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

传统社会中文化的迅速变化正在造成截然不同的生活方式的接触，青年人往往承担着适应周围各种影响的责任。 他们在这一奋进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。 这篇论文的研究由一位文化人类学家将集中在一个过渡的一代马尔杜原住民，年龄在15-40岁，生活在澳大利亚的西部沙漠。 这些青年男女在将传统文化和习俗与21世纪世纪澳大利亚的经济、政治和教育体系相结合时，面临着越来越复杂的影响。 这项研究的主要目的是确定为什么马尔杜青年选择将现代澳大利亚文化的某些方面与他们传统的觅食背景相结合。 它将结合联合收割机定性和定量的方法，并将集中在测试两个模型从人类行为生态学：体现资本，它着眼于个人和父母的投资和昂贵的信号，调查声誉建设和合作伙伴的选择的影响。 了解Mardu青年如何从进化和社会文化的角度驾驭这个充满活力和复杂的世界也将产生更广泛的影响。 许多觅食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居住的当地和主流文化的情况。 目前的研究将使用进化推理来应对具有挑战性的社会文化背景，将提供有关青年实践的新知识，这将有助于在经历快速文化变革的各个领域提供服务的人。

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.