Doctoral Dissertation Research: Kinship, Remittances and Redistribution

汇款是移徙者与其原籍社区之间转移的金钱和其他货物。在华盛顿大学埃里克奥尔登史密斯博士的指导下，博士生本杰明·哈诺韦尔将进行研究，调查汇款经济的两个以前未研究的方面。首先，亲属关系、性别和年龄如何共同影响汇款人关于汇款金额和汇款对象的决定？第二，亲属关系、性别和年龄如何与收款人家庭的再分配模式相互作用，以进一步影响汇款人的决定？这些问题来自人类学与进化论的融合，进化论关于基于亲属的分享和经济理论关于劳动力迁移。为了解决研究问题，Hanowell先生将在圣大卫教区的三个村庄进行为期一年的实地考察，这是多米尼加的一个农村地区，多米尼加是一个加勒比小岛国，汇款收入是当地经济的重要组成部分。实地工作将结合联合收割机结构化和深入的采访，详细的现场笔记和档案研究。访谈和实地记录将提供有关个人汇款关系、家庭和个人财富、家庭组成、家庭冲突和村庄家谱的信息。教会的人口动态记录和村庄人口普查将被用来估计随着时间的推移出生和死亡的年龄模式。统计分析将包括：社会网络分析，根据亲属关系和控制变量建立汇款关系模型;线性回归，将观察到的汇款与亲属分享的相互竞争的定量模型的预测进行比较。将对关键主题进行深入访谈和人种学实地记录，并将其与统计结果进行比较，以加深对圣大卫教区汇款模式的理解，这项研究将促进对汇款的科学理解，汇款是发展中地区贫困农村人口的主要收入来源。它还将解决几个长期存在的理论问题，以亲属为基础的共享。这样做，它将检验在小规模社会中长期持有的亲属关系和分享的概念在多大程度上扩大到全球汇款的范围。最后，它将帮助多米尼克政府评估其在实现四个联合国千年发展目标方面的长期进展：降低儿童死亡率、降低孕产妇死亡率、降低少女怀孕率以及了解小岛屿发展中国家的特殊需求。

Remittances are the money and other goods transferred between migrants and their communities of origin. Doctoral student Benjamin Hanowell, supervised by Dr. Eric Alden Smith of the University of Washington, will undertake research to investigate two previously unstudied aspects of remittance economies. First, how do kinship, gender and age together shape remitters' decisions about how much and to whom they remit? Second, how do kinship, gender and age interact with recipient household redistribution patterns to further shape remitters' decisions? These questions emerge from a fusion of anthropology with evolutionary theory about kin-based sharing and economic theory about labor migration. To address the research questions, Mr. Hanowell will conduct year long fieldwork in three villages of Saint David Parish, a rural locale of Dominica, a small Caribbean island nation, where remittance income is an important part of the local economy. Fieldwork will combine structured and in-depth interviews with detailed field notes and archival research. Interviews and field notes will provide information about individual remittance relationships, household and individual wealth, household composition, household conflicts, and village genealogy. Church vital records and village censuses will be used to estimate age patterns of birth and death over time. Statistical analysis will include: social network analysis to model remittance relationships as a function of kinship and control variables; and linear regression to compare observed remittances with predictions from competing quantitative models of kin-based sharing. In-depth interviews and ethnographic field notes will be coded for key themes and compared to statistical results for an enriched understanding of remittance patterns in Saint David Parish.This research will advance scientific understanding of remittances, a major source of income for poor, rural people in developing regions. It will also address several long-standing theoretical issues about kin-based sharing. So doing, it will test the extent to which long held notions of kinship and sharing in small-scale societies scale up to the global context of remittances. Finally, it will help Dominica's government to assess its long-term progress toward four United Nations Millennium Development Goals: reducing child mortality, reducing maternal mortality, reducing teen pregnancy, and understanding the special needs of small developing island nations.