Doctoral Dissertation Research: Emerging Futures: The Politics of Cultural Production Among Indigenous Kanak Youth

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New York University doctoral student, Tate LeFevre, supervised by Dr. Fred Myers, will undertake research on the dynamic processes that produce new indigenous citizen identities when former colonies become independent. This research will center primarily on the networks of cultural production that evolve outside of centralized institutional frameworks as new generations of activists configure, contest, and share what it means to be indigenous. Understanding these processes from the ground up is critical to understanding the evolving institutions and problems of the modern nation state.The research will be carried out in the context of the intensified political stakes generated by an upcoming referendum on New Caledonia's independence from France. The researcher will undertake 12 months of anthropological field research in Nouméa, the country's capital. She will employ a mixed-methods strategy for data collection, including: participant observation, video and audio recording, collection and analysis of life stories, conversational analysis, archival research, and social network analysis.By analyzing how indigenous identities are formulated and expressed, this research will contribute to understanding "indigeneity" as an increasingly important strategy of self-representation and resistance around the world. This will contribute to social scientific theory of how independent modern nations develop in an increasingly integrated world. It also will help to inform policies for international relations with post-colonial countries. Funding this research supports the training of a social scientist.