Estrangement from the Public Sphere: Economic Change, Democracy and Social Division in North Carolina

授予北卡罗来纳大学的这一奖项资助了几位人类学家，他们研究了该地区5个地方的地方政治参与。该项目的目标是研究人们参与当地政治活动的情况。将分析经济结构调整的影响，因为它们影响到“公众”的地方观念，而“公众”的利益应该得到服务。将审查人力资本的社区组成部分在多大程度上因当地群体与参与疏远而发生差异，无论是通过投票还是通过非正式的行为参与当地公共机构，如学校、执法部门和保健诊所。这些社区的主要经济取向是公共部门、私营企业部门，还是包括退休和教育社区在内的以消费为导向的社区，这一点各不相同。将在这五个地方的每一个地方开展广泛深入的地方民族志研究，并对地方的“争斗场面”或在公共领域开展的资源冲突进行个案研究。在田野工作结束时，将对其中一个社区的300人进行最后调查，以了解人种学材料如何为调查研究提供信息。这项研究之所以重要，是因为它关注的是一个非常令人担忧的问题：美国人力资本公共领域的社区组成部分的保存和扩展，在这个领域，公众关心的问题和共同的资源问题都在辩论中。它将增进我们对不断变化的美国政治经济如何影响当地融合和隔离做法的理解，这些人因种族、民族或其他特征而被视为不同的人。所使用的方法侧重于地方文化叙述和对重大冲突案例的解释，将阐明对差异的文化解释如何导致公共资源分配差异和塑造群体关系的基本过程。

This award to the University of North Carolina funds several anthropologists studying local political participation in 5 places in the region. The goal of the project is to study people's participation in local political activities. The effects of economic restructuring will be analyzed as they affect local conceptions of `the public` whose interest should be served. The extent to which the community component of Human Capital varies as local groups are estranged from participation, both formally through voting and informally through behavioral participation in local public institutions such as schools, law enforcement and health clinics will be examined. The communities will vary by whether their primary economic orientation is from the public sector, the private firm sector, or whether the communities are `consumption` oriented, including retirement and educational communities. Extensive in-depth local ethnographies will be carried out in each of the five places, as well as case studies of local `dramas of contestation`, or conflicts over resources carried out in the public sphere. At the end of the fieldwork a final survey of 300 individuals in one of the communities will be carried out to see how the ethnographic material can inform survey research. This research is important because it focuses on an issue of great concern: the preservation and extension of the community component of the Human Capital of America's public sphere, where matters of public concern and common resource problems are debated. It will advance our understanding of how the changing American political economy affects local integrating and segregating practices among people viewed as different because of their race, ethnicity, or other characteristics. The methodology used, of focusing on local cultural narratives and interpretations of significant cases of conflict, will shed light on basic processes of how cultural interpretations of differences lead to differences in public resource distributions and shape group relations.