Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Semiotics of Social Differentiation in the Southern Peruvian Andes

研究生吉列尔莫·萨拉斯·卡雷尼奥在布鲁斯曼海姆博士的指导下，将研究等级社会关系的社会语言学构建。研究人员将采取微观，人种学的方法，这将允许理解通常看不见的方面的互动，是在建设和复制的社会不平等的核心，在多文化和多种族的社会。认可和塑造社会等级的社会互动在表面上看起来很相似。这项研究调查的可能性，表面上的相似性可能是误导，如果社会互动同时被理解不同。这项研究将在库斯科地区，秘鲁，因为它有一个适当的语言和种族多样性的选择进行。这项研究将比较一个前种植园的克丘亚语牧民社区、一个克丘亚语农业家社区和库斯科市的一个讲西班牙语的城市人口。研究方法包括参与观察和日常互动的描述，在此过程中，研究者将特别关注非语言符号的实践。研究者还将对被调查者进行开放式访谈，并对自然语言样本进行社会语言学分析。这项研究将超越识别调解差异构建的实践，并关注这些实践被解释的意识形态，这些意识形态本身植根于对社会现实本质的截然不同的想法。因此，这项研究将有助于更好地了解社会差异如何以及为什么在日常生活中持续存在，并最终更好地促进跨文化交流的干预措施。本研究也将有助于研究生的教育。

Graduate student Guillermo Salas Carreño, under the guidance of Dr. Bruce Mannheim, will undertake research on the sociolinguistic construction of hierarchical social relations. The researcher will take a micro-scale, ethnographic approach, which will permit comprehension of usually unseen aspects of interactions that are at the heart of the construction and reproduction of social inequalities in multicultural and multiethnic societies. Social interactions that ratify and shape social hierarchy can look superficially similar. This research investigates the possibility that apparent similarities may be misleading, if the social interactions simultaneously are being understood differently.The research will be carried out in the region of Cuzco, Peru, chosen because it has an appropriate diversity of languages and ethnicities. The research will compare a community of Quechua-speaking herders on a former plantation, a community of Quechua-speaking agriculturalists, and an urban Spanish-speaking population from the city of Cuzco. The research methods include participant observation and description of daily interactions, during which the researcher will pay particular attention to non-verbal semiotic practices. The researcher also will conduct open-ended interviews with a sample of informants, and carry out sociolinguistic analysis of natural speech samples.This research will go beyond identifying the practices that mediate the construction of differences and focus as well on the ideologies through which such practices are interpreted and which themselves are rooted in distinctively different sets of ideas about the nature of social reality. Thus, the research will contribute to better social science understanding of how and why social differences persist in daily life, and ultimately to better interventions for fostering inter-cultural communication. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.