Doctoral Dissertation Research: Kinship, Remittances and Redistribution

汇款是指移民与其原籍社区之间转移的金钱和其他物品。在华盛顿大学的Eric Alden Smith博士的指导下，博士生Benjamin Hanowell将进行研究，调查汇款经济中以前未被研究的两个方面。首先，亲属关系、性别和年龄如何共同影响汇款人对汇款金额和汇款对象的决定？其次，亲属关系、性别和年龄如何与收款人家庭再分配模式相互作用，从而进一步影响汇款人的决定？这些问题来自于人类学与基于血缘的共享的进化理论和关于劳动力迁移的经济理论的融合。为了解决这些研究问题，Hanowell先生将在多米尼加的三个村庄进行为期一年的实地考察。多米尼加是一个加勒比海小国，汇款收入是当地经济的重要组成部分。实地考察将结合结构化和深入的访谈，详细的实地笔记和档案研究。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、家庭构成、家庭冲突和村庄家谱的信息。教会生命记录和村庄人口普查将被用来估计一段时间内出生和死亡的年龄模式。统计分析将包括：社会网络分析，将汇款关系作为亲属关系和控制变量的函数进行建模；以及线性回归，将观察到的汇款与基于亲属分享的竞争性定量模型的预测进行比较。深入访谈和人种学实地记录将针对关键主题进行编码，并与统计结果进行比较，以丰富对圣大卫教区汇款模式的了解。这项研究将促进对汇款的科学认识，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关于亲属共享的理论问题。这样做，它将测试小规模社会中长期存在的亲属关系和分享观念在多大程度上扩展到汇款的全球背景下。最后，它将帮助多米尼加政府评估其实现联合国千年发展目标的长期进展：降低儿童死亡率，降低孕产妇死亡率，减少青少年怀孕，了解发展中小岛屿国家的特殊需要。

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.