Doctoral Dissertation Research: Historical Memory, Temporality, and Cultural Identity

管理人类集体内部和集体之间的社会差异对决策和公民参与构成了独特的挑战。社会建构的关于差异的观念继续对个体的互动方式产生强大的影响。然而，尽管社会科学家和历史学家已经将另类概念与历史上的事件和过程联系起来，但很少有实证研究关注日常行为者自己如何在日常社会生活过程中参与将身份与历史联系起来。因此，本研究项目探讨了时间变化或连续性的普通经验如何塑造关于文化和国家身份的观念，以及这些个人和集体身份的转变观念如何反过来影响历史叙事的文化意义。该项目对非正式经济场所进行了案例研究，培养学生的实证、科学数据收集和分析方法。在加州大学伯克利分校查尔斯·布里格斯的指导下，博士生Jesus Gutierrez将探索社会差异的概念是如何被时间性、记忆和历史的概念所中介的。这项研究将在巴西南部进行，这是一个理想的地点，因为在这里，种族观念在告知公众对国家归属和地方历史的态度方面已经很明显。作为一个案例研究，该研究将集中在阿雷格里港市的艺术家网络上，他们在各种流行和外部艺术形式中工作。通过参与者观察、媒体和文献分析、网络映射和民族志访谈等研究方法，研究人员将研究种族的重要性以及每个艺术家的工艺和社会生活中出现的历史因素。通过与邻近的观众、顾客和政府官员进行广泛的民族志接触，他将确定艺术品和表演的流通如何参与到远远超出个人和地方的种族和国家身份观念的转变中。这项研究的发现将促进科学和大众对历史、种族和民族认同之间关系的理解，并将有助于产生关于全球民间艺术形式的历史和社会政治意义的更精确的理论。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The management of social differences within and across human collectives has posed unique challenges for policymaking and civic participation. Socially constructed ideas about difference continue to exert a powerful influence on how individuals interact. However, although social scientists and historians have connected notions of alterity to events and processes in the historical past, few empirical studies have paid attention to how everyday actors themselves participate in making links between identity and history over the course of daily social life. Accordingly, this research project asks how the ordinary experience of temporal change or continuity shape ideas about cultural and national identity, and how these shifting notions of individual and collective identity in turn impact the cultural significance of historical narratives. This project, which trains a student in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, conducts a case study of informal economic site. Doctoral student Jesus Gutierrez, supervised by Charles Briggs at the University of California-Berkeley, will explore how notions of social difference are mediated by conceptions of temporality, memory, and history. The research will take place in southern Brazil, an ideal site as this is a context where ideas about race have been pronounced in informing public attitudes toward national belonging and local history. As a case study, the research will be focused around a network of artists who work across a variety of popular and outsider art forms in the city of Porto Alegre. Through research methods that include participant observation, media and document analysis, network mapping, and ethnographic interviews, the researcher will examine both the significance of race and the emergence of historical elements in each artist's craft and social life. Through extended ethnographic engagement with proximate audiences, customers and government officials, he will determine how the circulation of artworks and performances participates in shifting perceptions of racial and national identity that reach far beyond the individual and the local. Findings from this research will advance scientific and popular understandings of the relationship between history, race and national identity, and it will contribute to the production of more precise theories about the historical and socio-political significance of folk art forms around the globe.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.