Mardu Foraging, Food Sharing, and Gender

与所有人类一样，在澳大利亚沙漠中的土著人中，获取食物不仅仅是吃：获取什么类型的食物，谁获得食物，如何处理和分配食物，这些都被赋予了价值，而不仅仅是简单的营养。这些做法往往与性别角色有关。传统的解释认为，觅食和食物分享方面的性别差异受到供应这一共同目标的约束——就像小型规模经济一样，通过性别专业化，一个家庭将获得更好的供应。但最近对其他狩猎和采集人群的研究表明，在某些情况下，劳动性别差异的关键方面可能来自不同的食物获取和分配策略，以满足不同的觅食目标，其中一些可能与家庭供应相冲突。当获取食物的活动可以提供广泛分发的公共产品时，或者当食物的象征价值超出其简单的热量含量时，情况尤其如此。本研究提出定量测试假设的预测，研究影响食物获取、分享的因素，以及它们与西澳大利亚马杜人性别分化的联系。不同的（有时是冲突的）觅食目标在多大程度上影响性别分工？在多大程度上，Mardu的觅食决定是为了更有效地为自己和家庭提供食物，在多大程度上，不同的活动可以诚实地表明收购方的潜在品质，这对他们产生了影响？家庭组成、环境动态和社会动态的变化如何影响男性和女性的觅食策略？回答这些问题将涉及资源斑块利用、猎物选择、食物转移、马尔都营地组成和生态等经济学的定量测量。描述这些因素以及它们如何构成生存决策，将对我们理解小规模经济中人类家庭组织的基本特征具有广泛的相关性。

Among Aboriginal people in Australia's deserts, as among all humans, food acquisition is not simply about eating: practices related to what types of foods are acquired, who obtains the food, how food is treated and distributed, are infused with value other than simple nutrition. Often these practices are attached to gender roles. Traditional explanations have assumed that gender differences in foraging and food sharing are bound by a common goal of provisioning--that like a mini-economy of scale, a household will be better provisioned through gender specialization. But recent work among other people that hunt and gather suggests that under some circumstances critical aspects of gender differences in labor may arise from the ways in which different strategies of food acquisition and distribution meet different foraging goals, some of which can conflict with household provisioning. This is especially the case when the activity of acquiring food can provide public goods that are distributed widely, or when food contains symbolic value beyond its simple caloric content. This research proposes to quantitatively test the predictions of hypotheses that examine factors influencing food acquisition, sharing, and their link to gender differentiation among the Mardu of Western Australia. To what extent are different (sometimes conflicting) foraging goals influencing a sexual division of labor? To what extent are Mardu foraging decisions designed to more effectively provision themselves and their households, and to what extent are they influenced by the ways that different activities can honestly signal underlying qualities of the acquirer? How do changes in household composition, environmental dynamics, and social dynamics affect male and female foraging strategies? Answering these questions will involve quantitative measures of the economics of resource patch utilization, prey selection, food transfers, and Mardu camp composition and ecology. Delineating these and how they structure subsistence decisions will have broad relevance for our understanding of basic features of human family organization in small scale economies.