Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Semiotics of Social Differentiation in the Southern Peruvian Andes

研究生Guillermo Salas Carreño将在Bruce Mannheim博士的指导下，对等级社会关系的社会语言学建构进行研究。研究人员将采取微观尺度的民族志方法，这将允许理解在多元文化和多民族社会中社会不平等的构建和再生产的核心的相互作用的通常看不见的方面。认可和塑造社会等级的社会互动表面上看起来很相似。这项研究调查了如果社会互动同时被不同的理解，表面上的相似性可能会误导的可能性。这项研究将在秘鲁的库斯科地区进行，选择这个地区是因为它有适当的语言和种族多样性。这项研究将比较一个以前的种植园里说克丘亚语的牧民社区、一个说克丘亚语的农学家社区和一个来自库斯科市的说西班牙语的城市人口。研究方法包括参与式观察和日常互动描述，在此过程中，研究者将特别关注非语言符号学实践。研究人员还将对举报人样本进行开放式访谈，并对自然语音样本进行社会语言学分析。这项研究将超越识别调解差异构建的实践，并将重点放在解释这些实践的意识形态上，这些实践本身植根于关于社会现实本质的独特不同的观念。因此，该研究将有助于更好地理解社会差异如何以及为什么在日常生活中持续存在，并最终为促进跨文化交流提供更好的干预措施。这项研究也将有助于研究生的教育。

Graduate student Guillermo Salas Carreño, under the guidance of Dr. Bruce Mannheim, will undertake research on the sociolinguistic construction of hierarchical social relations. The researcher will take a micro-scale, ethnographic approach, which will permit comprehension of usually unseen aspects of interactions that are at the heart of the construction and reproduction of social inequalities in multicultural and multiethnic societies. Social interactions that ratify and shape social hierarchy can look superficially similar. This research investigates the possibility that apparent similarities may be misleading, if the social interactions simultaneously are being understood differently.The research will be carried out in the region of Cuzco, Peru, chosen because it has an appropriate diversity of languages and ethnicities. The research will compare a community of Quechua-speaking herders on a former plantation, a community of Quechua-speaking agriculturalists, and an urban Spanish-speaking population from the city of Cuzco. The research methods include participant observation and description of daily interactions, during which the researcher will pay particular attention to non-verbal semiotic practices. The researcher also will conduct open-ended interviews with a sample of informants, and carry out sociolinguistic analysis of natural speech samples.This research will go beyond identifying the practices that mediate the construction of differences and focus as well on the ideologies through which such practices are interpreted and which themselves are rooted in distinctively different sets of ideas about the nature of social reality. Thus, the research will contribute to better social science understanding of how and why social differences persist in daily life, and ultimately to better interventions for fostering inter-cultural communication. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.