CAREER: Cash and the Social Economy of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation: Labor Allocations, Consumption, and Economic Development on the Periphery

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

Pre-industrial indigenous societies organized economic production on a "subsistence" level, based on the family and different from that of market-based industrial capitalism. In the modern world culturally distinct indigenous societies move fluidly between institutions and transactions on both sides of the subsistence-market divide. This Career project involves the ethnographic research of a young investigator at Colorado State University. Research on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota will analyze how economic production occurs both in family networks and through market transactions. The project will investigate how households integrate the market and the social economy using methods of time allocation and ethnographic participant observation. The project will study consumption and social networks, cash requirements, responses to new economic opportunities, and the relationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity to build models of labor time allocation and household consumption. The data will allow hypotheses to be tested relating wage labor, gender and social networks. Students from the University and Oglala Lakota College will work in teams to assist with the research. The research will advance our theoretical understanding of the subsistence-market distinction, will train students in research design and methods, will add to the skills of a young investigator, and will help local Lakota students to consider advanced studies at the university.