Ethnographie in transkulturellen Kontaktzonen: Imperiale Kooperationen und regionales Wissen über den ostgalizischen Raum.

How was regional knowledge produced in hierarchized transcultural contact zones? This paper discusses strategies among the Ukrainian/Ruthenian scientific community in Habsburg Eastern Galicia through the prism of autoethnography and transnational cooperation with projects and institutions engaged in imperial ethnography (Volkskunde). In the state-sponsored popular science undertakings in question, public institutions exerted control in order to marginalize unwelcome or politically subversive currents and to support those loyal to the state. Once the Ukrainian community gained greater visibility through these projects, it was possible for experts to participate in more horizontally structured transnational networks and to extend the region's visibility further. Thus, autoethnography is considered as an important tool for regional or national actors to create agency in hierarchized transcultural contact zones, i. e. for the Ukrainian movement to present its own idea of Galicia through German-language media and thereby to produce legitimate knowledge about the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]