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This chapter examines the question of how 13th century thinkers viewed God’s relationship to time. It is argued that mid-13th century accounts of God’s relationship to time are trying to affirm something that does not fall within the ambit of the concepts and thought patterns used by contemporary philosophers. Taking as their point of departure a universe populated and organized very differently from contemporary philosophical models, it should not be surprising that their thought refuses to be categorized and confined by the parameters of contemporary distinctions, such as that between timelessness and everlastingness.

This chapter begins by describing two competing kinds of explanations to the one offered in the preceding chapter. The first is the way in which rituals are thought to influence behavior through direct psychological stimulation. The second is based on how being physically together in a group of people affects individual emotions. It addresses the question of whether common knowledge is an impossible ideal. It then discusses how publicity—or more precisely, common knowledge generation—and content are never really separable, in contrast to the book's argument that both must be considered in understanding cultural practices such as rituals. The chapter goes on to explain how historical precedent can generate common knowledge and generating community through common knowledge.

This chapter asks what happens to the conventions of the road movie, and in particular its ethos of resistance, when younger and older generations hit the road together in Nordic films of the 2000s. In raising this question I discuss the use of road movie conventions in two Finnish road movies, the fictional Road North (Mika Kaurismäki, 2012) and the documentary Finnish Blood Swedish Heart (Mika Ronkainen, 2012), which both feature stories of father–son pairings driving together towards a new kind of understanding of their roots. The films offer two ways to see how road movies, in essence, work between the national and the transnational. Road North depicts a road journey inside the borders of Finland. Finnish Blood Swedish Heart, in comparison, is profoundly transnational anyway in its subject matter of a father and son duo driving from Finland to their past in Sweden, but film was also financed as a Finnish–Swedish co-production and, before being awarded as the best Finnish documentary of the year, it received the Dragon award for the best Nordic documentary at the Gothenburg International Film Festival 2013.

This chapter explains communion as a planetary practice of collective self-identification. Communion takes shape in opposition to teletechnological ideals of global togetherness. Opposed to the cosmotechnics of Spaceship Earth, a metaphor devised separately by Buckminster Fuller and Adlai Stevenson, communion is better developed in science-fictional work of Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin. Spaceship Earth, along with aligned metaphors of technologically enabled proximity, is in part to blame for sustaining the fiction of a world fused by common cause, and for perpetuating the accepted language of techno-boosterism, even in left cultural critique. Communion, by contrast, sees little such common cause in the world, but instead sees the cosmotechnic globe as the contested ground for coalitional struggles for real coexistence.

What did we see when visiting students at home, with their families? Having formed our accounts of their learning and social identities in one setting, we had to revise our views of many of them when we saw them again at home—with their family, by themselves in their bedrooms, when they went online. As already foreshadowed by the network analysis, home and family was in many ways a more fundamental source of values and sustenance, but it was also a place of emotion. The media—both mass and networked—were heavily implicated in the domestic setting of values, emotions, and identities. Families sought to overcome the perceived threat the media posed to family boundaries by seeking, instead, to use the media as a source of shared understanding, a convivial experience of family solidarity that served further, however, to distance home from school. The array of disconnects that we uncovered between home and school—both chosen and inadvertent—was itself problematic for some young people, and yet these were sufficiently common- place for us to begin also to wonder about those for whom home and school offered consistent and compatible experiences

This chapter discusses H. A. Scott Sr.'s childhood memoirs, in the Mississippi Delta town of Yazoo City, concerning the dividing space of their places. He recalls that some places had a double-sided door, two entrances side by side, “one for white and one for black.” The doors then opened into a larger area divided only by a row of stools separating the space for whites and the space for blacks. His description captures a compelling visual image of the geography of segregation. On the one hand, the stools hint at the significance of lines, important enough that in the absence of a full wall, something tangible was deemed necessary to divide these two spaces. On the other hand, one might wonder about a line of stools' qualifications for being a barrier. Thus, the stools nonetheless preserved a black presence and a white presence within an area allowing for a separated togetherness.

This chapter explores how worldschoolers cope with loneliness, homesickness, and unrootedness on the road by creating new kinds of community. As the children, especially teenagers, crave connection with their peers, parents reconcile their competing desires for individual freedom and a sense of belonging by seeking out what worldschoolers call a “tribe of rebels.” In contrast to the isolating effects of the “new individualism” that pervades late modern society, worldschoolers establish a “new togetherness” in communities that are mobile and mediated, temporary and intermittent, intentional, curated, and commodified. The chapter argues that even though these communities provide a source of communal belonging, they are essentially a lifestyle choice whose primary purpose is to support worldschoolers in their individualized pursuit of freedom. The “come-and-go” sociality that worldschoolers demonstrate in these communities also offers some insight into the kinds of social skills their children are learning, things like collaborating in diverse and temporary teams, maintaining nomadic friendships, and sustaining social relations through mediated channels. These are the kinds of competencies children will need to navigate their social and professional lives in a mobile future.

The Western philosophical “dwelling-in-the-world” perspective carries into hunter-gatherer studies distortive large-scale biases, and the ecological-anthropological perspective registers foragers’ dwellings as temporary huts. Aligning with studies of homes and houses as cultural sites, this chapter examines the forager hamlet as the physical setting and the mind setting of everyday life. Ethnography spanning the foragers’ vernacular architecture, domestic routines (especially sleeping and storage), (dis)order in the hamlet, material belongings, and semantics of dwelling(s) reveals the value accorded diversity, togetherness, and undivided habitus as well as locals’ conceptions of existence as pregiven being-with others and of plurality as encompassing diverse-and-related beings.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Arab patriotism. Patriotism in Arabic became manifest in two aspects. Firstly, it was an empire-wide ideology of power that provided a tactical vocabulary for Arabic-speaking elites to negotiate co-operation among themselves and with the Ottoman system. In the Egyptian province, it served the goal of achieving a tacit compromise with the semi-independent governor. Secondly, patriotism was a communal emotion, a physical experience of togetherness, constituted in and through public occasions. Such experiences allowed elite and ordinary individuals to imagine themselves as part of a community. Importantly, these were not just any experiences, but experiences that were made possible by new, public practices, institutions, and technologies. This book, therefore, focuses on performance culture as a key aspect of patriotism.

This chapter examines representations of the sea in several museums with maritime associations, using their engagement with the materiality of the sea to call for greater attention to seaborne mobility as an alternative source of belonging. It discusses three maritime museums in the Mediterranean and asks if they offer ways to go beyond ‘us’ and ‘them’. Together they make statements about the migration crisis in that area.

Physical togetherness has always been considered an integral part of social movements, but in the present age of information technology, physical copresence may not be required for social movements and protests. Internet-enabled technology may enable like-minded people to raise their voices, even from a distant location, for social change. People may show a powerful collective action online to express their outrage about some issue. This chapter discusses how Internet-enabled technologies help generate collective action without copresence and make protests or movements for social change effective. Asynchronous communication and long-distance collaboration are some of the important features of Internet-based technologies that make protests and social movements possible without having physical togetherness.

This chapter builds on the ideas of knowledging, community, communicative competence, and conviviality discussed in previous chapters. In examining the talk of another group of sojourners, it is evident that they all have competence to comprehend, evaluate, and appropriate semiotic forms associated with ethnic communities that they don’t identify with. By displaying these types of competence, they exhibit memberships in a number of communities, including an Indonesian public. Displaying membership in an Indonesian public also becomes one of the resources used to index membership in two other types of communities: a locally emergent community involving this group, and the wider community of Indonesians living in Nagoya, Japan. In contrast to using the term “conviviality” that is often discussed in relation to a single speech situation, here “togetherness in difference” is used because the focus is on the building of convivial relations over two spatially and temporally distinct speech situations.

By the 1960s and 1970s, generational dynamics and modern environmentalism fostered new camping experiences that led away from amenity-rich and resource-heavy family campgrounds. Youth who came of age in this era shaped new forms of camping to support interests in self-discovery, countercultural values, and environmental awareness. Organizers and participants of the National Outdoor Leadership School, launched in 1965, began to link backcountry camping with countercultural mindsets, personal freedom, and connection with nature. In so doing they experimented with new social contracts in microcosm, and after 1970 increasingly began to align their mission with environmentalist agendas. Echoing the popular belief that the personal is political, many began to embrace specific forms of camping like backpacking as a way of expressing their identity and viewpoints. The new popularity of minimum-impact forms of camping in turn generated a growing market for high-tech outdoor gear intended to enhance experience and advance conservation.

Chapter 3 focuses on the rich artistic output of the Czech Underground in the early 1970s. This aesthetic material helped frame the Underground through contrast structures and ideological articulations, helping it develop from an inchoate group that emerges from the 1960s bigbít scene into a distinct community. This occurred through a series of events congruent with the Underground band the Plastic People of the Universe’s musical development, all of which was calibrated by police repression and bureaucratic interruption of normalizace. In particular, notions of “establishment” emerged within Underground discourse, understood to be an “oppressor” of a self-determined way of life. The chapter shows how the fusing of cultural resources began to hold together an increasingly clearer network of dispositions, gestures and emotional stances that resulted from a series of social and aesthetic mediators. The chapter concludes by offering a model of how cultural resources are made available, located and put together. This engagement with resources ultimately creates a habitable, health-promoting space for communing and building immunity against things that one seeks to reject.

The dance of non-politics during communism was taken into account in its most public form in Charter 77. This chapter begins with the Second Festival of the Second Culture in 1976 and takes us until the early 1980s showing the relationship between dissidents associated with Charta 77 and Undergrounders. The assembly and framing of the relationship between establishment, self, and music in the Underground during the first part of the 1970s provided an entrance point that paired the Underground and the Czechoslovak dissident opposition. I problematize notions of resistance as tied to dissent and protest by taking a critical approach to the paradigm of protest music. The chapter seeks to show how music helps sort out and align groups of people.

Chapter 4 opens the second part of Feminist Democratic Representation. It first offers a discussion of the recent institutional and representational turn in democratic theory. Four ideals are identified that speak to concerns with women’s political representation: (i) democratic representation connects the institutional and the societal, (ii) democratic representation is creative and educative, (iii) democratic representation is deliberative, and (iv) democratic representation unifies and builds trust. These normative ideals are very promising but on their own only go so far. Added to them are the feminist principles of inclusiveness, responsiveness, and egalitarianism. Together these produce the feminist democratic effects that the authors seek. To this end, an introduction is provided to the design thinking and the specificities of the design practices envisaged. Chapter 4 is, therefore, where the authors’ approach is situated within the emerging literature on democratic design.