RAPID: Drivers Influencing the Persistence of Medically Adverse Cultural Practices

Body modifications, sometimes accompanied with rituals, are widespread across cultures. Some of these practices have been the subject of concerted and prolonged efforts to discourage them for various reasons, including concerns for their impacts on health. However, these interventions have often been ineffective, perhaps because these practices remain fundamentally misunderstood. This project explicitly tests two competing hypotheses explaining the persistence of unhealthy body modification practices to better understand what motivates and maintains them. In doing so, the project trains an undergraduate and multiple graduate students in anthropological research methods, qualitative analysis, and quantitative modeling. Findings from this research provide a deeper understanding of body modification practices, which are disseminated in three major ways: (1) in a policy brief aimed at organizations designing interventions; (2) in meetings with participant communities; and (3) through academic presentations and publications. While body modification practices are widely thought to be maintained by social norms, it is not currently clear whether the norms are reinforced by potential future marriage partners or by future peer support networks. The RAPID project takes place in a context where a potentially harmful modification practice is being decriminalized, providing an opportunity to test which social network pathway is most likely to influence its persistence. To test these two possibilities, the team utilizes focus group discussions and short surveys to assess how people share information about body modifications, what people perceive as the costs to the practices; and whether body modifications are associated with characteristics of a participants’ social support networks. The project integrates anthropological research on the social dynamics of body modification, signaling theory, and ritual, to expand the understanding of body modification and the creation of identity and cooperation more broadly. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.