Dissertation Research: Translinguistic Analysis of State-Local Community Relations in Rural Colombia

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award supports the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Michigan. The project is to study how the Colombian national state represents itself in relations with rural peasants through a linguistic analysis of videotaped encounters between the peasants and officials. The particular organization studied will be an agrarian credit bank which makes loans to local farmers. The analysis of conversations will reveal deep-seated expectations, assumptions and understandings of each side about the other. Methods include a survey of 80 households eligible to apply for loans from the credit bank, and repeated long interviews with a sub-sample of 30 of the households to assess their understanding of the national level state. These interviews will provide context for an in-depth analysis of videotaped interactions between peasants and state officials, done in the credit bank, which will reveal the individual and social memories of the community as they form the image of the state.. This research is important because `the state` or the `government` is a cultural construction embedded in narratives and conversations (witness the news accounts in current US society about the government's dealings with local peoples). This study will provide comparative information about how the state is culturally constructed in this Latin American context, which.will be valuable for comparisons and theory building about local perceptions of national issues.