Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Politics of Representing Nature, Culture, and Conservation in Northwestern Bolivia

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Graduate student, Teressa Trusty, supervised by Dr. Stevan Harrell, will undertake research on the environmental perceptions and practices of people who live along the eastern side of the Madidi National Park in Bolivia. Her research will focus on their cognitive models of the human-environment relationship and how these models affect their practices of agriculture and logging. At the behest of international conservationists, the Bolivian government created Madidi National Park in 1995. Formation of this protected area, which stretches from the Andes to the Amazon Basin, enclosed numerous communities and continues to impact the everyday lives of those who live in and adjacent to the park. International NGOs have sought to strengthen their conservation efforts in part by influencing the values and beliefs of local residents so they become more concerned about impacts from their natural resource use. However, pilot research suggests that local residents already are mindful of environmental impacts, even though they conceptualize them differently than do the NGOs.The three aims of the study are: 1) to assess and explain the formation of the environmental cultural models within a range of communities and ethnic groups; 2) to use this information to develop a survey to measure the value orientations and normative beliefs of the study population and their behavioral intentions towards logging, ranching, hunting, gathering, agriculture, and participation in conservation projects; and 3) to test the relationship between values, beliefs, and behavior and agreement within the study population about ideas and actions. This research will begin by delineating local ideas about the human-environment relationship and conservation through open-ended interviews, participant observation, and archival research. These qualitative data will be used to design and administer a culturally appropriate survey to determine the degree to which the value and belief systems are shared, adhered to, and acted upon.. The survey also will provide data for modeling local beliefs about the environment using cultural consensus analysis and standard psychometrics. The results of this research will advance theory in cognitive anthropology and social psychology while also contributing to the growing body of work on environmental perceptions in political ecology. In addition, better understanding of these ideas and behaviors can ameliorate interactions between NGOs, the Bolivian government, and the individuals living in this continuously contested region. The research also will contribute significantly to the education of a social scientist.