Doctoral student John H. Shaver (University of Connecticut), supervised by Dr. Richard Sosis, will undertake research on human cooperative behaviors and the redistribution of resources to others. Why humans give away useful resources, such as food and material possessions, has been of longstanding interest to anthropologists. Considerable research has examined the ability of anthropological models to explain resource transfers in the context of food sharing, labor, foraging, warfare and other domains of social behavior. The proposed research aims to extend these empirical findings and examine an economic system where contributions to public feasting and redistribution events are common. Specifically, this project will evaluate the ability of five social science theories to explain why individuals donate to collective pools for feasting and redistribution in a traditional society.
The research will be conducted in three rural villages located on the southern coast of Vanua Levu, Fiji. Quantitative and qualitative methods will be employed and data collection will include: quantitative data on resource transfers associated with redistribution feasts, demographics, fertility, and household economics, and qualitative data on norms associated with feasts, the relative prestige of village members and their willingness to come to the social assistance of other village members.
This research is important because it will improve our understanding of the relationship between institutional context and human cooperative behavior. Understanding human motivations for cooperation and how institutions influence human cooperation are crucial for explaining such wide-ranging phenomena as warfare, environmental conservation, and public health-care. This research also supports the education of a graduate student.
Members of all social groups known to anthropologists have extensive supernatural belief systems and everywhere people devote significant amounts of time and energy to religious rituals. The realm of the supernatural has long been the topic of scholarship; however we have only a cursory understanding of the dynamics of religious change, a topic of importance in a constantly modernizing world. As missionary activity has introduced new religious beliefs and rituals throughout the world, populations have had to navigate between the competing beliefs and rituals of their traditional religion and Western religions. My research investigated the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Fijians, a supernatural system that integrates their traditional religion with Christianity. Specifically, I examined several hypotheses aimed at explaining why individuals differentially invest their time and resources in different types of ritual practices. My fieldwork, conducted in rural villages on the island of Vanua Levu, Fiji, revealed a high level of behavioral variation in Christian and traditional ritual participation that mirrors variation in supernatural beliefs. In order to accurately understand the nature of supernatural beliefs and ritual practice in Fiji it is first necessary to appreciate the religious landscape of the Pacific generally. At the time of the arrival of missionaries, the traditional religions of Pacific peoples shared many common features due to a common ancestral religion. Part of this ancestral religion involved communication with ancestral spirits through kava (piper methysticum) rituals. Upon their arrival throughout the Pacific, missionaries attempted to eradicate the consumption of kava. However, despite widespread conversion to Christianity, there has been a steady increase in kava consumption throughout the Pacific, although in changing ritual formats. This increase in the consumption of kava also required an increase in the production of kava, which comes at the expense of more productive economic labor. Wesleyan Methodist missionaries first arrived in Fiji in 1835 and the overwhelming majority of ethnic Fijians today are devoutly Methodist; however, fieldwork indicated that traditional ancestor beliefs and associated beliefs about "tradition" are still very salient in structuring day-to-day life for many Fijians. Research found that individuals vary in terms of how much influence they believe their ancestors have in their lives, and the strength of their traditional beliefs in ancestors is negatively correlated with the strength of their Christian beliefs. Male participation in nightly kava ceremonies, ceremonies which grew out of the pre-Christian religion and contain references to supernatural belief in the ancestors, was found to be negatively associated with Christian religiosity and observed Christian ritual practice. Broadly, these differences in religious commitments can be predicted by rank: higher ranking men participate in more Christian ritual and lower ranking men participate more often in nightly kava ceremonies. This effect of rank is likely the result of the conversion methods of Methodist missionaries, who strategically first converted chiefs using traditional concepts of mana, assuming that lower ranking men would subsequently follow their chief’s example. My work represents some of the first research to collect quantitative data on observed ritual participation, and how it is related to different types and levels of supernatural beliefs, while placing the religious system in a broader historical context. The study of how populations vary in their commitments to different institutions is both important and timely. Understanding cultural institutions, their origins, spread, and how competing ones are reconciled are topics of increasing significance as globalization continues to force groups to confront and navigate new and diverse cultural institutions.
