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

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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.