Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Cultural Significance of Informal American Commemorative Sites

博士论文研究：美国非正式纪念地的文化意义

• 批准号: 1756776
• 负责人: John Comaroff
• 金额: $ 2.52万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-05-01 至 2020-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1756776&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Cultural; Significance

Commemorative sites are an essential part of American cultural life, as they provide a space for reflecting, sustaining, and challenging deeply held values and beliefs. Public memorialization often emerges in the aftermath of fraught, sometimes violent, encounters. The spaces dedicated to preserving those social memories can therefore function as much to resolve conflicts as to erase or remember particular identities or histories. This has been well-documented within formal, public spaces, but we know less about the informal mechanisms through which commemorative spaces are established, maintained, and contested. This project, which trains a student in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, conducts a case study of informal forms of memorialization in an American city in order to understand what impact the establishment and maintenance of a commemorative sites has on identity formation, civil society, and violence reduction. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations engaged in policy dialogues related to understanding the origins and motivations for urban violence, and to what extent memorialization attenuates its prevalence. Harvard University anthropology doctoral student Samantha Hawkins, under the supervision of Dr. Laurence Ralph, will explore the inner-city as a complex, affective landscape, wherein urban memorials function as tools of cultural recollection in a context marked by violence. These memorials are also sites of regulation and contestation, made evident by their ongoing obliteration and reinscription. She will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, which is an ideal site to conduct the study as it has the second highest per capita murder rate in the U.S. The makeup of and changes to memorials in Baltimore, the different levels of engagement and investment, the varying reasons that they are erected and/or destroyed, the patterns of aesthetic composition, demonstrate something significant about material claims to space and identity. The project asks how social relations and political ideologies are woven into a topography of memory. Can a material object both reflect political authority and social hierarchies, while also serving efforts of urban black populations to preserve a cultural identity? The investigator will employ a range of qualitative ethnographically-grounded techniques, pursuing three key areas of inquiry: how the memorial functions as an object of argument through which survivors of those lost to violence seek to legitimize their lived experience and assert value; the role of urban space in re-presenting material traces of memory and defining personhood; and the impact of violence in the formation of identities. This research will produce a critical account of memory politics in Baltimore's inner-city, contributing both to the anthropology of race and class, as well as broader scientific debates about memorialization.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

纪念地是美国文化生活的重要组成部分，因为它们提供了一个反思、维持和挑战根深蒂固的价值观和信仰的空间。公众纪念活动通常是在令人担忧的、有时是暴力的遭遇之后出现的。因此，致力于保存这些社会记忆的空间既可以用来消除冲突，也可以用来删除或记住特定的身份或历史。这在正式的公共空间内得到了很好的记录，但我们对纪念性空间的建立、维护和竞争的非正式机制知之甚少。该项目对学生进行实证性、科学性的数据收集和分析方法的培训，对美国一座城市的非正式纪念形式进行案例研究，以了解纪念地的建立和维护对身份形成、公民社会和减少暴力有何影响。除了为人类学研究生的培训提供资金外，该项目还将通过向参与政策对话的组织广泛传播其调查结果来加强科学理解，这些对话涉及了解城市暴力的根源和动机，以及纪念性活动在多大程度上减少了城市暴力的流行。哈佛大学人类学博士生萨曼莎·霍金斯在劳伦斯·拉尔夫博士的指导下，将探索市中心作为一种复杂的、充满情感的景观，在以暴力为标志的背景下，城市纪念碑充当文化回忆的工具。这些纪念馆也是规范和争辩的场所，它们正在进行的销毁和重新规定就是明证。她将在巴尔的摩进行人种学田野调查，巴尔的摩是进行这项研究的理想地点，因为它的人均谋杀率在美国排名第二。巴尔的摩纪念馆的组成和变化，不同程度的投入和投资，它们竖立和/或摧毁的不同原因，审美构成的模式，展示了一些关于物质要求空间和身份的重要东西。该项目询问社会关系和政治意识形态如何编织成记忆的地形图。一件实物既能反映政治权威和社会等级制度，又能服务于城市黑人人口维护文化身份的努力吗？调查员将采用一系列以民族志为基础的定性技术，研究三个关键领域：纪念碑如何作为争论的对象，那些在暴力中丧生的人的幸存者通过它寻求将他们的生活经历合法化并维护价值；城市空间在再现记忆的物质痕迹和定义人格方面的作用；以及暴力在身份形成中的影响。这项研究将对巴尔的摩市中心的记忆政治做出批判性的描述，对种族和阶级的人类学以及关于纪念的更广泛的科学辩论做出贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。