dgerkey
Main profile
Postdoctoral Alumnus
Drew Gerkey is an anthropologist who uses theory from behavioral and political ecology to examine the emergence and stability of cooperation. Synthesizing qualitative and quantitative ethnographic methods, he examines cooperation in diverse contexts that link multiple scales of human-environment interaction, including: subsistence activities, market expansion, natural resource use, social networks, institutions, and social movements. He has conducted 22 months of ethnographic research with salmon fishers and reindeer herders on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Northeast Siberia. At SESYNC, Drew is collaborating with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to study social networks in rural Alaskan villages. By analyzing the flow of labor, resources, and knowledge between households, this project will identify factors that enhance resilience among individuals, households, and communities. These insights can expand our understanding of the ways social networks emerge from human-environment interactions, contributing to research on the human dimensions of sustainability and natural resource management.
| Resources | |
|---|---|
| Linking subsistence harvest diversity and productivity to adaptive capacity in an Alaskan food sharing network |
Feb 08, 2021 Article published in American Journal of Human Biology. |
| Indirect Reciprocity, Resource Sharing, and Environmental Risk: Evidence from Field Experiments in Siberia |
Jul 21, 2016 Article published in PLoS ONE. |
| Estimating the absolute wealth of households |
May 15, 2015 Article published in Bulletin of the World Health Organization. |
| Evolution of Kinship |
Feb 17, 2015 Article published in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition). |
| What is a group? Conceptual clarity can help integrate evolutionary and social scientific research on cooperation |
Jun 27, 2014 Open peer commentary published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. |
| Cooperation in Context: Public Goods Games and Post-Soviet Collectives in Kamchatka, Russia |
Apr 16, 2013 Economic game experiments have become a prominent method among social scientists developing and testing theories of cooperation. These games provide a valuable opportunity to generate measures of cooperation that can be compared from one place to the next, yet challenges remain in how to interpret cross-cultural differences in these experiments and connect them to cooperation in naturally occurring contexts. I address these challenges by examining framing effects in public goods games (PGGs) with salmon fishers and reindeer herders in Kamchatka, Russia. |