Doctoral Disseratation Research: Women and Direct Selling as a Household Economic Strategy in the Lower Brazilian Amazon

在过去30年中，直销公司越来越多地渗透到第三世界的农村市场，为妇女提供了一种新的灵活的赚钱方式，同时满足传统的性别期望和从事家务劳动。研究生杰西卡Chelekis，在博士理查德R。威尔克将对巴西亚马逊河下游妇女参与直销以及性别角色、妇女工作和经济全球化之间的联系进行研究。这项研究将探讨经济机会如何与当地家庭经济战略和背景交叉，以及由此改变或保持性别角色的潜力。研究人员将在巴西亚马逊河流域的一个农村城市的三个不同的河边社区进行为期12个月的实地考察。她将使用定性研究方法的组合，包括参与者观察，非结构化和半结构化访谈，以及生活史。她将在巴西的城市中心对这些直销公司的中层和高层管理人员进行半结构化访谈。她还将进行档案研究，并从巴西地理和统计局区域办事处以及负责卫生和社会服务的市政秘书处等机构收集该地区现有的社会人口统计数据。这项研究将有助于现有的奖学金，通过审查性别角色，提供关键信息，了解家庭经济战略，这是从该地区的家庭组织和经济的文献中缺失。这项研究也将有助于全球化的人类学理论。这项工作也很重要，因为妇女在亚马逊地区发挥的经济作用往往被忽视，使妇女在政策和区域发展方案中看不到。该奖项还支持社会科学家的教育。

Over the past 30 years, direct sales corporations have increasingly penetrated rural markets in the Third World, offering a new, flexible way for women to earn money while fulfilling traditional gender expectations and performing domestic tasks. Graduate student Jessica Chelekis, under the guidance of Dr. Richard R. Wilk, will undertake research on women's participation in direct sales in the Lower Brazilian Amazon, and the link between gender roles, women's work, and economic globalization. This study will examine how economic opportunities intersect with local household economic strategies and contexts, and the potential to transform or conserve gender roles as a result.The researcher will conduct 12 months of fieldwork in three different riverine communities in a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon. She will use a combination of qualitative research methods, including participant-observation, unstructured and semi-structured interviews, and life histories. She will conduct semi-structured interviews with middle- and upper-level management personnel of these direct sales corporations in the urban centers of Brazil. She will also conduct archival research and collect available socio-demographic statistics for this area from institutions such as regional offices of the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Agency and municipal secretaries for health and social services. This research will contribute to existing scholarship through its examination of gender roles by providing critical information for understanding household economic strategies that is missing from the literature on household organization and economies of this region. This research will also contribute to anthropological theories of globalization. This work is also important because the economic roles women perform in the Amazon region are often ignored, rendering women invisible to policy and regional development programs. The award also supports the education of a social scientist.