Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Children's subsistence contributions to pastoral households in the drylands of East Africa

本论文的研究将调查如何，何时，以及什么影响牧民在东非旱地的孩子为自己的食物饲料。它将衡量儿童对自己、同龄人和家庭的生存贡献的价值和影响。 在许多社会中，儿童有时在很小的时候就开始为家庭生产作出贡献，这取决于社会的生存模式和他们所生活的环境。儿童对生存的贡献在农学家中得到了研究，最近在狩猎采集者中也得到了研究。这将是研究牧民儿童贡献的首批研究之一。 这项研究结合了营养、健康和人种学方法。早先关于生计战略的研究发现，衡量收益时不仅要考虑到粮食采购的能源成本，而且要考虑到文化和环境背景下的营养收益和健康后果。因此，研究人员将库存儿童的工作，也采取拟人化的测量他们和他们的家庭，以衡量他们的发展和监测健康随着时间的推移。人类学生存风险管理研究的元分析显示，缺乏经验数据来测试模型。该项目将收集经验数据，以便开始严格检验关于儿童在家庭和社区中的作用、儿童觅食的原因、特别是在非觅食社会中觅食的原因以及风险管理的假设。这项研究的结果将有助于人类学理论的发展，并有助于政府和非政府组织制定有关儿童、教育、粮食安全和旱地牧民发展的政策。

This dissertation research will investigate how, when, and to what effect the children of pastoralist herders in the drylands of East Africa forage for their own food. It will measure the value and effects of children's subsistence contributions for themselves, their peers, and their households. Children in many societies sometimes begin to contribute to household production at early ages, depending on the subsistence mode of their society and the environment in which they live. Children's contributions to subsistence have been studied among agriculturalists and more recently, among hunter-gatherers. This will be one of the first studies to study the contributions of pastoralist children. This research combines nutrition, health, and ethnographic methodologies. Earlier studies of subsistence strategies found that returns should be measured not only in relation to energy costs of food procurement, but also in relation to nutritional returns and health consequences within cultural and environmental contexts. Therefore, the researcher will inventory children's work and also take anthropomorphic measurements of them and their families to measure their development and monitor health over time.Meta-analyses of subsistence risk management research within anthropology reveal a lack of empirical data with which to test models. This project will collect empirical data to begin the process of rigorously testing hypotheses about children's roles within households and communities, the reasons children forage, especially in non-foraging societies, and risk management. Results of this research will be valuable to the development of theory in anthropology and to assist government and non-government organizations producing policy for children, education, food security, and development among dryland pastoralists.