New jobs are beginning to emerge in developing and underdeveloped countries. Economies are opening up and people are moving to major cities in search of new career opportunities. Agrarian societies are turning into industrial societies.
A UNM researcher is examining how these recent changes in socioeconomic opportunities affect the distribution of wealth in China and Bangladesh.
“Previously, these societies have been agrarian and most people subsisted in fairly similar ways. Everyone was a farmer and everyone had similar things. But now that the economies are opening up and they are integrating with regional economies, people have different opportunities,” said Siobhán Mattison, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology.
The study, headed up by UNM, is funded by the National Science Foundation. Researchers from University of Missouri and Furmen University, partners in the study, will also provide some financial support. The project is also funding several undergraduate and graduate students at these host institutions, Mattison said.
“It is a great training opportunity for graduate and undergraduate students,” she said.
The project is currently at its early stages and researchers are currently developing instrument for gathering data.
“We are comparing two locations, Bangladesh and China, to examine how recent changes in socioeconomic opportunities basically affect the distribution of wealth,” she said. “One thing that we are really interested in learning about is how a particular social context affects peoples’ access to new kinds of wealth that are coming in,” she said.
The researchers are hoping to extend their study to other countries beyond China and Bangladesh, she said.
“They can work as wage laborers at places that are fairly remote from these locations; they can work globally in the tourism industry,” she said. “We are trying to see what kind of social networks facilitate access to those opportunities.”
She said she and her partners became interested in the project when they were in their respective field sites.
“It became really clear that all of the things we were focusing on as anthropologists, that we considered to be traditional, particularly in the Chinese context, were changing, and they were changing really quickly. And this is something that affects a lot of anthropological studies of human population,” she said.
The researchers are also investigating how the economic changes are affecting traditions in China and Bangladesh.
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“Increasingly these communities are becoming integrated into the wider regional or global markets,” Mattison said. “What happens as this integration takes place is that some traditions are lost. Things are taken out specifically. We want to know how that happens.”
The researchers are also figuring out how different kinds of communities shape different kinds of opportunities, she said.
“Different family structures within Albuquerque, for example, might have different ways of accessing these kinds of opportunities,” she said. “What we find out in the context of China and Bangladesh we are hoping will also be relevant for local socioeconomic kinship.”
Zubair Abro, a graduate anthropology student, said anthropological research is required to understand the complex socioeconomic fabric of South Asia.
“Things are changing really quickly — quicker than we are expecting,” he said. “There is a need to explore the changes and see how those changes impact the family system and health institutions of those countries.”
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor at The Daily Lobo. He can be reached at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
