The Changing Value of Food: Localizing Modernity among the Tsimané Indians of Lowland Bolivia

This dissertation offers an ethnographic account of the contemporary relationships between livelihood practices and food among the Tsimané Indians of the Bolivian Amazon. Because of the multitudinous properties of food, I use it as both a tool and a metaphor to focus my discussion on how a history of development in the region coalesces into new constructions of identity, values, practices, and knowledge for the Tsimané. Through a framework of `localized' modernity, I argue that food and food related processes are not only shaped by broad and indirect forms of development over time, but that they moderate them by formulating the ways in which they take root in everyday life. Understanding contemporary articulations of indigenous identity and cultural constructions is increasingly important to small lowland indigenous groups throughout Latin America, but particularly in Bolivia, where indigenous groups are engaging in new claims over autonomy, land, and resource rights as part of a new "plurinational" state. By offering insight into contemporary indigenous practices and knowledge, I draw attention to the ways politicized ideals of indigeneity in Bolivia can conflict with local ontologies. Based on over a year of fieldwork, the dissertation is organized into two sections. The first section examines a century of regional shifts that transformed the landscape in which the Tsimané historically reside along with their ability to survive solely from subsistence activities. I situate contemporary forms of livelihood production, specifically logging, within this history in order to highlight how past experiences transform local articulations of the emerging national indigenous and environmental politics of 'Vivir Bien'. The second section focuses specifically on livelihoods and food. I call attention to the ways global, national, and regional processes are experienced, interpreted, and transformed on a local level and through time. I illustrate this in three ways: first, through a discussion of time allotment and the relationship between subsistence activities and cash accruing activities; second, through a comparison of how people think about the domain of food and how they consume food; and lastly, through a discussion of one of the most important cooked foods of the Tsimané, Shocdye (beer), and the ways in which changing livelihood activities, conceptions of dietary practice, and social relationships and roles coalesce through cooking and eating

Gender targeting of unconditional income transfers and child nutritional status: Experimental evidence from the Bolivian Amazon

Observational studies suggest that women’s income benefits children’s health and nutritional status, as well as education, more than men’s income, apparently because women are more likely to shift marginal resources to their children. These studies have influenced policies such as conditional cash transfers, which typically target women. However, previous studies have been unable to control for unobserved heterogeneity in child endowments and parental preferences. We report the results of a trial that allocated randomly one-time in-kind income in the form of edible rice (the main staple and cash crop in the study area) or rice seeds to the female or male household head (edible rice transfers, range: 30-395 kg/household; rice seeds: 5.9 kg/household). The trial took place in a society of native Amazonian forager-farmers in Bolivia (2008-2009). Outcomes included four anthropometric indicators of short-run nutritional status of 848 children from 40 villages. We found that the transfers produced no discernible impact on short-run (~5 months) nutritional status of children, or any differential effects between girls and boys by the gender of the household head who received the transfers. These null results probably relate to specific social norms of the Tsimane’, such as pooling of food resources, shared preferences, and relatively equal bargaining power between Tsimane’ women and men. The results highlight the probable importance of culture in household resource allocation and suggest that gender targeting in cash transfer programs might not increase investments in children in societies where women and men have more egalitarian household relationship

Social science perspectives on drivers of and responses to global

This article provides a review of recent anthropological, archeological, geographical, and sociological research on anthropogenic drivers of climate change, with a particular focus on drivers of carbon emissions, mitigation and adaptation. The four disciplines emphasize cultural, economic, geographic, historical, political, and social‐structural factors to be important drivers of and responses to climate change. Each of these disciplines has unique perspectives and makes noteworthy contributions to our shared understanding of anthropogenic drivers, but they also complement one another and contribute to integrated, multidisciplinary frameworks. The article begins with discussions of research on temporal dimensions of human drivers of carbon emissions, highlighting interactions between long‐term and near‐term drivers. Next, descriptions of the disciplines\u27 contributions to the understanding of mitigation and adaptation are provided. It concludes with a summary of key lessons offered by the four disciplines as well as suggestions for future research

To Beef or Not to Beef: Defining Food Security and Insecurity in Tucumán Argentina

Anthropologists have had a long and rich history of drawing out the cultural importance of diet and the beliefs and rituals that are associated with it. Many anthropologists combine this knowledge with biological data to create a more comprehensive understanding of the diet. This skill becomes particularly important in understanding the difficulties of defining terms like food security and food insecurity among vulnerable populations. Popular working definitions focus primarily on the diet as being a nutritious entity that leads to a healthy and active lifestyle. While these definitions weigh heavily on the biological importance of diet, they deal with the issue of culturally relevant foods by using the term ‘food preference’, not considering the possibility that preferential foods and the way they are eaten can be in direct opposition to a nutritious and healthy life style. In the case of Tucumán, Argentina the preference for a beef-centric diet is associated, by government institutions, with malnutrition and a host of other health related problems throughout the province. However, local cultural definitions in Tucumán define food security as having beef as a daily component of the diet. Associated with this definition are various beliefs surrounding health, national identity, and family. Within these definitions Households and individuals are willing to go to great lengths, despite economic and health hardships to insure the daily presence of beef in their everyday lives. The result of these divergent definitions is that one interpretation of food security is understood by another to be food insecurity. This paper is a work in progress and explores how local definitions of food security and food insecurity play a role in daily diet maintenance and how these local definitions may conflict with the broader institutional and nutritionally based definitions

Food and the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture d’Isabelle de Solier

Isabelle de Solier (2013) Food and the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture. Bloomsbury, [London]. A timely addition to theoretical debates over practices of defining the self in postindustrial modernity, Isabelle De Solier’s Food and the Self provides a comprehensive discussion of the production and consumption practices that shape what it means to be a foodie. The term foodie is used globally as an identifier, particularly among the middle and upper classes in westernized coun..

Changes in adult well-being and economic inequalities : An exploratory observational longitudinal study (2002-2010) of micro-level trends among Tsimane', a small-scale rural society of Indigenous People in the Bolivian Amazon

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-MKnowing what happens over time to the lifeways of people in contemporary small-scale non-industrial societies of the rural Global South matters because it helps assess changes in the quality of life of underrepresented groups. It has been hard to answer the question because longitudinal information is rarely collected in such settings. A longitudinal dataset of nine years (2002-2010) from a horticultural-foraging society of Indigenous People in the Bolivian Amazon (Tsimane') is used for an exploratory analysis of micro-level trends in indicators of well-being and economic inequalities. We selected 13 Tsimane' villages (from ∼ 100) that varied in proximity to town and surveyed all households in each village. ∼ 240 households were followed yearly to estimate trends of 21 outcomes (e.g., income, sociality, macronutrients). For each economic outcome, annual and all-years-combined Gini coefficients were estimated for the entire sample across the 13 villages. We show a rise in total asset wealth, a change in asset composition (less traditional wealth, more commercial wealth), higher monetary value of foods eaten, and better-perceived health, but a decline in caloric and protein consumption and no marked gender differences in objective or hedonic measures of well-being. Economic inequalities were non-trivial and showed no marked trend but varied between years; asset inequality varied less than income inequality. We document the value of longitudinal, locally grounded indexes of well-being to obtain a granular view of micro-level changes in well-being and the possible use of inequality in the consumption of calories and macronutrients as a valid proxy for income inequality in rural areas of the Global South with tenuous links to the market economy