The Globalization of Rural Plays in the Twenty-First Century excavates the neglected ideological substratum of peasant folk plays. By focusing on northeastern Romania and southwest Ukraine-two of the most ruralized regions in Europe-this work reveals the complex landscape of peasant plays and the essential role they perform in shaping local culture, economy, and social life. The rapid demise of these practices and the creation of preservation programs is analyzed in the context of the corrosive effects of global capitalism and the processes of globalization, urbanization, mass-mediatization, and heritagization. Just like peasants in search of better resources, rural plays "migrate" from their villages of origin into the urban, modern, and more dynamic world, where they become more visible and are both appreciated and exploited as forms of transnational, intangible cultural heritage.

This volume introduces the Cross-Cultural Interaction Model (CCIM), a visual tool for studying the exchanges that take place between different cultures in borderland areas or across long distances. The model helps researchers untangle complex webs of connections among people, landscapes, and artifacts, and can be used to support multiple theoretical viewpoints. Through case studies, contributors apply the CCIM to various regions and time periods, including Roman Europe, the Greek province of Thessaly in the Late Bronze Age, the ancient Egyptian-Nubian frontier, colonial Greenland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Mississippian realm of Cahokia, ancient Costa Rica and Panama, and the Moquegua Valley of Peru in the early Middle Horizon period. They adapt the model to best represent their data, successfully plotting connections in many different dimensions, including geography, material culture, religion and spirituality, and ideology. The model enables them to expose what motivates people to participate in cultural exchange, as well as the influences that people reject in these interactions. These results demonstrate the versatility and analytical power of the CCIM. Bridging the gap between theory and data, this tool can prompt users to rethink previous interpretations of their research, leading to new ideas, new theories, and new directions for future study.

The concept of 'hybridity' is often still poorly theorized and problematically applied by peace and development scholars and researchers of resource governance. This book turns to a particular ethnographic reading of Michel Foucault's Governmentality and investigates its usefulness to study precisely those mechanisms, processes and practices that hybridity once promised to clarify. Claim-making to land and authority in a post-conflict environment is the empirical grist supporting this exploration of governmentality. Specifically in the periphery of Bukavu. This focus is relevant as urban land is increasingly becoming scarce in rapidly expanding cities of eastern Congo, primarily due to internal rural-to-urban migration as a result of regional insecurity. The governance of urban land is also important analytically as land governance and state authority in Africa are believed to be closely linked and co-evolve. An ethnographic reading of governmentality enables researchers to study hybridization without biasing analysis towards hierarchical dualities. Additionally, a better understanding of hybridization in the claim-making practices may contribute to improved government intervention and development assistance in Bukavu and elsewhere.

Every society thrives on stories, legends and myths. This volume explores the linguistic devices employed in the astoundingly rich narrative traditions in the tropical hot-spots of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the ways in which cultural changes and new means of communication affect narrative genres and structures. It focusses on linguistic and cultural facets of the narratives in the areas of linguistic diversity across the tropics and surrounding areas - New Guinea, Northern Australia, Siberia, and also the Tibeto-Burman region. The introduction brings together the recurrent themes in the grammar and the substance of the narratives. The twelve contributions to the volume address grammatical forms and categories deployed in organizing the narrative and interweaving the protagonists and the narrator. These include quotations, person of the narrator and the protagonist, mirativity, demonstratives, and clause chaining. The contributors also address the kinds of narratives told, their organization and evolution in time and space, under the impact of post-colonial experience and new means of communication via social media. The volume highlights the importance of documenting narrative tradition across indigenous languages.