Individual Decisions and Emergent Aggregate Patterns: Kin Co-residence among Hadza Hunter-Gatherers

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Comparative work in cultural anthropology has shown that marriage, kinship systems, and marital residence patterns vary according to the ecological conditions. In this project, Dr. James Holland Jones and Dr. Brian Wood, both at Stanford University, will investigate the individual and family-level decisions that lead to emergent patterns of kin coresidence among Hadza hunter-gatherers of northern Tanzania. The Hadza are an ideal population with whom to perform this research, because they exhibit a high degree of variation in their residential arrangements, across individuals, families, and seasons. As the last group of hunter-gatherers in east Africa, they also provide a rare chance to examine the demography and residential arrangements of a foraging population. This work will improve the theoretical and methodological foundations for understanding how individual decisions, cascading through a population, lead to aggregate patterns in residential groups.The investigators will test theoretically grounded hypotheses about the formation of residential groups by examining variation between and within Hadza residential groups. Their hypotheses address questions of how demographic, economic, and ecological factors contribute to variation in social structure, through both time and space. To test these largely adaptive hypotheses, the investigators will develop rigorous counterfactual demographic null hypotheses and test these using both demographic microsimulation and agent-based models constructed specifically for this project. This project also will forge new international research alliances with the University of Dar Es Salaam, and local capacity building through workshops and student training. In cooperation with Tanzanian colleagues, the demographic information being collected for basic science research questions also will be made available to those seek to improve the health and welfare of the Hadza community.