The ‘When,’ Not the ‘What,’ of Emirati National Identity The modern history of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a story about fundamental and rapid societal change. One important consequence of this profound change for Emiratis is integral to the lived experience of modernity: namely, the perception of risk and fragmentation. In media and scholarship, the problematique of Emirati national identity is often generalized to a story about a bounded group of Emiratis extended between the perceived identity threat from migrants on the one hand, and the cultural excavation of nationhood on the other. As a corrective to this representation, however, I study how stories about national identity are always filtered into Emirati interaction with non-nationals by distinctive spaces, localized social plots and rooted interaction rituals. My argument for the importance of doing so is this: negotiated forms of national identity stories in concrete interaction are not necessarily so binary and in any event lesser fixed than the dominant version. By probing into locally textured presences and absences of identity boundaries, in other words, the question is transformed from the ‘what’ to the ‘when’ of Emirati national identity. I flesh out this argument by zooming in on the Emirate of Ras al Khaimah (RAK), a politically and economically disadvantaged emirate with a long history of rivalry and fragmentation vis-à-vis Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Since the development of the federation is largely led by the oil-rich emirate of Abu Dhabi, and given the relative difference in power and privileges, it would not seem farfetched to expect local challenges to an Emirati national identity in RAK. Yet my ethnographic fieldwork in RAK brings out a more subtle story. Spanning from August-December 2013 and March-April 2014, my field work engages in participant observation and semi-structured interviews with youth (the target audience of national identity projects) in Ras al Khaimah (RAK), observations of National Day celebrations and student interaction at the American University of Ras al Kahimah. On the shoulders of that material, it turns out that in RAK, stories about an Emirati identity under cultural siege are interweaved with stories about a locally unique close interaction between Emiratis and non-Emiratis. While my study thus engages itself with a social scientifically and empirically understudied northern emirate, the suggested road ahead is also of a general nature: namely, to study the constantly unfolding median lines between micro- and macro-level imaginings about national identity and interaction.