The Bolivia site lies along the Maniqui River in the department of Beni. The nearest town with electricity, running water, telephones, a hospital, pharmacies, and email is San Borja (pop 19,000). San Borja lies about 18 hours by bus ride from the capital city of La Paz. Amaszonas, a Bolivian airline company, has flights into and out of San Borja most days of the week. Students will live in two villages for the entire duration of the training program.
As market economies expand, the lifestyle and habitat of indigenous peoples with only tenuous links to the market begin to change, often in predictable ways. Although much has been written about the effects of globalization and market expansion on the well being and environment of indigenous peoples, little of this research is rigorously quantitative and longitudinal. The present work among the Tsimane’ in Bolivia started in 1999, continues to this day, and is designed to assess the effect of market expansion on a wide range of indicators of quality of life and the environment, including income, consumption, wealth, nutritional status, self-perceived and objective health, land use, rates of time preference (or patience), folk or traditional knowledge, social capital, economic inequalities, and happiness. The signature of this multi-disciplinary effort is the collection of panel or longitudinal data – repeated observations over time from the same people, households, and villages – to allow us to obtain a dynamic view of how larger processes taking place at regional and global levels affect local well being. In parallel with the academic work, we have introduced a new cover crop that should help increase land productivity, improve nutrition, serve as feed for domesticated animals, and lower pressure on forests. We are currently encouraging the adoption of the cover crop and assessing its impact both on the environment and personal well-being.
Since we examine the effect of market expansion on many different outcomes, we lack a central hypothesis for the entire research and training project, beyond the idea that things often get worse before they get better. Methodological innovations have included and include: (a) the application of consensus analysis to obtain measures of cultural competence in plant knowledge, (b) the use of a randomized experimental research design to assess the impact of development interventions, (c) the use of biomarkers of stress, (d) validation of survey instruments to assess household deforestation, (e) development of new methods to measure other dimensions of traditional knowledge, and (f) the use of experiments with real rewards to elicit rates of private time preference. Substantive empirical findings so far include: (a) strong positive correlations between schooling and rates of private time preference, (b) widespread sharing of ethnobotanical knowledge within and across villages, (c) poor adult and child nutritional status as revealed through anthropometric indicators, (d) absence of strong community-level effects in shaping nutritional outcomes, (e) several studies dealing with the income and own-price elasticities of demand for wildlife which show that many wild animals are inferior goods – their consumption declines as incomes rise even after controlling for standard confounders, (f) work in progress on the private returns and interaction of traditional and modern culture in shaping nutritional outcomes, (g) estimates of market participation on well being using an instrumental-variable approach, and (h) absence of strong evidence for secular changes in adult physical stature as revealed by changes in height between contemporary adult cohorts.
Current research focuses on the role of economic inequalities, social capital, and subjective indicators of stress in shaping self-perceived and objective health and emotions, such as anger, fear, happiness, and sadness.
The following web addresses contain PDF files of a sample of publications to come out of the Bolivia project: http://people.brandeis.edu/~rgodoy/papers.htm