Departmental News

Posted:  Sep 07, 2021 - 12:15pm

Ruizhe Liu, Evolutionary Anthropology doctoral student, has been awarded an NSF Cultural Anthropology Research Experience for Graduates for her project Does market integration reduce reliance on kin? 

Abstract

From evolutionary theory, people cooperate with their kins to enhance lineage and reproductive success, but under economic and societal transitions (i.e., market integration), numerous scholars in evolutionary anthropology and in other areas of social science have hypothesized the transitions may allow for more autonomy in decision-making and people tend to lesser rely on kin. The goal of this REG is to use social network methods to measure the density of connections between kin in cooperative networks and how the kin density of networks varies with market integration among the Mosuo of China, a population experiencing rapid market transition in association with government development projects and recent ethnic tourism in the region.