Stories of Divided Politics: Polarisation and Bridge-Building in Colombia and Britain

哥伦比亚和英国都在2016年举行了全民公投--在哥伦比亚就和平协议举行公投，在英国就英国退欧举行公投--留下了持久的身份分歧，并助长了关于两个社会比以往任何时候都更加分裂的普遍说法。这个项目旨在重塑学术界和大众对人们如何与政治分歧共存的理解，并在这些分歧之间架起桥梁。它将植根于政治人类学，研究文化在人们的政治观点、意识形态和身份认同中的作用，并将借鉴两极分化的政治学研究，后者考察社会分化的更广泛图景。它将使用两种互补的方法，通过日常故事记录和分析人们经历和(重新)产生政治分歧的方式。首先，在每个国家的社会经济、种族和政治多样化的地方进行民族志案例研究，以了解不同的部门如何看待他们在社区中经历的差异和分歧，以及他们如何将这些地方经验与他们对国家政治的看法联系起来。第二，与寻求在政治分歧之间架起桥梁的组织进行民族志实地考察，在全国各地的活动中进行参与者观察，并与他们共同举办对话和研讨会，以形成关于不同地区和行业的政治分歧和人们关于政治分歧的故事的更广泛的交叉观点。通过分析故事在两极分化和搭建桥梁中的作用，该项目将为当前关于分裂社会的理论增添细微差别和复杂性，为政治分歧的比较研究开发一个开创性的多尺度框架，并为日益紧迫的两极分化问题及其可能引发的各种暴力和敌意的全球政策提供信息。

Colombia and Britain both held referendums in 2016-in Colombia on a peace accord, in Britain on Brexit-leaving enduring identity divides, and fostering widespread narratives about each society being more divided than ever. This project aims to re-shape academic and popular understandings of how people live with political divisions and build bridges across them. It will be anchored in the anthropology of politics, which studies the role of culture in people's political opinions, ideologies and identities, and will draw also on political science studies of polarisation, which examine broader pictures of societal divisions. It will document and analyse the ways that people experience and (re-)produce political divisions through everyday stories using two complementary methods. First, an ethnographic case study in a socio-economically, racially and politically diverse locality in each country, to understand how different sectors perceive the differences and divisions they experience in their community, and how they connect these local experiences with their view of national politics. Second, ethnographic fieldwork with organisations that seek to build bridges across political divides, doing participant observation at their events around the country, and co- convening dialogues and workshops with them, to develop broader cross-cutting views of political divisions and people's stories about them in different regions and sectors. By analysing the role of stories in polarisation and bridge-building, the project will add nuance and complexity to current theories about divided societies, develop a ground-breaking multi-scale framework for comparative research on political divisions, and inform global policies on the increasingly urgent problem of polarisation and the many kinds of violence and hostility it can engender.