Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropology of Community Politics in Indigenous Communities

博士论文研究：原住民社区社区政治人类学

• 批准号: 1528704
• 负责人: Fred Myers
• 金额: $ 1.24万
• 依托单位: New York University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-15 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1528704&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Anthropology; Community

Scientific work on indigenous communities has established a clear linkage between traditional moral values and the claims for sovereign political organization. What scholars know less about is how indigenous social organizations develop in culturally diverse ways, and what sovereignty means, culturally and morally, within an indigenous context. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, seeks to understand the role of cultural and moral values in organizational development. As a project which employs a collaborative ethnographic approach, engaging Navajo in the gathering and archiving of data, the project would also broaden the participation of an underrepresented group in the sciences.Teresa Montoya, under the supervision of Dr. Fred Myers of the New York University will conduct a 15-month ethnographic project exploring community political life on the Navajo Nation in two neighboring settlements: Pine Springs, Arizona (Oak Springs Chapter) and Sanders, Arizona (Nahata Dziil Chapter). Specifically, this research examines the correlation between political sovereignty - a legal category established through federal treaty obligations and subsequent acts of legislation - and the cultural ideal of K'e, a Navajo term that emphasizes the moral value of kinship and social organization. Based on preliminary research observing and analyzing local meetings, the researcher hypothesizes that in each location, community members draw upon both cultural and political discourses to support and sustain their organizational efforts. An investigation of the differential employment of these discourses utilizing methods of participant observation, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews allows for a comparative analysis of contemporary Navajo community action. This project brings together insights from current ethnographies addressing kinship and relatedness, critical Indigenous approaches to sovereignty and Navajo subjectivity, and the anthropology of representational politics. Taken together this literature informs the hypothesis that neither the cultural nor the political frame has adequately helped social scientists understand contemporary Navajo community organization. The researcher hypothesizes that community political activity is not limited to official institutional structures and that cultural understandings of K'e cannot be isolated from political ambitions. Methods include the use of interviews, focus groups, and participant observation in the Navajo communities of Pine Springs and Nahata Dziil, as well as targeted archival research and collaborative ethnographic methods with local community organizations. By examining the confluence of social and political discourses of relatedness in everyday Navajo lives, this project offers three major contributions to the discipline of anthropology: (1) it reframes what is often presumed to be an oppositional relationship between the expression of so-called traditional Indigenous values and enactment of political sovereignties; (2) it examines how Navajo people are reworking idioms of relatedness not to return to a prior stable past but to creatively engage with and perhaps challenge unsustainable processes of extraction that target their bodies, histories, and communities; and (3) it explores new developments in Indian Country around the increasingly polysemic and multifarious expressions of sovereignty in tribal and community politics.

关于土著社区的科学研究在传统道德价值观和对主权政治组织的主张之间建立了明确的联系。学者们对土著社会组织如何以不同的文化方式发展，以及主权在土著背景下在文化和道德上意味着什么，知之甚少。这个项目培训研究生如何进行严格的、有经验的科学实地考察，试图了解文化和道德价值观在组织发展中的作用。作为一个采用协作人种学方法的项目，让纳瓦霍人参与收集和归档数据，该项目还将扩大一个代表性不足的群体在科学领域的参与。特蕾莎·蒙托亚将在纽约大学的弗雷德·迈尔斯博士的监督下，开展一个为期15个月的人种学项目，探索纳瓦霍民族在两个相邻定居点：亚利桑那州的松树泉(橡树泉分会)和亚利桑那州的桑德斯(纳哈塔·齐伊尔分会)的社区政治生活。具体地说，这项研究考察了政治主权--一个通过联邦条约义务和随后的立法行为确立的法律范畴--与K‘e文化理想之间的相关性，K’e是纳瓦霍语的一个术语，强调亲属关系和社会组织的道德价值。基于观察和分析当地会议的初步研究，研究者假设，在每个地点，社区成员都利用文化和政治话语来支持和维持他们的组织努力。利用参与者观察、焦点小组和半结构化访谈的方法对这些话语的不同使用进行调查，可以对当代纳瓦霍人的社区行动进行比较分析。该项目汇集了当前关于亲属关系和亲属关系的人种学、对主权和纳瓦霍人主体性的批判性土著方法以及代表性政治的人类学的见解。综上所述，这些文献揭示了这样一种假设，即无论是文化框架还是政治框架都没有充分帮助社会科学家理解当代纳瓦霍社区组织。研究人员假设，社区政治活动并不局限于官方机构结构，对K‘E的文化理解不能与政治野心分开。方法包括在松泉和Nahata Dziil的纳瓦霍社区使用访谈、焦点小组和参与者观察，以及有针对性的档案研究和与当地社区组织合作的民族志方法。通过研究日常纳瓦霍人生活中关于关联的社会和政治话语的融合，这个项目为人类学学科提供了三个主要贡献：(1)它重新构建了通常被认为是所谓的传统土著价值观的表达和政治主权的确立之间的对立关系；(2)它研究了纳瓦霍人如何修改关联的习语，不是回到以前稳定的过去，而是创造性地参与，也许是挑战针对他们的身体、历史和社区的不可持续的提取过程；以及(3)它探索在部落和社区政治中日益多义性和多样化的主权表达周围的印度国家的新发展。