Goals and hypotheses. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have used local knowledge of plants and the environment to protect their health and manage natural resources. 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 anthropology provides researchers with the tools to fill the gaps. In research in progress, TAPS researchers are using these methods to quantify (a) parental knowledge of medical plants used to treat illnesses (anemia, infection, parasite, and physical growth) of children 2-15 years old and (b) adult local knowledge of farming among Tsimane’. Researchers will estimate the effect of (a) on objective child health and (b) on deforestation. We hypothesize that both forms of knowledge will produce social or spillover benefits: parental knowledge will protect child health and adult knowledge of farming will curb deforestation. Since tropical forests produce benefits for the rest of the world (e.g., carbon sequestration, biodiversity), a reduction in tropical rain forest cut from greater local knowledge of farming amounts to a subsidy to the rest of the world.
Specific aims.
(a) Present a theory and hypotheses about how and why local knowledge of medicinal plants and farming benefits others beyond the person holding the knowledge.
(b) Use instrumental-variable techniques to get unbiased estimates of the effect of local knowledge on child health and deforestation.
(c) Create a public-use data set for others to test hypotheses beyond the ones examine here.
(d) Train Ph.D. students in cultural anthropology in formal methods of collecting socio-cultural and biological data.
Methods. Research will last three years (1/2006-12/2008) and will take place in at least 13 Tsimane’ villages at varying distances from market towns. The research team includes cultural and biological anthropologists and a plant physiologist who have been working together with the Tsimane’ since 1999. They draw on cultural consensus and cultural consonance analysis to measure local knowledge of medicinal plants and farming. The use of instrumental variables will allow researchers to improve estimates of how local knowledge of medical treatments and local farming affect child health and deforestation. Measures of child health include: (a) parasite load, (b) C-Reactive Protein (CRP), (c) hemoglobin (Hb) levels, and (d) anthropometric measures of growth and nutritional status.
Significance. Standard estimates of the value of local knowledge are lower than they should be because they ignore the social or spillover effects of local knowledge. Our study will provide a more reliable estimate of the value of local knowledge to the world.
Funding organization.. National Science Foundation.
