I am currently engaged in several cross-cultural projects. Each of these involve collaboration between anthropological fieldworkers and theoreticians and modelers. This work is designed to encourage a broader picture of human behavior and decision-making than is typically found, by replicating and expanding upon findings from westen, educated populations and by standardizing primary data collection across sites in order to produce more easily comparable results.
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E.N.D.O.W. Project
The Economic Network Dynamics and the Origins of Wealth (ENDOW) Project is a longitudinal, cross-cultural investigation of how people's social networks affect whether they gain or lose wealth over time. The project will test hypotheses that advantageous positions in community-wide social networks allow some households to aggregate wealth more quickly than their peers, and it will explore mechanisms for these emerging disparities. The project will provide new insights regarding the origins and effects of income inequality on measures of individual well-being as well as to the heterogeneous mechanisms through which relatively egalitarian societies exhibit increases in the distribution of wealth within communities.
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Culture and the Mind
The AHRC Culture and the Mind project brings together top scholars in a broad range of disciplines-including anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, developmental psychology, economics, history, neuroscience, and philosophy-to investigate the philosophical consequences of the impact of culture on the mind and the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of culture.
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SFI Dynamics of Wealth Inequality
The Dynamics of Wealth Inequality project brings together ethnographic data from a wide range of populations with mathematical models in order to better understand how factors such as household structure, marital assortment and wealth transfers impact inequality.
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