Anthropology doctoral student, Wenyi Zhang of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, supervised by Professor F. K. Lehman, will undertake research on the relationship between the circulation of scientific knowledge, the production of social consensus, and individual decision making. The research will be conducted among the ethnic Jinghpo people who live astride the China-Burma border. Although a thriving border trade has brought HIV/AIDS and drug dependence to the Jinghpo, prevention programs have not stimulated the Jinghpo to learn and act on scientific knowledge that might protect them. This situation provides a natural laboratory in which to investigate i) how individuals construct their understandings of natural phenomenon; ii) how local knowledge circulates in a social group; iii) how social consensus emerges from such circulation; and iv) how consensual knowledge affects behavior.
The researcher will undertake 18 months of field research. He will observe behavior, conduct individual and group interviews, and film and analyze rituals. He will focus particuarly on how consensus emerges out of knowledge variability, employing mathematical chaos theory to analyze the relationship between micro-level variability and the emergence of macro-level or collective agreement.
The research is important because it will contribute to the application of complexity theory to social science, and to better understanding of the cognitive basis for achieving social consensus in real-life contexts. In addition, the research outcome will inform the development of interventions that enable people to employ scientific knowledge on their own terms. The award also contributes to the education of a social scientist.
