AHRC-NSF MOU: Scale, Ambiguity and Experimentation: A Collaborative Ethnography of Regional Government in Peru

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project is a collaboration between anthropologists Dr. Deborah A. Poole (Johns Hopkins University) and Dr. Penelope Harvey (The London School of Economics and Political Science), which is being co-funded by the National Science Foundation and the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council through a Memorandum of Understanding between the two agencies. Poole and Harvey will undertake research on the contemporary nation state as a multiscalar entity, to investigate how it acquires political and affective force at the interface between local, regional and transnational levels of organization and practice. Their research will be conducted in Cusco, Peru, where they will collect data on new forms of regulatory and technical systems developed in the wake of a governmental administration re-organization that has given new power to regional governments. The research will consider two domains of state authority in particular: (1) law, in the form of the international treaties and conventions that regulate how nation states govern indigenous populations and the environment; and (2) infrastructural engineering, more specifically the metrics, techniques, and standards of engineering works that frame the ways in which modern states transform public space and infrastructural systems. Their ten-month ethnographic will focus on controversies surrounding technical practices, legal interpretation, and expert knowledge in a World Bank-funded public works project that is both administered by the Regional Government of Cusco and subject to international indigenous, environmental, and regulatory laws. The research team will trace these controversies as they unfold in relationship to two specific activities within the project: the construction of a by-pass around an important archaeological site, and a territorial mapping program designed to reorganize and rationalize urban and rural land.Through its novel combination of perspectives drawn from the social science of law, and of science and technology, this research will make significant contributions to social science methodology and theory. Findings from this project will contribute to better understanding of the structure and fucntioning of contempoary state systems. The project also will advance international research and policy-development collaborations between the United States, Britain, and Peru.