Doctoral Dissertation Research: Obligation and Relationality in the Wake of Critical Events

重大事件可以催生新的社会关系形式，或支撑新的集体生活模式。关键事件(重大事件，如自然灾害、冲突或重新定义社会类别的经济危机)通常是在孤立事件之后进行探索的。这个博士论文项目调查了人们对他人的责任感是如何在随着时间的推移而积累的多个关键事件的背景下被定义、经历和实现的。现有的关于义务的研究侧重于互惠和交换，倾向于对义务的恳求如何形成并将人们彼此联系起来进行线性描述。相反，这篇论文的研究将关注人们对他人的责任感在层层关键事件之后得到缓解和质疑的错综复杂的过程。除了支持博士生的培训外，该项目的成果还将与学术受众以及人道主义和文化非政府组织分享。该项目追溯了不同的反应模式，包括援助和文件，人们利用这些模式来应对层层关键事件。这一多地点的民族志将涵盖不同世代的成员和不同地点的居民，并将采用半结构化访谈、参与者观察和口述生活史访谈相结合的方式，探索引导人们对事件的反应的因素，这些反应如何导致社会性和社区边界被(重新)配置，以及关键事件的含义如何随着时间的推移而变化。通过这样做，这拓宽了义务人类学研究的空间和时间范围，并通过更好地了解社区边界的形成和重新设定的过程和力量，为社会科学做出贡献。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Critical events can catalyze new forms of social relations or anchor new modes of collective life. Critical events (major occurrences, such as natural disasters, conflict, or economic crises that redefine social categories) have typically been explored in the aftermath of isolated incidents. This doctoral dissertation project investigates how people’s sense of obligation to others comes to be defined, experienced, and materialized in the context of multiple critical events that accrue over time. Existing research on obligation focuses on reciprocity and exchange and tends to paint a linear account of how solicitations of obligations form and bind people to one another. This dissertation research will instead attend to the tangled processes through which people’s sense of obligation to others is brought into relief and called into question in the wake of layered critical events. In addition to supporting the training of a doctoral student, the findings from this project will be shared with academic audiences as well as humanitarian and cultural non-governmental organizations.The project traces different modes of response, including assistance and documentation, that people draw on to respond to layers of critical events. This multi-sited ethnography will encompass members of different generations and residents of different locales, and will deploy a combination of semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and oral life history interviews to explore the factors that guide people’s responses to events, how sociality and community boundaries become (re)configured as a result of these responses, and how meanings of critical events change as they accrue over time. In doing so, this broadens the spatial and temporal scope of the anthropological study of obligation and contributes to social science by better understanding the processes and forces through which boundaries of community are made and remade.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.