Monitoring Rapid Social Change in Southeastern Mexico

该项目涉及斯坦福大学文化人类学家的人种学研究。该项目旨在监测和比较墨西哥恰帕斯高原两个土著社区发生的经济、政治和人口变化，近30年来，这两个社区的变化一直在不同的项目中绘制出来。这一地区曾在1994年发生过萨帕蒂斯塔叛军的武装叛乱，是墨西哥国家政府和外国观察员高度关注的焦点。要研究的社区体现了影响整个该区域和拉丁美洲其他类似区域土著社会的更广泛的动态。Zinacantan的一个社区500多年来一直是当地的土著精英，围绕资本化的农业和小企业区分开来；查穆拉的另一个社区多年来土地贫瘠，传统上依赖农业工资工作。在这两个社区，经济变化最近使当地政治派系分化，一个认同国家政党，另一个认同国家(和国际)宗教改宗教派。这两个社区都在沿着传统上固定的种族边界经历新的流动。调查员将利用人种学参与者观察法，并结合自1960年代初以来记录的一起案件和1970年代初以来记录的另一起案件的家庭一级的当地社区普查，更新有关家庭和个人的人口、政治、社会、经济和文化信息。这些人口普查将进行协调、计算机化，并放入关系数据库，该数据库将与当地研究机构ECOSUR联系起来，汇编与卫生有关的社会经济数据，供区域规划者使用。这一数据集的优势将是相对较长的时间跨度，丰富的民族志描述的文化背景，以及明确关注个人和家庭而不是社区。这个项目很重要，因为分析家将使用收集的数据来解释这一地区在创造就业机会、社会和政治组织以及宗教皈依方面的不同活动，该地区正在经历动态、迅速和爆炸性的变化。对于试图解释事件进程的社会科学家以及试图改变这些趋势的策划者来说，这将是一个极其宝贵的资源。

This project involves the ethnographic research of cultural anthropologists based at Stanford University. The project is to monitor and compare the economic, political and demographic transformations occurring in two highland Chiapas, Mexico indigenous communities whose changes have been charted in separate projects for almost 30 years. This area has seen an armed rebellion by Zapatista rebels in 1994, and is the focus of high interest by the national Mexican government as well as foreign observers. The communities to be studied exemplify broader dynamics affecting indigenous society throughout this region and in other similar regions in Latin America. One community in Zinacantan has been the local indigenous elite for over 500 years, and has differentiated around capitalized farming and small business enterprises; the other in Chamula has been land-poor for many years and has relied traditionally on agrarian wage work. In both communities economic changes have recently factionalized local politics, in one case identifying with national political parties, in the other with national (and international) religious proselytizing sects. Both communities are experiencing new flows along what were traditionally fixed ethnic boundaries. Using methods of ethnographic participant-observation coupled with household-level censuses of local communities that have been recorded since the early 1960s in one case and the early 1970s in another case, the investigators will update demographic, political, social, economic and cultural information on families and individuals. These censuses will be coordinated, computerized, and placed into relational databases, which will be linked with a local research institution ECOSUR, compiling health-related socio-economic data for use by regional planners. The strength of this data set will be the relatively long time span, the rich ethnographically-described cultural context, and the clear focus on individuals and households instead of on communities. This project is important because the data to be gathered will be used by analysts to explain differential activities in job creation, social and political organization, and religious conversions in this region which is undergoing dynamic rapid and explosive change. It will be an immensely valuable resource for social scientists trying to explain the course of events as well as planners trying to modify these trends.