Doctoral Dissertation Research: Decision-making and Responses to Change Among a Transitional Generation of Mardu Aborigines

博士论文研究：马尔都原住民过渡一代的决策与变革应对

• 批准号: 0514560
• 负责人: Eric Smith
• 金额: $ 0.42万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-09-01 至 2006-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0514560&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Decision; making

Rapid cultural change in traditional societies is causing vastly divergent lifeways to come into contact and young people are often stressed with the responsibility of adapting to the confluence of influences surrounding them. Their success at this endeavor is tied to the success of the communities they live in and the evolution of their cultures and traditions. This dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist will focus on a transitional generation of Mardu Aborigines, aged 15-40, living in Australia's Western Desert. These young men and women face an increasingly complex set of influences as they merge their traditional culture and practices with the economic, political and educational systems of 21st century Australia. The main objective of this research is to determine why Mardu youth are choosing to integrate certain aspects of modern Australian culture with their traditional foraging background. It will combine qualitative and quantitative methods and will focus on testing two models from Human Behavioral Ecology: embodied capital, which looks at the effects of personal and parental investment and costly signaling, which investigates reputation building and partner choice. Understanding how Mardu youth navigate this dynamic and complex world from both an evolutionary and a sociocultural perspective will also have broader impacts. Many foraging societies have become increasingly inundated with influences and products of industrialized society. Some groups within diverse nations become marginalized from mainstream society and their decisions must reflect the circumstances of both the local and dominant cultures in which they reside. The current study, which will use evolutionary reasoning to confront challenging a sociocultural context, will provide a new knowledge about youth practice that will be useful to service providers in a variety of areas undergoing rapid cultural change.

传统社会的快速文化变革正在引起极大的生命之路接触，年轻人经常受到压力，负责适应周围影响的融合。 他们在这项工作中的成功与他们所居住的社区的成功以及其文化和传统的发展有关。 文化人类学家的这项论文研究将集中在居住在澳大利亚西部沙漠中的15-40岁的Mardu原住民的过渡一代。 这些年轻的男人和女人将传统文化和实践与澳大利亚21世纪的经济，政治和教育系统融合在一起，面临着越来越复杂的影响。 这项研究的主要目的是确定为什么马尔杜（Mardu）青年选择将现代文化的某些方面与传统的觅食背景相结合。 它将结合定性和定量方法，并将着重于测试人类行为生态学的两个模型：体现资本，它着眼于个人和父母投资的影响以及昂贵的信号，该效果研究了声誉建设和合作伙伴的选择。 了解马尔杜青年如何从进化和社会文化的角度来驾驭这个动态和复杂的世界也将产生更广泛的影响。 许多觅食社会因工业化社会的影响和产物而变得越来越淹没。 不同国家内部的一些群体从主流社会中被边缘化，他们的决定必须反映其居住的地方和主导文化的环境。 当前的研究将利用进化推理来面对挑战社会文化背景，将提供有关青年实践的新知识，这对经历了快速文化变革的各个领域的服务提供者很有用。