Monitoring Rapid Social Change in Southeastern Mexico

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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.