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At the turn of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, syllabic devotional songs in Ruthenian (RDS) make their first appearance as occasional appendices or notes in the margins of manuscripts serving quite divergent functions (triodia, evangelia and the like). The first systematic collections of RDS were compiled abroad by Ruthenian monks having left Ukraine for monasteries around Moscow from the 1660s onwards. It required several more decades, till the beginning of the eighteenth century, before these songs were also being systematically collected in song manuscripts throughout the Ruthenian lands themselves. The article argues against established views to the effect that this documentary gap was due to a massive loss of seventeenth-century Ruthenian song manuscripts. It should rather be taken at face value as an indication that some perceptual change with respect to devotional songs is likely to have taken place among Ruthenian literate classes at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is argued that the rise of Ruthenian song manuscripts marks the beginning of a collecting culture, which treats devotional songs as a cherished and coveted collectable, where heretofore no particular value seems to have been accorded to these songs. The article explores the social profiles of song collectors and the individual makeup of song collections to offer a hypothetical outline of this emerging collecting culture, addressing issues of modes of exchange, methods of collecting and compiling, the specific relationship between collector and collectable, with a view to arguing for a highly individualized and intimate culture between private devotion and incipient object-oriented consumerism.

This article deals with the impact of a major redesign of public space at a cross-border market on the Russian—Chinese border on customer—seller interrelations. The location in question is the Chinese border town of Manzhouli, which, over the last two decades, has risen to become a bustling town of cross-border tourism and retail trade. It will be shown that the large-scale replacement of makeshift market stalls by huge, ostentatious department store buildings is paralleled by the way Chinese traders try to impose a more restricted and rule-governed price regime in their interactions with Russian customers. Russian customers react to this recent shift in appearance and behaviour by sticking to received perceptions of the border as a place outside orderly society and will accordingly reject the Chinese reinterpretation of the cross-border market location.

The present volume aims at exploring the overall patterns of linguistic regionalism throughout Eastern Europe, casting also a comparative glance beyond this specific cultural setting into neighboring Western European regions. A wide array of aspects related to regional language designs are addressed, such as: linguistic rights, conflicting conceptualisations of linguistic regionalism, the role of the internet in identity modelling, the role of linguistics in language planning and research, etc. The volume is also designed to approach linguistic regionalism on a general theoretical level giving a critical assessment of Aleksandr Dulichenko's microlanguage paradigm. Case studies of individual projects as well as reports by regional language activist will provide the reader with glimpses of how regional language designs are set up and elaborated.