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

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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.