The Ecology of Production, Reproduction and Cooperation among the Mardu

该项目调查了澳大利亚西部沙漠的狩猎采集社会Mardu的生产、繁殖和合作。这项研究的重点是男性和女性从优秀的猎人或种子收集者的身份中获得的社会和生殖利益，以及这些利益与狩猎和其他合作行为之间的联系，研究了为什么个人经常选择获取食物来喂养他人，为什么个人在某些狩猎和收集任务中合作，而在其他任务中却不合作。研究人员将利用有关社会地位、人口统计（家庭、婚姻和生殖）和分组历史的人种学访谈，以及对猎物选择、时间分配、食物分享和合作狩猎的观察，来了解过去40年来经济和流动性的变化如何改变了马尔都人的资源选择、社会地位、人口和婚姻模式、食物分享和合作劳动。该项目的更广泛影响包括通过培训研究生和本科生进行实地研究和分析而获得的教育效益；研究受益于解决当前社会科学中的争论和问题的数据和模型，特别是生产、交配策略和集体行动中的性别差异之间的关系。这项研究的结果将与小规模社会中的集体行动理论有关，并有助于理解在平等主义社会中获得的地位（如通过狩猎获得的地位）的作用。此外，本研究将首次对觅食社会中女性猎人的社会地位进行详细调查。

This project investigates production, reproduction, and cooperation among the Mardu, a hunter-gatherer society in the Western Desert of Australia. The research focuses on the social and reproductive benefits men and women gain from status as a good hunter or good seed collector, and the links these may have with hunting and other cooperative behavior, asking why individuals often choose to acquire food that goes to feed others, and why individuals cooperate in some hunting and collecting tasks, but not others.The researchers will use ethnographic interviews concerning social status, demography (household, marital and reproductive, and grouping history, and observations on prey choice, time allocation, food sharing, and cooperative hunting to understand how changes in economy and mobility have changed Mardu resource selection, social status, demography and marital patterns, food sharing, and cooperative labor over the last 40 years.The broader impacts of the project include educational benefits gained through training graduate and undergraduate students in field research and analysis; and research benefits from data and models addressing current debates and problems in social science, particularly the relationships between gender differences in production, mating strategies, and collective action. The results from this research will be relevant to collective action theory in small-scale societies, and in understanding the role of acquired status (such as that gained through hunting) in egalitarian society. In addition, this study will provide the first detailed investigation of the social status of women hunters in a foraging society.