Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Anthropology of Community Politics in Indigenous Communities

关于土著社区的科学工作在传统道德价值观与主权政治组织要求之间建立了明确的联系。学者们所知较少的是，土著社会组织如何以文化多样性的方式发展，以及主权在土著背景下的文化和道德意义。这个项目，培训研究生如何进行严格的实地科学考察，旨在了解文化和道德价值观在组织发展中的作用。作为一个采用合作民族志方法的项目，让纳瓦霍人参与数据的收集和存档，该项目还将扩大一个代表性不足的群体在科学领域的参与。特蕾莎·蒙托亚在纽约大学的弗雷德·迈尔斯博士的监督下将进行一个为期15个月的民族志项目，探索纳瓦霍民族在两个邻近定居点的社区政治生活：松泉，亚利桑那州（橡树泉章）和桑德斯，亚利桑那州（纳哈塔Dziil章）。具体而言，本研究探讨了政治主权-通过联邦条约义务和随后的立法行为建立的一个法律的类别-和文化理想的K 'e，纳瓦霍语术语，强调亲属关系和社会组织的道德价值之间的相关性。基于初步研究观察和分析当地会议，研究者假设，在每个位置，社区成员利用文化和政治话语，以支持和维持他们的组织努力。这些话语利用参与观察，焦点小组和半结构化访谈的方法的差异就业的调查允许当代纳瓦霍社区行动的比较分析。该项目汇集了来自当前民族志的见解，涉及亲属关系和相关性，主权和纳瓦霍主体性的关键土著方法，以及代表性政治的人类学。总之，这些文献告知的假设，无论是文化还是政治框架都没有充分帮助社会科学家了解当代纳瓦霍社区组织。研究者假设，社区政治活动并不局限于官方的制度结构和文化的K 'E的理解不能孤立的政治野心。方法包括使用访谈，焦点小组，并在纳瓦霍社区的松树泉和Nahata Dziil参与观察，以及有针对性的档案研究和当地社区组织的合作民族志方法。通过考察纳瓦霍人日常生活中社会和政治相关性话语的汇合，该项目对人类学学科做出了三大贡献：（1）它重新构建了所谓传统土著价值观的表达与政治主权的制定之间通常被认为是对立的关系;（2）它考察了纳瓦霍人如何重新使用相关性习语，而不是回到先前稳定的过去，而是创造性地参与并挑战针对他们的身体，历史和社区的不可持续的提取过程;（3）围绕着部落和社区政治中日益多义和多样化的主权表达，探讨了印第安人乡村的新发展。

Scientific work on indigenous communities has established a clear linkage between traditional moral values and the claims for sovereign political organization. What scholars know less about is how indigenous social organizations develop in culturally diverse ways, and what sovereignty means, culturally and morally, within an indigenous context. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, seeks to understand the role of cultural and moral values in organizational development. As a project which employs a collaborative ethnographic approach, engaging Navajo in the gathering and archiving of data, the project would also broaden the participation of an underrepresented group in the sciences.Teresa Montoya, under the supervision of Dr. Fred Myers of the New York University will conduct a 15-month ethnographic project exploring community political life on the Navajo Nation in two neighboring settlements: Pine Springs, Arizona (Oak Springs Chapter) and Sanders, Arizona (Nahata Dziil Chapter). Specifically, this research examines the correlation between political sovereignty - a legal category established through federal treaty obligations and subsequent acts of legislation - and the cultural ideal of K'e, a Navajo term that emphasizes the moral value of kinship and social organization. Based on preliminary research observing and analyzing local meetings, the researcher hypothesizes that in each location, community members draw upon both cultural and political discourses to support and sustain their organizational efforts. An investigation of the differential employment of these discourses utilizing methods of participant observation, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews allows for a comparative analysis of contemporary Navajo community action. This project brings together insights from current ethnographies addressing kinship and relatedness, critical Indigenous approaches to sovereignty and Navajo subjectivity, and the anthropology of representational politics. Taken together this literature informs the hypothesis that neither the cultural nor the political frame has adequately helped social scientists understand contemporary Navajo community organization. The researcher hypothesizes that community political activity is not limited to official institutional structures and that cultural understandings of K'e cannot be isolated from political ambitions. Methods include the use of interviews, focus groups, and participant observation in the Navajo communities of Pine Springs and Nahata Dziil, as well as targeted archival research and collaborative ethnographic methods with local community organizations. By examining the confluence of social and political discourses of relatedness in everyday Navajo lives, this project offers three major contributions to the discipline of anthropology: (1) it reframes what is often presumed to be an oppositional relationship between the expression of so-called traditional Indigenous values and enactment of political sovereignties; (2) it examines how Navajo people are reworking idioms of relatedness not to return to a prior stable past but to creatively engage with and perhaps challenge unsustainable processes of extraction that target their bodies, histories, and communities; and (3) it explores new developments in Indian Country around the increasingly polysemic and multifarious expressions of sovereignty in tribal and community politics.