Cultural Change and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: An Empirical Analysis from the Tsimane' in the Bolivian Amazon

Abstract

Among the different factors associated with change in traditional ecological knowledge, the study of the relations between cultural change and traditional ecological knowledge has received scan and inadequate scholarly attention. Using data from indigenous peoples of an Amazonian society facing increasing exposure to the mainstream Bolivian society, we analyzed the relation between traditional ecological knowledge, proxied with individual plant use knowledge and cultural change, proxied with individual- (n=484) and village-level (n=47) measures of attachment to traditional beliefs and values. We found that both the individual level of detachment from traditional values and the village level detachment from traditional values were associated with individual levels of plant use knowledge, irrespective of other proxy measures for cultural change. Because both the individual- and the village-level variables bear statistically significant associations with plant use knowledge, our results suggest that both the individual- and the supra-individual level processes of cultural change are related to the erosion of plant use knowledge. Results from our work highlight the importance of analyzing processes that operate at intermediary social units—the village in our case study—to explain changes in traditional ecological knowledge.