Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Inequality and Social Exclusion in the Southern Andes

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University of Michigan doctoral student Margarita Huayhua, under the guidance of Dr. Bruce Mannheim, will investigate fractal social categories that are situation-specific markers of ethnic hierarchy in the southern Andes. Huayhua will study how these categories are created and re-created by the rhetoric of hierarchy in daily social interaction and how they are displayed by language and body comportment. This research will investigate whether the socially created categories of runa ("native Quechua speaker") and misti ("Spanish speaking local elite") conflict with the ideal of Peruvian citizenship that is understood to offer all individuals equal rights and responsibilities. Huayhua will focus on the face-to-face interactions between Quechua speakers and Spanish speakers in the countryside near Cuzco in order to study how these hierarchical social categories are deployed in everyday social relationships. This investigation will consist of ethnographic and socio-linguistic research on the relationship between runa and misti based on long-term participant observation, in-depth interviews, photos and sketches, body hexis codification, sociolinguistic analysis of interactions and analysis of body comportment a variety of settings. The researcher will examine why and how fractal relationships work and if and how they contribute to establishing a social world in which, although runa are nominal citizens, they are placed in hierarchical relationships inferior to the misti. The research will contribute to better understanding of patterns of inequality and social exclusion and the often unseen ways in which they are created and perpetuated. Understanding how such mechanisms of inequality and exclusion work will contribute to developing policy to address them more concretely and effectively. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.