Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Cultural Significance of Informal American Commemorative Sites

纪念场所是美国文化生活的重要组成部分，因为它们为反思，维持和挑战根深蒂固的价值观和信仰提供了空间。公众纪念活动往往出现在令人担忧的，有时是暴力的遭遇之后。因此，致力于保存这些社会记忆的空间既可以消除或记住特定的身份或历史，也可以解决冲突。这在正式的公共空间中有很好的记录，但我们对纪念空间的建立，维护和争议的非正式机制知之甚少。该项目培训一名学生掌握经验和科学数据收集和分析方法，对美国一个城市的非正式纪念形式进行案例研究，以了解纪念场所的建立和维护对身份形成、民间社会和减少暴力的影响。除了为培训一名人类学研究生提供资金外，该项目还将通过向参与政策对话的组织广泛传播其研究结果，以增进科学认识，这些对话涉及了解城市暴力的起源和动机，以及纪念活动在多大程度上减少了城市暴力的发生。哈佛大学人类学博士生萨曼莎·霍金斯在劳伦斯·拉尔夫博士的指导下，将探索作为一个复杂的情感景观的市中心，其中城市纪念馆在暴力的背景下作为文化回忆的工具。这些纪念馆也是管理和维护的场所，这一点从它们不断被抹去和重新刻上的文字中可以看出。她将在巴尔的摩，这是一个理想的网站进行研究，因为它具有第二高的人均谋杀率在美国的化妆和变化，纪念馆在巴尔的摩，参与和投资的不同水平，不同的原因，他们是竖立和/或摧毁，美学构图的模式，展示了一些重要的物质要求空间和身份。该项目探讨了社会关系和政治意识形态是如何编织成记忆地形的。一件实物能否既反映政治权威和社会等级制度，又能为城市黑人维护文化身份的努力服务？调查员将采用一系列定性民族志接地技术，追求调查的三个关键领域：纪念馆如何作为争论的对象，通过这些失去暴力的幸存者寻求合法化他们的生活经验和维护价值;城市空间在重新呈现记忆的物质痕迹和定义人格的作用;和暴力在身份形成的影响。这项研究将产生在巴尔的摩的市中心的记忆政治的关键帐户，既有助于种族和阶级的人类学，以及更广泛的科学辩论纪念。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得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的支持。

Commemorative sites are an essential part of American cultural life, as they provide a space for reflecting, sustaining, and challenging deeply held values and beliefs. Public memorialization often emerges in the aftermath of fraught, sometimes violent, encounters. The spaces dedicated to preserving those social memories can therefore function as much to resolve conflicts as to erase or remember particular identities or histories. This has been well-documented within formal, public spaces, but we know less about the informal mechanisms through which commemorative spaces are established, maintained, and contested. This project, which trains a student in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, conducts a case study of informal forms of memorialization in an American city in order to understand what impact the establishment and maintenance of a commemorative sites has on identity formation, civil society, and violence reduction. In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology, the project would enhance scientific understanding by broadly disseminating its findings to organizations engaged in policy dialogues related to understanding the origins and motivations for urban violence, and to what extent memorialization attenuates its prevalence. Harvard University anthropology doctoral student Samantha Hawkins, under the supervision of Dr. Laurence Ralph, will explore the inner-city as a complex, affective landscape, wherein urban memorials function as tools of cultural recollection in a context marked by violence. These memorials are also sites of regulation and contestation, made evident by their ongoing obliteration and reinscription. She will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, which is an ideal site to conduct the study as it has the second highest per capita murder rate in the U.S. The makeup of and changes to memorials in Baltimore, the different levels of engagement and investment, the varying reasons that they are erected and/or destroyed, the patterns of aesthetic composition, demonstrate something significant about material claims to space and identity. The project asks how social relations and political ideologies are woven into a topography of memory. Can a material object both reflect political authority and social hierarchies, while also serving efforts of urban black populations to preserve a cultural identity? The investigator will employ a range of qualitative ethnographically-grounded techniques, pursuing three key areas of inquiry: how the memorial functions as an object of argument through which survivors of those lost to violence seek to legitimize their lived experience and assert value; the role of urban space in re-presenting material traces of memory and defining personhood; and the impact of violence in the formation of identities. This research will produce a critical account of memory politics in Baltimore's inner-city, contributing both to the anthropology of race and class, as well as broader scientific debates about memorialization.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.