Ryan O. Begley, Ph.D.

Ethnographic Fieldwork

I am currently working with Dr. Shenk as part of her NSF-funded project on the micro-foundations of inequality in rural Bangladesh. The research explores how wealth and health disparities emerge and/or change with market integration. During the summer of 2018, I spent two months in the field filming interviews (n = 64) designed to elicit emic perspectives on socioeconomic change in the region. I also recorded demonstrations of traditional practices as part of a salvage ethnography effort. I am now editing the footage into a feature-length film.

I collaborated with Dr. Shenk and colleagues at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) to conduct ethnographic research on the micro-foundations of inequality in Matlab, Bangladesh. Matlab is a rural area located about 75 kilometers southeast of the capital city of Dhaka, with around 240,000 people across 142 villages (as of 2018). The project explores how disparities in health and wealth emerge and/or change with economic development. I conducted fieldwork in 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023. The fieldwork involved conducting and filming interviews (n = 94 as of 2022) designed to elicit emic perspectives on economic, social, and technological change in the region, including changes in occupation, education, health, occupation, morality, and social relationships. This footage will result in an interview archive and a series of short films. I am now working with Bangla-English translators to have the interviews transcribed and captioning footage as transcripts become available. Completed materials are archived on ScholarSphere. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (No. BCS-1461514).

Ethnological Research

My ethnological research investigates traditional lifeways in transitional contexts, drawing upon ethnographic data sourced from the Human Relations Area Files and insights derived from evolutionary theory to illuminate the processes through which the contemporary world came to be. My earlier scholarship explored: [a] continuities between indigenous and world religions and [b] the role of stories in facilitating cooperation between unrelated ethnic groups within multicultural contexts. In 2019, I collaborated with Dr. Shenk to investigate factors driving transitions to and from matrilineal kinship systems across societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (n = 186). Our goal was to answer whether arguments regarding a cross-cultural transition away from matriliny were well-supported and whether “reverse transitions” to matriliny occurred with more regularity than claims of rarity suggest. We also explored the causes and correlates of such transitions and discussed the nature of the data used to support these claims. Our paper, “When does matriliny fail? The frequencies and causes of transitions to and from matriliny estimated from a de novo coding of a cross-cultural sample”, was part of a theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B published in 2019.