Graduate student Mason C. Mathews, under the guidance of Dr. Marianne Schmink, will study how personal social networks contribute to social capital for collective projects. The research will be carried out in an isolated Amazonian extractive reserve in Brazil. The Brazilian government has designated approximately 5,080,830 hectares of forests and other landscapes as federal reserves for self-sustaining exploitation and conservation of renewable natural resources. Earlier research has demonstrated that dramatic social change typically accompanies the creation of extractive reserves because formerly isolated individuals and communities bond into local social movements, build alliances with national and international organizations, and overturn longstanding patron-client relations through land reform processes. Social network analysis will make it possible to quantify these changing relations and also will provide a new approach to measuring the access that extractive reserve residents have to markets, loans, and other types of capital.
The researcher will build on combine ego-centered network data with ethnographic data to investigate relations between government institutions, local organizations, and reserve residents in the context of recent changes. He will conduct the research in three reserve communities involved in different extractive industries (rubber, nut oil, and agriculture) and a control community located outside of the extractive reserve. Data collection will include intensive ethnographic interviews in a stratified sample of households from each community and then collect social network data from male and female household heads of the sample households.
The research is important because it will test an innovative methodology for analyzing the relations between individuals and groups in the context of economic and social change, and the controlled use of natural resources. In addition, a better understanding of the social networks of reserve residents may improve the success rate of reserve projects and provide useful information for policy makers. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.
