Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Language and Regionalist Politics: The Dynamics of Ethnolinguistic Identity in Mozambique

在Michael Silverstein博士的指导下，研究生Erik Lee Skjon将研究非洲民族语言认同的空间表达中一个看似矛盾的现象。虽然民族语言认同在非洲城市环境中最为突出，但其最强烈的政治表现出现在区域主义冲突中。研究人员提出，这两个事实是相关的。他的假设是：(1)语言文化区域是非洲民族语言认同被客观化和认可的主要空间基础；(2)这个基础主要依赖于将民族语言意识中心与区域网络和历史统一起来的实践。研究将在莫桑比克进行，那里的种族-区域主义问题在其15年内战和战后政治中起了决定性作用。研究人员将比较德尔加多角省尚卡-马库瓦方言地区的三种区域网络。每个网络将不同的山坎地区与省会城市连接起来，并且只由说山卡语的主体居住：半正式的行业协会；精神占有联想；和Ikirimu舞蹈团。研究者将使用话语和符号学分析来调查山坎主体如何以及在多大程度上在这些网络中解释他们的地区和民族身份是辩证相关的，一个前提是另一个。这将通过记录每个网络特有的具体实践、话语类型和口述历史来实现，然后分析假设为区域身份辩证法的通用的选择语用、参考和形式相关性：也就是说，将相互关联的地点与区域常识联系起来，并将其主题定位为民族语言意识的区域中心。这项研究很重要，因为它可能会超越这个特殊的案例研究，揭示共同的语言和文化因素，这些因素是非洲民族-地区主义政治的基础和动机。这项研究也将对研究生的教育做出重大贡献。

Graduate student Erik Lee Skjon, under the supervision of Dr. Michael Silverstein, will investigate a seeming paradox in the spatial articulation of ethnolinguistic identity in Africa. Although ethnolinguistic identity is most salient in African urban contexts, its most intense political manifestations occur in regionalist conflicts. The researcher proposes that these twin facts are related. He hypothesizes that: (1), the lingua-cultural region serves as the principal spatial ground through which African ethnolinguistic identity is objectified and recognized; and (2), this ground depends crucially on practices that unify centers of ethnolinguistic consciousness with regional networks and histories. Research will be conducted in Mozambique, where the problematic of ethno-regionalism has played a determinant role in its 15-year civil war and postwar politics. The researcher will compare three kinds of regional network in the Shanka-Makhuwa dialect region of Cabo Delgado province. Each network connects various Shankan locales to the provincial capital and is inhabited exclusively by Shanka-speaking subjects: semi-formal trade guilds; spirit possession associations; and Ikirimu dance troupes. The researcher will employ discourse and semiotic analysis to investigate how and to what extent Shankan subjects construe their region and ethnic identity to be dialectically related, one presupposing the other, in these networks. This will be achieved by documenting the embodied practices, discourse genres, and oral histories particular to each network, and then analyzing select pragmatic, referential, and formal correlates hypothesized to be generic to a region-identity dialectic: that is, ones that affiliate interconnected locales to a common sense of region, and orient their subjects to regional centers of ethnolinguistic consciousness. The research is important because it may go beyond this particular case study to uncover the common linguistic and cultural elements underlying and motivating Africa's ethno-regionalist politics. The research also will contribute significantly to the education of a graduate student.