Below Shawn Parkhurst takes up my suggestion to describe his dissertation. If you have very specific and detailed replies perhaps they might go to him directly off list, but if you have something to say that might be of general interest, I invite you to reply to H-SAE so that others might benefit from your insights. Like Shawn, lots of our graduate student subscribers are studying "identity" in one way or another. I'd like to hear more about the variety of things they mean by that.

T. Galt, Editor

My name is Shawn Parkhurst. I'm a student at the U. of California at Berkeley doing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. I've been reading from this list from some time, and I've decided to take Tony Galt's advice about describing my dissertation research with hopes that interested parties will have comments to make, on or off the list. Here's a description of what I have been up to.

I returned early this year from 15 months of field research in the Alto Douro region of northern Portugal. In my field research I moved deep into but also much beyond a village in the heart of the Alto Douro's demarcated zone for the production of grapes for port wine. My research problem is how such villages develop corporate identities and do much more than react to economic and political decisions imposed from "outside" and "above." The conventional view in the media and social sciences alike is that these villages are identical, internally homogeneous in social terms, and mainly adaptive to economic and policy decisions handed down from the authoritative: port wine shippers, large (typically absentee) land owners, and the Portuguese state, to name a few. Because this is the world's first demarcated wine region, the boundaries of which remain vigilantly enforced by the state, assumptions of internal social and spatial homogeneity derive from an acceptable logic. Yet the boundaries, the character, and the fate of the region are strongly contested from "within." Thus my work asks how members of localities such as villages produce social identities with economic, political, and cultural consequences for social-spatial entities larger than themselves--the Alto Douro region to be sure, but beyond it as well. My dissertation focuses on the local production of regionality, but has implications beyond that for the combined local-regional production of national and even Pan-European identities.

I realize this might seem a little high-flown, especially there at the end. I hope, though, that this will pique someone's interest who is working on similar problems elsewhere in Europe. I would like to talk in detail, and I guess this would be for off the list. I would also like to know what kind of recent work people are reading that engages with problems like these. I'd like to say that I'm especially taken with Lipuma and Meltzoff's approach to problems of locality, region and class in Iberia. Finally, I work with two other people here, Jean Lave, an anthropologist, and Paul Duguid, an historian, and we're trying to develop a multi-perspectival take on the port trade. Are there similar projects that people are engaged in?

Shawn Parkhurst
parkhurs@garnet.berkeley.edu