Migration and Knowledge

David Griffith博士将研究移民到美国对派遣社区传统知识系统的影响。从拉丁美洲和加勒比前往美国目的地的移民继续将收入汇给他们的出生地社区，用于投资于生产制度、房屋建设和加强社区基础设施。这种行为明确地将全球现象带到了当地，挑战了当地的知识体系，以适应新的政治经济条件。这里提出的研究将集中在墨西哥韦拉克鲁斯的一个地区和洪都拉斯的奥兰乔的一个地区的移民对当地知识的影响。来自三个国家的研究人员将使用一系列补充长期人种学研究的方法，比较移民家庭和非移民家庭，以及移民家庭成员和非移民家庭成员对当地生产制度的了解。这项研究之所以重要，是因为它将有助于社会科学理论，即寻求将对当地环境的密切、长期研究与在跨民族和其他超越社区的过程中进行的多地点、多国研究相结合。当地环境继续对人类行为产生强大影响，成为终身认同的场所，吸引了对住房和土地的大量投资，并产生了关于自然资源、生态过程和特定生态系统和生产制度独有的其他特征的重要知识库。这项研究将把认知人类学和地方知识研究的见解与迁徙研究的见解结合起来。因此，这项调查将汇集两个重要的社会科学调查线索，以了解美洲移民发送地区和移民接收地区之间的复杂关系。这项研究还将促进墨西哥、洪都拉斯和美国学者和研究生之间的合作。

Dr. David Griffith will undertake research on the effects that migration to the United States has on traditional knowledge systems in sending communities. Migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean to U.S. destinations continue to remit earnings to their natal communities for investment in productive regimes, house construction, and the enhancement of community infrastructure. Such behaviors explicitly bring global phenomena to bear on local settings, challenging local knowledge systems to accommodate new political economic conditions. The research proposed here will focus on the impacts of migration on local knowledge in one region in Veracruz, Mexico and one region in Olancho, Honduras. Using a battery of methods that complement long-term ethnographic research, investigators from three countries will compare migrant and non-migrant households, as well as migrating family members with non-migrating family members, regarding their knowledge of local production regimes.The research is important because it will contribute to social science theory that seeks to integrate close, long-term studies of local settings with multi-site, multinational studies done in the context of transnationalism and other processes that transcend communities. Local settings continue to exert powerful influence over human behavior, serving as life-long seats of identity, attracting significant investments in housing and land, and generating important knowledge bases about natural resources, ecological processes, and other features unique to specific ecosystems and production regimes. This research will combine insights from cognitive anthropology and local knowledge studies with insights from migration research. This investigation will thus draw together two important strands of social scientific inquiry to understand the complex relations between migrant-sending and immigrant-receiving regions in the Americas.The research also will foster collaboration among Mexican, Honduran, and U.S. scholars and graduate students.