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

在过去的30年里，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、灵活的方式来赚钱，同时满足传统的性别期望和做家务。研究生Jessica Chelekis将在Richard R. Wilk博士的指导下，研究巴西亚马逊河下游地区女性参与直销的情况，以及性别角色、女性工作和经济全球化之间的联系。这项研究将审查经济机会如何与当地家庭经济战略和背景相交叉，以及因此改变或保留性别角色的可能性。研究人员将在巴西亚马逊地区的一个农村自治市的三个不同的河流社区进行12个月的实地调查。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。她将在巴西城市中心对这些直销公司的中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和市政卫生和社会服务秘书等机构收集这一领域现有的社会人口统计数据。这项研究将通过对性别角色的研究，为理解家庭经济战略提供重要信息，从而促进现有的学术研究，而这些信息是关于本地区家庭组织和经济的文献所缺少的。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，使妇女无法参与政策和地区发展计划。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.