Mardu Foraging, Food Sharing, and Gender

玛杜觅食、食物分享和性别

• 批准号: 0127681
• 负责人: Douglas Bird
• 金额: $ 12.5万
• 依托单位: University of Maine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-08-01 至 2003-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0127681&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Mardu; Foraging; Food; Sharing; Gender

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.

在澳大利亚沙漠的原住民中，就像在所有人类中一样，获取食物不仅仅是为了吃：与获取什么类型的食物、谁获得食物、如何处理和分配食物有关的实践被注入了除简单营养之外的价值。这些做法通常与性别角色相关。传统的解释认为，觅食和食物分享方面的性别差异受到共同的供给目标的约束——就像微型规模经济一样，通过性别专业化，家庭将得到更好的供给。但最近对其他狩猎和采集者的研究表明，在某些情况下，劳动力性别差异的关键方面可能源于不同的食物获取和分配策略满足不同觅食目标的方式，其中一些目标可能与家庭供应发生冲突。当获取食物的活动可以提供广泛分配的公共物品时，或者当食物包含超出其简单热量含量的象征价值时，尤其如此。本研究旨在定量检验假设的预测，这些假设检验了影响食物获取、分享的因素及其与西澳大利亚马尔杜人性别差异的联系。不同的（有时是相互冲突的）觅食目标在多大程度上影响性别分工？玛杜的觅食决策在多大程度上是为了更有效地为自己和家人提供食物而设计的，以及它们在多大程度上受到不同活动能够诚实地表明收购者潜在品质的方式的影响？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、食物转移以及玛尔都营地组成和生态的经济学定量测量。描述这些以及它们如何构建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。