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

传统社会中迅速的文化变化导致截然不同的生活方式相互接触，年轻人往往被强调有责任适应周围各种影响的汇合。他们在这一努力中的成功与他们所生活的社区的成功以及他们的文化和传统的演变息息相关。这篇由文化人类学家撰写的论文主要研究生活在澳大利亚西部沙漠的马尔都原住民的过渡一代，年龄在15-40岁之间。这些年轻人面临着越来越复杂的影响，因为他们将自己的传统文化和习俗与21世纪澳大利亚的经济、政治和教育体系融合在一起。本研究的主要目的是确定为什么Mardu青年选择将现代澳大利亚文化的某些方面与他们的传统觅食背景相结合。它将结合定性和定量方法，并将重点测试人类行为生态学中的两个模型：体现资本，它着眼于个人和亲代投资的影响，以及昂贵的信号，它研究声誉建立和伴侣选择。从进化和社会文化的角度了解马尔都青年如何驾驭这个充满活力和复杂的世界，也将产生更广泛的影响。许多以觅食为生的社会越来越被工业化社会的影响和产品所淹没。不同国家中的一些群体被主流社会边缘化，他们的决定必须反映他们所处的地方文化和主导文化的情况。目前的研究将使用进化推理来面对具有挑战性的社会文化背景，将提供关于青年实践的新知识，这将对经历快速文化变革的各种地区的服务提供者有用。

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.