Dissertation Research: The Ancient Hawaiian World-System Through the Eyes of Russian Explorers

9634211邓恩本论文改进研究涉及科学观察者的特权地位，当研究人员全神贯注于使用汇总数据时，这一地位在很大程度上没有得到承认。这个项目的独特之处在于，通过探险家的眼睛，研究一个小世界--它正在融入一个不断扩大的更大的世界系统。在19世纪早期，古代夏威夷群岛的小世界体系被改造并并入现代世界体系之前，我们将对其进行考察。这将通过研究不同类型数据的相对有效性，并使用这些数据来推断不同政治在夏威夷世界体系中的结构位置来实现。正在测试的一般假设是，关于19世纪之交夏威夷社会复杂性的“已知”并不是仅仅来自对事实的观察，而是探险家们的感知是由社会和历史环境塑造的。这项研究的数据主要来自俄罗斯航海家的账户。通过审查特定个人对事件的表述，将检验世界体系方法的几个论点，例如关于更多和更少等级邻居之间的相互作用。这项研究似乎表明，有必要从对总体交换分布的广泛研究转向对交换行为的基于背景的知识的更敏感研究。***

9634211 Dunn This Dissertation Improvement research deals with the privileged status of the scientific observer, which for the most part goes unrecognized when the researcher is preoccupied with using aggregate data. The uniqueness of the project is to study one small world-system at the moment of it's incorporation into an expanding larger one through the eyes of explorers. The small world-system of the ancient Hawaiian archipelago before that system was transformed and incorporated in to the modern world-system in the early nineteenth century will be examined. This will be accomplished through studying the relative validity of different kinds of data and using these data to make inferences about structural positions of different polities within the Hawaiian world-system. The general hypothesis being tested is that what is "known" about the social complexity of Hawaii at the turn of 19th century did not arise from observation of facts alone, but the perceptions of the explorers were shaped by social and historical circumstances. The data for this research is mainly from accounts of Russian voyagers. Through examining particular individuals' representations of events several theses of the world-system approach, e.g. concerning the interplay between more and less hierarchical neighbors will be tested. The study seemingly suggests a need to move away from broad studies of total exchange distribution to more sensitive studies of contextual based knowledge about the exchange acts. ***