pastujem môj research proposal pre PhD prihlášky... úvodná časť textu je niečo ako purpose of study a resumé mojej doterajšej školskej práce, očakávali to, tak to prípadne odignorujte. som lenivý riešiť formátovanie, hlavne bibliografie, sorry. samozrejme veľmi potešia akékoľvek vnímavé komentáre.

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After graduating in ethnology at Charles University in Prague, my primary ambition is to engage in full-fledged, preferably team-based anthropological research which would help me further develop my academic skills. While my hitherto training has been satisfying in providing me with factual information and knowledge of theory, as well as demanding a considerable amount of independent reading and writing, I perceive my main weakness as an anthropologist to be an incompletely developed ability to apply this in practical research. The ambition to improve in this respect is why I apply for MPhil/PhD programme in Social Anthropology at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

The basic idea for my future interdisciplinary research is to combine the theoretical and methodological resources of social and linguistic anthropology with those of discourse analysis. Such an effort underpinned my recent work on collective (ethnic) identity and discourse, most prominently on the ways scientific, political and media discourses in the Czech Republic and Slovakia shape multiple representations of Romani identities. Having an ethnographic knowledge of social and institutional contexts of the discourse production, I made use of the method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine representative corpora of academic and specialized writing, policy papers and media texts. I wrote up the results in my master‘s thesis Discourse Construction of Collective Identity: Clashing Images of ‘Roma‘, defended in 2007. An extract from this thesis is currently being offered to the Czech journal Český lid – Etnologický časopis. The same year I also elaborated on other relevant subjects while staying for a semester at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, e.g. on ‘confrontational talk framing’ in a courtroom reality show or social markers and diglossia in the language use of Slovak and Czech Roma. The study internship also enabled me to become familiar with other approaches than CDA, such as Conversation Analysis (CA) or Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces.

Besides this main focus, I have also been and still am interested in host of other topics, e.g.:
- social exclusion and poverty of the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (in 2004, I did an anthropological fieldwork in a Romani settlement and wrote up my findings in an ‘upgrading’ thesis titled Sociocultural Integration and Segregation in a Central-Slovak Highland Village, completed 2005);
- political theories of multiculturalism, social policies towards ethnic minorities and immigrants;
- anthropology of science;
- gender studies, queer theory and poststructuralist theories of gender and sexuality;
- anthropology of globalization and transnationalism (I am currently working on a paper on transnational aspects of tourism for yet another Czech journal, Sociální studia);
- collective identity and the ways ethnic-emancipation movements, state policies and media shape it.

To get back to my main interest, exemplified by the thesis outlined above, during my studies I have become increasingly interested in the process of blending of power and knowledge in discourse which Fairclough (1992: 82, original emphasis) terms ‘fight over language’. More specifically, I would like to focus on the ways in which various linguistic practices mediate ‘scientific-political’ representations of social reality and how such power-laden classifications, in turn, contribute to particular identity constructions and politics. This connects with what Bourdieu (2005: 127) has to say about the impact of political action on social reality: ‘it aims to make or unmake groups (…) by producing, reproducing or destroying the representations that make groups visible for themselves and for others.’ After social science crosses the epistemological ‘threshold of scientificity’ (Foucault 1972), its ambition is to disassociate itself from such motives driving the production of social classifications. Instead, it endorses ‘objective’ criteria for defining of social groups. However, science is a discourse practice with discourse regularities just like any other, and it is as well a regular social field – ‘the locus of a competitive struggle, in which the specific issue at stake is the monopoly of scientific authority’ (Bourdieu 1999: 31, original emphasis). The concept of a new mode of producing knowledge, called ‘mode 2’, reflects this as it postulates a substantial transformation of the traditional mode in which the knowledge production was strictly restricted to academic circles and only afterwards applied in extra-scientific fields. In contrast to this, the newly emerging type of the process transcends the boundaries of academia and is characterized by flexible organizational setting and intensive communication and negotiation between scientific and non-scientific participants (Maasen and Winterhager 2001: 13). In such an ‘updated’ perspective, scientific knowledge about society, previously protected by its own rhetoric of neutrality, becomes perfectly comparable with other kinds of knowledge.

Within the discipline of anthropology, such perspective is especially pertinent for the necessary (self-) reflection of applied and development anthropology whose discursive products can impact on cultures and communities rather directly and in directions diverging from the proclaimed goals of development, alleviation of poverty or a positive cultural transformation. As early as 1988, Arturo Escobar, one of the first authors to critically examine the notion of development, showed how the invention of ‘underdevelopment’ of certain nations and establishment of desirability of their progress towards development in fact engendered a set of power relations between these populations and what was formerly known as ‘First World’ – relations enabling to organize and structure the knowledge of the former so as to fit the needs and interests of the latter (Escobar 1988). He also examined the processes of professionalization (‘the process by which a politics of truth is created and maintained‘) and institutionalization of development, and, in a later work (Escobar 1991), demonstrated how these relate to the sub-discipline of development anthropology in particular. According to him, it really is paradoxical that in a period of heightened self-reflection in anthropology ‘development anthropologists establish a practice predicated on their scientific credentials, on their ability to speak the truth about "the natives"… [and that they] choose to remain blind to the historically constituted character of development as a cultural system’ (ibid.: 676). Nevertheless, critique should not be directed exclusively against anthropologists – not only is there a constant self-censorship in work for those researchers who strive to help shape the policies; their notions often get co-opted and modified so as to fit the needs and interests of decision-makers and implementers. For instance, the concept of ‘target groups’ has been praised as more accurate than the top-down discourses expecting ‘everyone in the community to benefit’ from a particular policy or project, but it has been as well criticized as ‘outsider labelling, in which complex realities are forced into simple, easily digestible categories’ (Gardner — Lewis 2005: 106).

Even though the reflexive tendencies in development anthropology are gaining strength (for overview, see Edelman — Haugerud et al. 2004), to my knowledge only a limited attention has been given to its linguistic media per se, although their problematic character is often pointed to. The usage of terms such as ‘discourse’, ‘labelling’, ‘language of development’ and the like is almost omnipresent, but a satisfying definition of these is often wanted (for one of the exceptions, see Apthorpe, Gasper et al. 1996). The lacking conceptual clarity and explicitness seems to be the main limitation of relevant literature. There are some works on ‘development narratives’ (Roe 1991), labeling as a development policy practice (Wood 1985) or development discourse in general (Gasper – Apthorpe 1996), but as they come from disciplines such as development studies or sociology, their significance for the study of the relationships between anthropologists, development institutions and groups of beneficiaries is somewhat restricted.

The particular questions to which I would like to seek answers are:

1. What is the nature of the discourse constructions of the beneficiaries’ identity, their ‘problem’ and the appropriate solutions to this, i.e. how can we best describe the ‘politics of truth’ about the ‘underdeveloped’, ‘poor’ and the like? Which specific linguistic phenomena and resources can be identified as bearers of these processes?

2. How do development anthropologists contribute to the production and shaping of such constructions? To what degree and how precisely is their contribution influenced by their relations with diverse types of institutions participating in development (states, international organizations such as WB or IMF, NGOs) and by the interests, needs and working culture of the former?

3. Which types and features of communicative interactions serve to channel these constructions into everyday social practice, including the processes of collective self-identification and classification, and to what effects?

I hypothesize that for the supposed beneficiaries, the frequently involuntary decision whether to accept or refuse interaction with such classifications can have profound influence on their self-conception, social belonging and, last but not least, material well-being. It is precisely this process which shapes and is shaped by linguistic praxis that I would like to examine as a chain of discursive events with all the intertextuality and interdiscursivity it involves, starting with the practices of anthropologists, powerful development organizations and media and ending with the transformative effects it has on local communities. Such research provides an ideal opportunity to combine the strengths of ethnography and discourse analysis, as recommended by Jan Blommaert (2005). The ethnographic knowledge of social, economic, political, institutional and cultural contexts of the discourse production is indispensable for checking the validity of conclusions; without such informed contextualization, researcher tends to bring in the interpretation of discourse subjective meanings instead of members’ categories. Moreover, there seems to be a great prospect in making use of various methods of discourse analysis such as CA and CDA (Titscher et al. 2000), the incompatibilities of which are often artificially highlighted; this would be all the more appropriate considering the different character of various types of relevant data (e.g., on-line verbal interactions of development workers and ‘clients’ as compared to World Bank publications).

References

Aphtorpe, Raymond — Gasper, Des (eds.): 1996 — Arguing Development Policy. Frames and Discourses. Taylor & Francis Ltd 1996.
Blommaert, Jan: 2005 — Discourse. Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
Bourdieu, Pierre: 1999 — The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason. In: BIagioli, Mario (ed.): The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge: 31-50.
Bourdieu, Pierre: 2005 [1996] — Language & Symbolic Power. Cambridge / Malden: Polity Press.
Edelman, Marc — Haugerud, Ruth (eds.): 2004 — The Anthropology of Development and Globalization. From Classical Political Economy to Contemporary Neoliberalism. Blackwell Publishing.
Escobar, Arturo: 1988 — Power and visibility: development and the intervention and management of the Third World. Cultural Anthropology 3: 4: 428—443.
Escobar, Arturo: 1991 — Anthropology and the development encounter: the making and marketing of development anthropology. American Ethnologist 18: 4: 658¬-682.
Fairclough, Norman: 1992 — Language and Power. London: Longman.
Foucault, Michel: 1972 [1969] – The Archeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper and Row.
Gardner, Katy — Lewis, David: 2005 [1996] — Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern Challenge. London / Sterling: Pluto Press.
Gasper, Des — Apthorpe, Raymond: 1996 — Introduction: Discourse analysis and policy discourse. The European Journal of International Development 8: 1: 1-15.
Maasen, Sabine — Winterhager, Matthias: 2001 — Science studies. Probing the dynamics of scientific knowledge. In: Maasen, Sabine — Winterhager, Matthias (eds.): Science Studies. Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag: 9—54.
Roe, Emery M.: 1991 — Development narratives, or making the best of blueprint development. World Development 19: 4: 287-300.
Titscher, Stefan — Meyer, Michael — Wodak, Ruth — Vetter, Eva: 2000 — Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis. London / Thousand Oaks / New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Wood, Geof: 1985 — The politics of development policy labelling. Development and Change 16: 347-373.