AbstractsAnthropology

High levels of internal migration to urban centers are occurring throughout the developing world. With rapid urbanization the shifts in mode of subsistence and the value of wage-labor jobs can be dramatic. Changing dietary patterns, education options, and child work patterns often accompany these shifts. Using Kaplan's framework of Embodied Capital Theory, this study explores how parental investment strategies function and change in and between rural and urban environments for Indo-Fijians. Parental investment decisions guide the actions parents take regarding the nutrition, education, and labor expenditures of their children. These decisions are shaped by the ecological contexts in which they occur. It is proposed that differing ecological conditions (rural vs. urban) will stimulate different patterns of investment in children to create embodied capital and different patterns of child productive labor given parental capacities, variable opportunity structures, and expectations for the future lives of children. Data on 110 rural and 220 urban households (85 high income, 135 low income) collected during 2004-2005 provides for analysis of household, maternal and paternal variables, and individual information on education, diet, and activity patterns of 572 children. Results indicate that parents do perceive an expanded urban opportunity structure, relative to rural, and shift investment strategies to enhance educational investments. In doing so, parents are shown to decrease expectations on short-term child productive work for some children, in lieu of greater long-term returns from educational investment. Parental capacities are shown to be key in migrant selectivity, maternal access to wage-employment, and children's educational performance. The urban environment is shown to be associated with greater food expenditures, higher consumption of processed foods, and increases in child BMI. This study makes theoretical contributions to parental investment research by providing a comparative study on the quality - quantity tradeoff in humans and by testing some predictions of the Theory of Embodied Capital in a modern context. Practically, this study informs public health and policy programs on the intra-household dynamics involved in nutritional and educational decisions and how those decisions impact child welfare.