Inter-ethnic Interaction, Strategic Bargaining Power, and the Dynamics of Cultural Norms: A Field Study in an Amazonian Population
Year: 2017
Type: preprint
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: This article has now been published. It is open-access and available here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-017-9297-8Ethnic groups are universal and unique to human societies. Such groups sometimes have norms of behavior that are adaptively linked to their social and ecological circumstances, and ethnic boundaries may function to protect that variation from erosion by inter-ethnic interaction. However, such interaction is often frequent and voluntary, suggesting that individuals may be able to strategically reduce its costs, allowing adaptive cultural variation to persist in spite of interaction with out-groups with different norms. We examine five mechanisms influencing the dynamics of ethnically-distinct cultural norms, each focused on strategic individual-level choices in inter-ethnic interaction: bargaining, interaction frequency-biased norm adoption, assortment on norms, success-biased inter-ethnic social learning, and childhood socialization. We use Bayesian item response models to analyze patterns of norm variation and inter-ethnic interaction in an ethnically-structured Amazonian population. We show that, among indigenous Matsigenka, inter-ethnic education with colonial Mestizos is more strongly associated with Mestizo-typical norms than is even extensive inter-ethnic experience in commerce and wage labor. Using ethnographic observations, we show that all five of the proposed mechanisms of norm adoption may contribute to this effect. However, of these mechanisms, we argue that changes in relative bargaining power are particularly important for ethnic minorities wishing to preserve distinctive norms while engaging in inter-ethnic interaction in domains such as education. If this mechanism proves applicable in a range of other ethnographic contexts, it would constitute one cogent explanation for when and why ethnically-structured cultural variation can either persist or erode given frequent, and often mutually beneficial, inter-ethnic interaction.
Authors: John A Bunce, Richard McElreath
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4252576151