SelectedWorks - John P. Ziker

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Selected Works of John P. Ziker

Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology

Dr. John Ziker is a professor with the Department of Anthropology. His recent work focuses on climate change anthropology, the anthropology of infrastructure, and wealth inequality. His expertise is in the areas of ethnography, social network analysis, economic games, and time allocation!

Works
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About John P. Ziker

Dr. John Ziker is a professor with the Department of Anthropology. His recent work focuses on climate change anthropology, the anthropology of infrastructure, and wealth inequality. His expertise is in the areas of ethnography, social network analysis, economic games, and time allocation!

Present	Professor and Chair, Boise State University ‐ Department of Anthropology
Institution Organization Position Type Position Title Time Period to Options Current Position Affiliate my profile with this Institution

Environmental sustainability, risk, and uncertainty, Climate change anthropology, Anthropology of infrastructure, Wealth inequality, social network analysis, and reproducible science

2022 - 2026	Navigating the New Arctic Research
	National Science Foundation - 2126794
	Collaborative Research: NNA Research: Interactions of Natural and Social Systems with Climate Change, Globalization, and Infrastructure Development in the Arctic
	Role: PI
	Colleague(s): Florian Stammler
	$726,093.00
2022 - 2024	Evolutionary Insights into Digital Ecologies of Fear
	National Science Foundation - 2210082
	Standard Grant
	Role: Co-Principal Investigator
	Colleague(s): Jerry Fails and Kendall House
	$299,997
2023	Decision-Making with Uncertainty for DoD Installations Under Climate Change Impacts on Flood Risks
	Office of Naval Research - Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program - N00014-23-1-2735
	Department of Navy Award
	Colleague(s): Xun Huan, University of Michigan (Lead), University of Illinois

2011 - Boise State University Foundation Scholar Research/Creative Activity Award Finalist
2006-2009 National Science Foundation, Continuing Grant: Home, Hearth, and Household in the Siberian and Northern Canada
2009-2010 Fulbright Visiting Chair in North American Studies at the University of Calgary
2016 Foundation Scholar Award - Research and Creative Activity, Boise State University Founation

Medical Anthropology
Sex and Gender: An Ethnological Approach
Synchronic Methods in Anthropology

E-mail: jziker@boisestate.edu

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9059-5594

Articles (33)

Women’s Subsistence Strategies Predict Fertility Across Cultures, but Context Matters (Abigail E. Page, Erik J. Ringen, Jeremy Koster, et al.) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024)

While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities—incorporating market integration—are associated with ...

Inheritance and Inequality Among Nomads of South Siberia (Paul L. Hooper, Adam Z. Reynolds, Bayarsaikhan Jamsranjav, et al.) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2023)

At the headwaters of the Yenisei River in Tuva and northern Mongolia, nomadic pastoralists move between camps in a seasonal rotation that facilitates their animals' access to high-quality grasses and shelter. The use and informal ...

Social Networks and Instructional Reform in STEM: The Teaching-Research Nexus (Katherine Kappelman, John P. Ziker, Karl Mertens, et al.) Innovative Higher Education (2023)

Instructional reform in STEM aims for the widespread adoption of evidence based instructional practices (EBIPS), practices that implement active learning. Research recognizes that faculty social networks regarding discussion or advice about teaching may matter to ...

Reproductive Inequality in Humans and Other Mammals (John Ziker and Karl J. Mertens) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2023)

To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) ...

Context and Content of Teaching Conversations: Exploring How to Promote Sharing of Innovative Teaching Knowledge Between Science Faculty (Brittnee Earl, Karl Mertens, Susan E. Shadle, et al.) International Journal of STEM Education (2022)

Background: Change strategies may leverage interpersonal relationships and conversations to spread teaching innovations among science faculty. Knowledge sharing refers to the process by which individuals transfer information and thereby spread innovative ideas within an organization. ...

Development of the Cooperative Adoption Factors Instrument to Measure Factors Associated with Instructional Practice in the Context of Institutional Change (John P. Ziker, Brittnee Earl, Karl Mertens, et al.) International Journal of STEM Education (2022)

Background: Many institutional and departmentally focused change efforts have sought to improve teaching in STEM through the promotion of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs). Even with these efforts, EBIPs have not become the predominant mode of ...

The Revival of Reindeer Herding in the North Baikal Highlands, Republic of Buryatia (John P. Ziker) Reports of the Laboratory of Ancient Technologies (2021)

This paper summarizes work with two Evenki reindeer herding collectives in the Severo-Baikal’skoe nagor’e in July, 2010. Ethnographic work with reindeer herder groups Oron and Uluki, both established in the early 1990s in the Kholodnoe ...

Innovative Teaching Knowledge Stays with Users (Brittnee Earl, Karl Mertens, Susan E. Shadle, et al.) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (2020)

Programs seeking to transform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses often strive for participating faculty to share their knowledge of innovative teaching practices with other faculty in their home departments. Here, we provide interview, ...

Life-History Factors Influence Teenagers’ Suicidal Ideation: A Model Selection Analysis of the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (John P. Ziker and Kristin Snopkowski) Evolutionary Psychology (2020)

Suicidality is an important contributor to disease burden worldwide. We examine the developmental and environmental correlates of reported suicidal ideation at age 15 and develop a new evolutionary model of suicidality based on life history ...

The Life History of Human Foraging: Cross-Cultural and Individual Variation (John Ziker) Science Advances (2020)

Human adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement ...

Sexual Initiation Among Canadian Youth: A Model Comparison Approach of Evolutionary Hypotheses Shows Greatest Support for Extrinsic Mortality Cues, Intergenerational Conflict, and Early Life Psychosocial Stressors (Kristin Snopkowski and John P. Ziker) Evolution and Human Behavior (2020)

Early life factors are associated with the timing of reproductive events in adolescence, but a variety of hypotheses (such as psychosocial acceleration theory, paternal investment theory, extrinsic mortality, internal prediction, and intergenerational conflict) propose different ...

Differences Between Sons and Daughters in the Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth (Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Mary C. Towner, Ryan Baldini, et al.) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2019)

Persistent interest lies in gender inequality, especially with regard to the favouring of sons over daughters. Economists are concerned with how privilege is transmitted across generations, and anthropologists have long studied sex-biased inheritance norms. There ...

Investigating How Faculty Social Networks and Peer Influence Relate to Knowledge and Use of Evidence-Based Teaching Practices (J. P. Ziker, B. Earl and S. E. Shadle) International Journal of STEM Education (2019)

Background: Calls for science education reform have been made for decades in the USA. The recent call to produce one million new science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates over 10 years highlights the need ...

Paying It Forward or Giving Back?: Women’s Sharing Networks in Siberia (John P. Ziker and Karen S. Fulk) Cross-Cultural Research (2019)

Subsistence food sharing in Ust’-Avam (Taimyr Region, Russian Federation) is analyzed in light of Arctic research on sharing and current debate. Cultural traditions such as food sharing practices are widespread across indigenous communities in the ...

Greater Wealth Inequality, Less Polygyny: Rethinking the Polygyny Threshold Model (John Ziker) Journal of the Royal Society Interface (2018)

Monogamy appears to have become the predominant human mating system with the emergence of highly unequal agricultural populations that replaced relatively egalitarian horticultural populations, challenging the conventional idea—based on the polygyny threshold model—that polygyny should ...

Reproductive Responses to Economic Uncertainty: Fertility Decline in Post-Soviet Ust’-Avam, Siberia (David A. Nolin and John P. Ziker) Human Nature (2016)

In the face of economic and political changes following the end of the Soviet Union, total fertility rates fell significantly across the post-Soviet world. In this study we examine the dramatic fertility transition in one ...

The Effects of Wealth on Male Reproduction Among Monogamous Hunter-Fisher-Trappers in Northern Siberia (John P. Ziker, David A. Nolin and Joellie Rasmussen) Current Anthropology (2016)

Variability in men’s reproductive success (RS) is partly attributable to the ability of successful men to influence resource flows relevant to the mate choice and reproduction of women. This study explores the effects of variability ...

Linking Disparate Approaches to the Study of Social Norms: An Example from Northern Siberia (John P. Ziker) Sibirica (2015)

This article examines altruistic social norms among the Dolgans and the Nganasans in Arctic Siberia, drawing on and integrating experimental game theory and semiotic approaches. The article demonstrates the complementarity of these two methodologies in ...

Resilience of Domestic Groups and Communities on the Lower Enisei River Throughout the Twentieth Century (John P. Ziker) Sibirica (2012)

This paper discusses flexibility in subsistence and exchange strategies and family and community structures in an indigenous community on the lower Enisei River in north-central Siberia. An analysis of available data on mobility, resource use, ...

Microdemographics and Indigenous Identity in the Central Taimyr Lowlands (John P. Ziker) Indigenous Peoples and Demography: The Complex Relation between Identity and Statistics (2011)

Identity systems in indigenous and small-scale societies are known to include kinship and marriage systems, exchange networks and larger solidarities, such as lineages, clans and regional groups (Fox 1984; Stone 2000). Human identities can be ...

Toward an Integrated Theory of Social Norms (John P. Ziker) Histories from the North: Environments, Movements, and Narratives (2011)

The main question I am interested in exploring is how social norms are related to indigenous Siberians' narratives about the environment, their strong sense of fairness in distributing food, and other elements of their social ...

Changing Gender Roles and Economies in Taimyr (John P. Ziker) Anthropology of East Europe Review (2010)

This article is an inquiry into the extent to which, and how, roles of men and women in indigenous communities in north-central Siberia have changed along with the changing economic and political context from the ...

Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment (Joseph Henrich, Jean Ensminger, Richard McElreath, et al.) Science (2010)

Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. ...

Introduction to the Special Issue on Siberian Demography (John P. Ziker and David G. Anderson) Sibirica (2010)

This special issue of Sibirica features a selection of recent research on the demography of Siberians with a special emphasis on what Russian scholars call the etnodemografiia of the “sparse” (malochislennye) peoples of Siberia. Demographic ...

Chronological Insights, Cultural Change, and Resource Exploitation on the West Coast of Sweden During the Late Palaeolithic/Early Mesolithic Transition (Lou Schmitt, Stephan Larsson, Jan Burdukiewicz, et al.) Oxford Journal of Archaeology (2009)

In this paper, we attempt to shed light on a probable cause of cultural change via a new avenue of approach. In brief, the paper represents a micro-study that addresses the Ahrensburgian culture group during ...