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

纵观我们的进化史，人类一直在利用当地的植物知识来保护自己的健康。人类学家早就认识到测试地方知识的适应优势的重要性，但他们一直受到有限的方法来衡量个人的地方知识文化内的差异。此外，人类学家强调个人知识如何使拥有知识的个人受益，而不是个人知识如何使他人受益。文化人类学的文化共识和文化和谐方法的最新发展和完善为研究人员提供了填补空白的工具。在这个项目中，研究人员将在玻利维亚的亚马逊土著Tsimane中进行，他们建议使用这些新方法来量化父母对用于治疗疾病的药用植物的知识（贫血，感染，寄生虫和身体发育）的儿童2-15岁。研究人员将评估父母对药用植物的了解对父母自己的孩子和邻居的孩子的客观儿童健康的影响。他们假设，父母的知识将保护自己孩子的健康，也产生积极的好处，积累到其他孩子的家庭以外，因为自己的孩子有更好的健康。研究的具体目的是（a）提出一个理论和假设，说明药用植物的地方知识如何以及为什么会使掌握知识的人以外的其他人受益，包括父母自己的孩子和邻居家的孩子。(b)使用工具变量技术来获得当地知识对儿童健康影响的无偏估计。(c)创建一个公共使用的数据集，供其他人测试这里所研究的假设。(d)对两名文化人类学博士生进行培训，使其掌握收集社会文化和生物数据的正规方法，研究将持续三年（2006-2008年），将在距离集镇不同距离的村庄进行。该研究小组包括文化和生物人类学家，自1999年以来一直与Tsimane'一起工作。经济学家和发展组织对了解文化影响基本福祉指标的程度和途径表现出潜在但日益增长的兴趣。该项目的结果改进了对文化的一个方面的好处的评估：共享的地方知识。

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.