience. Or was my presence in the hut enough of an audience to change his patterns? These reflections are what this article is about.

Listening Genres: The Circulation of Psychoanalysis in Everyday Interactions in Buenos Aires, ArgentinaByXochiquetzal Marsilli-VargasDoctor of Philosophy in AnthropologyUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Charles L. Briggs, ChairThis dissertation proposes the concept of listening genres as frameworks of relevance that surface at the moment of reception and orient the apprehension of sound. At the intersection of linguistic and psychological anthropology, sound studies, and Argentine cultural history, it argues that sound reception, far from being neutral and automatic, always involves a particular type of ideological and practice intervention. The listener, by focusing through a particular frame, creates a context, or more precisely a contextual configuration of reception that provides a unique interpretative lens. The argument is that through listening, sound images produce different contexts depending on the particular way in which an individual listens. Social actors, thus, listen both pragmatically and intentionally. Hearers listen with a purpose, they look for (directed) meanings, and the outcome of their interpretation transforms various social dimensions. To exemplify how listening genres are produced and reproduced, this dissertation explores psychoanalytic listening as a genre in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Based on ethnographic work conducted in a variety of social settings, it explains how and why psychoanalysis occupies an important position in Argentina, one that symbolically structures other fields and many discursive arenas. We can find psychoanalysis outside the clinical setting, in newspapers, TV and radio shows, sports, and casual conversations, among other forms. By contributing to the ongoing discussion about why psychoanalysis is so prevalent in Argentina, this dissertation proposes the idea that psychoanalytic listening as a genre has become a social fact. It has gone beyond the clinical setting, creating links to citizenship, civil society, and the state, as well as with national culture in general. This dissertation demonstrates that personal identities, conceptions of citizenship, and constructions of the political in Buenos Aires, are rooted less in the performativity associated with speaking than in particularly forms of listening based on psychoanalysis. This listening is social, produced by a collectivity of individuals, and performed in all sorts of interactions surpassing class, age, and gender classifications.

The explosion in new media technologies and how people use them has ruptured a longstanding model of authorship and ownership behind intellectual property (IP) laws and norms. New media make creating, manipulating, and circulating information much faster, easier, and cheaper. The romantic author entitled to own her expressions of creative genius is being reimagined as a remix author who always borrows, collaborates, and has partial claims over cultural products. Scholars in various fields have used this development to reconsider what authorship is and how it relates to ownership. My approach employs empirically, locally grounded linguistic anthropological methods that have not been applied before to this topic. My aim is to uncover what motivates authorship as a communicative activity that has social value, as evidenced by its link to ownership. I conducted fieldwork among professional storytellers, lawyers, and marketers in Hollywood, an influential industry that relies heavily on copyright, the branch of IP law that regulates the circulation of creative expression. I investigated how people who see remix authorship as both a challenge and an opportunity talk about authorship and, in doing so, talk as authorship. Framing my study in practice theory terms, I analyzed the micro-semiotic and macro-social aspects of that discourse in contexts such as courtroom litigation, professional gatherings, and story production. I argue that authorship and ownership are mutually defining practices driven by a productive tension between the chronological pursuit of authentic experience and a horizonal goal of idealized authenticity. Striving to achieve authenticity is socially mediated, and often occurs through cultural products, including entertainment commodities. For a long time, romantic authorship ideology tailored authenticity to its own terms, mitigating the tension and supporting the modern IP regime. Spurred by new media, remix authorship ideology pries open that loop. More broadly, people constantly remix the nexus of what authenticity, authorship, and ownership mean. My findings further remix authorship theory in order to think beyond the superficial divergence of IP law and social practices; specify the social and institutional consequences of linguistic authorship, including how it can lead to paradigmatic transformation; and describe an experiential motivation behind that practice.

This dissertation investigates the everyday lives and experiences of Serbian youth born amidst war and the breakup of Yugoslavia. It argues that historical and political events in Serbia have inspired widespread ambivalence about national pride and cosmopolitanism, how to restore Serbia's international reputation, and the ability of citizens to enact societal change. Such ambivalence manifests itself through different genres of speaking and types of social encounters. The dissertation explores the ways in which a new generation takes up and reinterprets recent social upheaval amidst changing local, European, and global landscapes.The study draws upon one year of fieldwork in a prestigious high school in Belgrade, Serbia, where I recorded history, civics, and literature courses, videotaped and conducted participant-observation with students and their peers outside of class, interviewed students and teachers, examined textbooks and other school materials, and analyzed students' interactions on Facebook. This ethnographic corpus offers rich insights into 1) Inter-generational constructions of histories and futures, both personal and collective; 2) Talk itself as simultaneously a symbol of futility and an instrument of political action; and 3) Social media as a site for youth to express their ambivalence, experiment with new connections between language and identity, and overcome feelings of isolation and stigma that still weigh on the previous generation. Analysis of the corpus suggests that ambivalence in Serbia is historically-grounded, is constructed through a range of linguistic features and types of interaction, and has been experienced as alternately constraining and empowering. Students and teachers oscillate between nostalgia and skepticism when recounting shared histories and use a range of linguistic features to ambiguously assert or downplay Serbia's responsibility for past events. Teachers alternate between criticizing and participating in bureaucratic interactional routines with their students. Online, students mix politically-charged writing systems in novel ways that seem to redefine modern Serbian youth identity while reasserting the advantages of living between `East' and `West.' Overall, this study reveals ambivalence to be a pervasive cultural and political mood that can either lead to feelings of political and social paralysis or become a resource for new and creative forms of identification.

This dissertation provides both ethnographic and linguistic analysis of how translocality and transidiomatic practices intersect the ways in which people organize their social worlds in the digital and information age. I explore how translocality informs how people understand, construct, and experience a voluntary and avocational community and identity in their everyday lives, through the lens of a global, video gaming community, centered around a game called League of Legends. In this dissertation, I focus on understanding how distributed players and developers together co-construct a sense of community, belonging, and connectivity, through both language and interaction online and offline. This analysis first discusses how players and developers co-construct community and identity through language, distinctiveness, and authenticity. The data in this dissertation is used to highlight how players and developers use language in their everyday interactions to construct particular group identities, through specific lexical and material styles. I then discuss how a sense of community and belonging are constructed in the social network through moral participation and engagement, both institutionally and endogenously, looking particularly at stance, directives, assessments, and structure-preserving transformations. Further, I discuss how players and developers co-create community through understandings and narrative experiences of translocality and temporality that focus on empathy and the experience of playing the game itself. At a macro level, this dissertation discusses the analytic concept of community and problematizes the multiple and varying definitions of speech community. As technology and globalization continue to impact, transform, and recreate communities, there is a great need for expanding our understanding of speech communities as one that accounts for the changing ways in which people constitute meaningful participation in a society or culture. This research provides an empirical example of how participation, fluidity, interconnectedness, and sense-making unfolds, particularly in the everyday interactions of a specific, global network of players and developers.

Each year, four million Americans travel abroad as participants in short-term missions (STMs), the religious branch of the billion-dollar volunteer-tourism industry. Rooted in 13 months of multi-sited ethnographic research, this dissertation examines evangelical STMs in the Dominican Republic as vehicles for evangelization and voluntarism in the contexts of postcolonial tourism and the production of sugar for the global market. In doing so, it also examines STMs as important sites of religious socialization for American participants, particularly, socialization of moral ideologies. These moral ideologies, expressed and performed through the discursive practices, religious rituals, and routinized cross-cultural interactions that are characteristic of STMs, (re)create and justify unequal power relations between Americans and Dominicans. STMs expose American volunteers to striking socioeconomic and racial inequalities, which could powerfully (re)shape their worldviews by raising their awareness, for example, of the exploitative working and living conditions behind a ubiquitous commodity, sugar. However, STM leaders and volunteers conceptualize these inequalities in ways that are inconsistent or contradictory, disconnected from their understandings of inequality back home, and decontextualized from broader processes and systems, including colonialism and contemporary global capitalism. The personal narratives and the religious and economic discourses that are (re)produced during STMs shape American participants’ understandings of inequalities and cultivate a moral subjectivity in which they are divinely charged with the responsibility of ameliorating others’ poverty, lack of social welfare, and poor living conditions. STM discourses and practices thus legitimize forms of charitable giving that may actually contribute to poverty and inequality by concealing Americans’ pre-existing socioeconomic relations with Dominicans. Amid heightened efforts to dismantle social welfare in the US, it is increasingly important to deconstruct ideologies and practices of giving in order to understand why evangelical Christians prefer charity, which provides only partial and temporary relief at best, over other methods that could provide more sustainable and transformative solutions to poverty and inequality. The research presented in this dissertation reveals that, despite what participants believe to be their moral intentions and good works, STMs work in various ways to perpetuate inequalities between sending and receiving countries.