Social returns of local knowledge in child health and forest conservation: A study in a native Amazonian population of Bolivia

Brandeis University, Waltham MA

Investigators

Abstract

Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have used local knowledge of plants to protect their health. Anthropologists have long recognized the importance of testing the adaptive advantages of local knowledge, but they have been hampered by limited methods for measuring individual intra-cultural variation of local knowledge. Furthermore, anthropologists have stressed how individual knowledge benefits the individual holding the knowledge more than how individual knowledge benefits others. The recent development and refinement of cultural consensus and cultural consonance methods from cultural anthropology provides researchers with the tools to fill the gaps. In this project, to be carried out among the Tsimane, a native Amazonian population in Bolivia, researchers propose to use these new methods to quantify parental knowledge of medical plants used to treat illnesses (anemia, infection, parasite, and physical growth) of children 2-15 years old. Researchers will estimate the effect of parental knowledge of medicinal plants on the objective child health of the parents' own children and their neighbor's children. They hypothesize that parental knowledge will protect the health of their own children, and also produce positive benefits that accrue to other children outside of the family because one's own children have better health. The specific aims of the research are to (a) Present a theory and hypotheses about how and why local knowledge of medicinal plants benefits others beyond the person holding the knowledge, including parent's own children and children in neighboring households. (b) Use instrumental-variable techniques to get unbiased estimates of the effect of local knowledge on child health. (c) Create a public-use data set for others to test hypotheses beyond the ones examine here. (d) Train two PhD students in cultural anthropology in formal methods of collecting socio-cultural and biological data. Research will last three years (2006-2008) and will take place in villages at varying distances from a market town. The research team includes cultural and biological anthropologists that has been working together with the Tsimane' since 1999. Economists and development organizations have shown a latent but increasing interest in understanding the magnitude and paths through which culture affects basic indicators of well-being. The results from this project improve assessment of the benefits of one aspect of culture: shared local knowledge.