This project supports the dissertation research of an anthropology student from the University of Michigan in Nicaragua. The student's project is to understand how government-sponsored local cultural centers attempted to impose a national set of values in the Sandinista era, and how this failed or succeeded in different local situations. Using a combination of ethnographic methods including participant observation and community surveys, the student will try to assess reasons for the varying success and failure of these centers. This research is particularly timely at the present time, when the break-up of the Yugoslavian state shows that local resistance to national ideologies is powerful and long-lived. This sort of in-depth case study can provide valuable information to explain the success or failure of programs of national integration.
