About Me: I am a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington. I am currently writing my dissertation, which examines how wealth acquisition has affected kinship, inheritance, parental investment and reproductive decisions among the ethnic Mosuo of Southwest China.

Research Philosophy: Karl Popper famously admonished “whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.” In practicing the science of understanding human behavior, I have tried to expose myself to a broad set of relevant theories. While committed to a rigorous, scientific approach to research, I believe much may be gleaned from disciplines outside my own, including those that focus on humanistic explanations of culture. My research has benefitted enormously from the works of ethnographers in sociocultural anthropology and sociology; these provided context, without which I would certainly have engaged in futile explorations of local cultural variation. I have focused also on incorporating demography and statistics into my work to ensure that the analysis I employ is the most appropriate to answer any given question.

Email: smc56 at u dot washington dot edu

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Image Copyright 2008, American Anthropological Association (credit: Peter M. Mattison)