Over the past 30 years, direct sales corporations have increasingly penetrated rural markets in the Third World, offering a new, flexible way for women to earn money while fulfilling traditional gender expectations and performing domestic tasks. Graduate student Jessica Chelekis, under the guidance of Dr. Richard R. Wilk, will undertake research on women's participation in direct sales in the Lower Brazilian Amazon, and the link between gender roles, women's work, and economic globalization. This study will examine how economic opportunities intersect with local household economic strategies and contexts, and the potential to transform or conserve gender roles as a result.
The researcher will conduct 12 months of fieldwork in three different riverine communities in a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon. She will use a combination of qualitative research methods, including participant-observation, unstructured and semi-structured interviews, and life histories. She will conduct semi-structured interviews with middle- and upper-level management personnel of these direct sales corporations in the urban centers of Brazil. She will also conduct archival research and collect available socio-demographic statistics for this area from institutions such as regional offices of the Brazilian Geography and Statistics Agency and municipal secretaries for health and social services.
This research will contribute to existing scholarship through its examination of gender roles by providing critical information for understanding household economic strategies that is missing from the literature on household organization and economies of this region. This research will also contribute to anthropological theories of globalization. This work is also important because the economic roles women perform in the Amazon region are often ignored, rendering women invisible to policy and regional development programs. The award also supports the education of a social scientist.
