This award provides fellowship support to a student for post-doctoral research and training. The student's proposed research project is entitled `A Multi-Site Ethnoastronomical Study of African Stellar Navigators and Their Communities.` The student, who received her Ph.D in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will study the current use of astronomical knowledge and the political and socioeconomic environments in which it is situated by focusing on stellar navigation, and the stellar navigators and their communities in Africa. More specifically, through a preliminary site investigation of Tunisia and the region around Massawa, Eritrea, East Africa, the student will examine how the globalization of non-local technologies has shifted the allocation of resources, the rites, privileges, and definitions of astronomical knowledge. The post-doctoral student will conduct ethnographic interviews in Tunisia with the stellar navigators, their modern navigation counterparts, and a sample of other inhabitants of the island. One goal of the research is to videotape interviews of several fishermen of the Kerkennah Islands about the use of stellar navigation and to record a boat trip with one of the stellar navigators. The video will be the basis of a planetarium show on the tropic. Field work in Eritrea will include an examination of the origins of the Afar stellar navigation knowledge, the extent to which stellar navigation was used in Eritrean independence, and the change in political and socioeconomic status of the Afar people over the course of the struggle for independence. One hypothesis is that the introduction of navigation equipment and techniques has changed who has access to, control of, and expertise in the astronomical knowledge of stellar navigation by 1) decreasing the need for stellar navigation, 2) decreasing the economic status of the stellar navigators, and therefore, 3) limiting the transmission of the knowledge of stellar navigation. Another hypothesis is that the globalization of electric street lamp technology has contributed to a decrease in astronomical knowledge of stellar names and constellations due to, among other factors, light pollution. This project will not only contribute to informal science education, but also to science and technology studies, which looks at the intellectual, value, process and impact factors related to the development of science and technology. The student will employ the interdisciplinary fields of archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy, which combine astronomy, archaeology, and anthropology.
