Rethinking the Local Effects of Political and Economic Transformation

The research supported by this award will examine how major political and economic changes affect the ways in which ordinary people speak, imagine the future, and navigate moral decision making in their daily lives. During the last three decades, liberal models of democracy and neoliberal economic reforms, based on American political and economic doctrines, have brought about fundamental transformations in many countries of the global South. New emphases on democratic aspirations, transparency, entrepreneurialism, and human rights have been incorporated into political cultures formerly grounded in social hierarchy, secrecy, and fatalism. Understanding the role that key concepts of American political culture have in the transformations occurring in the emergent countries of the global South is critical for fostering geopolitical communication and stability through the development of programs and policies based on a deeper knowledge of culturally specific dimensions of moral and political reasoning. However, such understanding can only be acquired through attention to the micro-processes of daily life at the level of individuals and communities. Therefore, anthropologists who study the local-level effects of these major national shifts often take advantage of the natural experiment provided by the fact that once-isolated populations are now increasingly exposed for the first time to Western models of the goal-oriented political actor driven by rational choices, a situation that highlights the mechanisms involved. For this research, linguistic anthropologist Dr. Aurora Donzelli (Sarah Lawrence College) will travel to the Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is an appropriate site for pursuing these questions because not only is Indonesia the world's second-fastest growing economy, it has also, since 1998, transitioned quickly from having highly centralized system of state-led development to a decentralized system based on market capitalism. As a result of this watershed transformation, the relatively remote Toraja have been confronted with a new rhetoric of democratic aspirations, a new world of actual goods and imaginable consumptions, and a new social legitimacy of personal ambition. The researcher will gather data on this complex transition from a moral regime centered on the social expectation that personal wants should remain hidden and unexpressed to a new acceptance of the public expression of individual ambition. To document the collision between these different moralities, she will conduct careful analysis of the linguistic and semiotic resources employed in two apparently unrelated domains of human sociality: the public sphere of political speechmaking and ritual exchange and the private domain of domestic interaction. Because the investigator first studied the Toraja over a decade ago, she has baseline data that will enable her to undertake a longitudinal study of changes in their linguistic and moral practices that have resulted from national economic and political transformation. Findings from this research will provide material for comparative analyses of moral and linguistic transformations in the wake of social and political reform and will further the understanding of the linguistic, social, and cultural dynamics that support institutional transformations.