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

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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.