IBSS-Ex: Wealth, Wealth Inequality, and Marraige Systems

这个跨学科的研究项目侧重于三个人口群体（农民、园艺师和采集者）的财富、财富不平等和一夫多妻制之间的关系，特别强调在不同文化中解决不同的婚姻制度。自该学科诞生以来，不同婚姻制度的分布一直是人类学研究的焦点，其解释包括性别比例、女性对生产的经济贡献、社会复杂性、兄弟利益集团、可用的扩张栖息地和寄生虫负荷。考虑到婚姻作为一种经济制度的重要性，经济学的解释开始引人注目。这些解释与行为生态学家在研究非人类物种中一夫多妻制分布时提出的观点有一个有趣的趋同。人们普遍认为，在物质财富在男性之间的分配更不平等、对人口的生产和再生产更重要的地方，一夫多妻制将更为普遍。虽然这种直觉解释了为什么园艺师往往比采集者更倾向于一夫多妻制，但它导致了一个悖论，因为农民的物质财富更重要，分配更不平等，他们比园艺师更少一夫多妻制。该项目将借鉴人口学、人类学和经济学的见解。研究人员将把人种学数据与家庭结构和财富差距相互作用的数学模型结合起来。该项目的主要经验组成部分是利用13个小规模人口的个人数据估计关键模型参数。对这些不同来源的数据进行分析，将能够确定不同因素的这些共同影响的相对强度，并对解决一夫多妻制悖论的可能办法进行检验。这个项目将有助于基本了解贫富差距的动态及其对社会结构的影响。一夫多妻制悖论的解决对财富和家庭结构之间相互作用的一般知识产生了影响，这超出了该项目将研究的小规模社会。项目结果可能有助于解决影响现代先进社会中婚姻动态的一系列因素，例如离婚率上升的趋势和社会上更可接受的一夫多妻制形式，例如个人通过长期的一系列一夫一妻制婚姻而拥有多名配偶。该项目还将推进数学建模、实验技术和对个人层面数据的深入分析的方法学应用，以解决民族志学家个人层面数据的深度与跨人口比较能力之间的权衡。该项目的更广泛影响将包括促进经济学、人类学和进化生物学的跨学科研究，为博士后研究人员提供特殊教育和培训机会，以及在相关领域的学者之间举行年度会议，以促进使用本项目所测试的先进方法。本项目由美国国家科学基金会跨学科行为与社会科学研究（IBSS）竞赛资助。

This interdisciplinary research project focuses on relationships among wealth, wealth inequality, and polygyny in three population groups (farmers, horticulturalists, and foragers), with special emphasis given to addressing different marriage systems among different cultures. Distribution of different marriage systems has been a focus of anthropological investigation since the discipline's birth, with explanations drawing on sex ratio, women's economic contributions to production, social complexity, fraternal interest groups, available habitats for expansion, and parasite loads. Given the importance of marriage as an economic institution, economic explanations have come to prominence. These explanations show an interesting convergence with ideas developed by behavioral ecologists studying the distribution of polygyny in non-human species. It is widely thought that polygyny will be more common where material wealth is both more unequally held among men and more important to a population's production and reproduction. While this intuition explains why horticulturalists tend to be more polygynous than foragers, it results in a paradox, because farmers, among whom material wealth is both more important and more unequally distributed, are less polygynous than horticulturalists. The project will draw on insights from demography, anthropology, and economics. The researchers will combine ethnographic data with mathematical models of the interacting dynamics of family structure and wealth disparity. The major empirical component of this project entails estimating key model parameters using individual-level data from 13 small-scale populations. The analyses of data from these different sources will allow determination of the relative strengths of these joint effects of different factors and provide a test of possible resolutions of the polygyny paradox.This project will contribute to basic understanding of the dynamics of disparities in wealth and how they impact on the social structures. The resolution of the polygyny paradox has implications for general knowledge about interactions between wealth and family structure that extend beyond the small scale societies that the project will study. Project results may help address a range of factors that influence marriage dynamics in modern advanced societies, such as a tendency for higher divorce rates and more socially acceptable forms of polygyny, such as individuals having multiple spouses through a series of monogamous marriages over time. The project also will advance the methodological use of mathematical modeling, experimental techniques, and intensive analysis of individual level data to address the trade-off between the depth of an ethnographer's individual-level data and the power of cross-population comparisons. Broader impacts of this project will include facilitation of interdisciplinary research across economics, anthropology and evolutionary biology, special education and training opportunities for a post-doctoral researcher, and annual meetings to advance the use of advanced methodologies tested in this project among scholars in relevant fields. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.