Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Language and Regionalist Politics: The Dynamics of Ethnolinguistic Identity in Mozambique

研究生Erik Lee Skjon将在Michael Silverstein博士的指导下，研究非洲民族语言认同的空间表达中的一个看似矛盾的问题。虽然民族语言认同在非洲城市环境中最为突出，但其最强烈的政治表现出现在地区性冲突中。研究人员提出，这两个事实是相关的。他假设：(1)语言文化区是非洲民族语言认同被对象化和被承认的主要空间基础；(2)这一基础关键取决于将民族语言意识中心与区域网络和历史相统一的做法。研究将在莫桑比克进行，那里有问题的种族地区主义在该国长达15年的内战和战后政治中发挥了决定性作用。研究人员将对德尔加杜角省山卡-马库瓦方言地区的三种区域网络进行比较。每个网络将不同的尚坎地区与省会连接起来，居住着专门讲尚卡语的主体：半正式的贸易协会、灵魂附体协会和Ikiriu舞蹈团。研究人员将使用话语和符号学分析来调查在这些网络中，山坎受试者如何以及在多大程度上将他们的地区和种族认同辩证地联系在一起，一个预设另一个。这将通过记录每个网络特有的具体实践、话语体裁和口述历史来实现，然后分析选定的语用、参照和形式上的关联，假设这些关联属于区域认同辩证法：即将相互关联的地点与共同的区域意识联系在一起，并将其主题定位于民族语言意识的区域中心。这项研究很重要，因为它可能超越这一特定的案例研究，揭示非洲种族地区主义政治背后和动机下的共同语言和文化因素。这项研究也将对研究生的教育做出重大贡献。

Graduate student Erik Lee Skjon, under the supervision of Dr. Michael Silverstein, will investigate a seeming paradox in the spatial articulation of ethnolinguistic identity in Africa. Although ethnolinguistic identity is most salient in African urban contexts, its most intense political manifestations occur in regionalist conflicts. The researcher proposes that these twin facts are related. He hypothesizes that: (1), the lingua-cultural region serves as the principal spatial ground through which African ethnolinguistic identity is objectified and recognized; and (2), this ground depends crucially on practices that unify centers of ethnolinguistic consciousness with regional networks and histories. Research will be conducted in Mozambique, where the problematic of ethno-regionalism has played a determinant role in its 15-year civil war and postwar politics. The researcher will compare three kinds of regional network in the Shanka-Makhuwa dialect region of Cabo Delgado province. Each network connects various Shankan locales to the provincial capital and is inhabited exclusively by Shanka-speaking subjects: semi-formal trade guilds; spirit possession associations; and Ikirimu dance troupes. The researcher will employ discourse and semiotic analysis to investigate how and to what extent Shankan subjects construe their region and ethnic identity to be dialectically related, one presupposing the other, in these networks. This will be achieved by documenting the embodied practices, discourse genres, and oral histories particular to each network, and then analyzing select pragmatic, referential, and formal correlates hypothesized to be generic to a region-identity dialectic: that is, ones that affiliate interconnected locales to a common sense of region, and orient their subjects to regional centers of ethnolinguistic consciousness. The research is important because it may go beyond this particular case study to uncover the common linguistic and cultural elements underlying and motivating Africa's ethno-regionalist politics. The research also will contribute significantly to the education of a graduate student.