Researchers have shown that different cultural groups, exploiting a common environment, have very different cognitive models of animal-plant-human interactions, and that these mental models are strongly correlated with, and perhaps cause strikingly different environmental behaviors. This research focuses on how different Lowland Maya cultural groups respond across generations to conditions of radical change, including language loss, environmental degradation, spatial displacement and dislocation. The project studies the mental models of the environment, and the values and behaviors associated with environmental and health-related decision making, of Lowland Maya people in the Guatemalan Department of El Peten. The research will document similarities and differences in folk-ecological models, environmental values and behaviors within and across cultures; will examine the flow of information within and across Indian and Ladino (Mestizo) groups; and will determine how relations between cognitive models and their transmission promote or undermine successful solutions to resource dilemmas and related conflicts. The research will study how Lowland Maya notions of illness are embedded and sustained within a vestigial cosmological framework of relationships involving humans, spirits and the surrounding social and material environment; and will contribute to a reliable cross-cultural methodology for understanding folk mental models of illness and behaviors that result from them.
Methods include experiments that integrate modeling techniques from anthropology, psychology, sociology and market research including the cultural-consensus model, mental models and social network models. The research is designed to assess within and between-population agreement on knowledge of plants, including principles of classification, on values, and on types of causal reasoning that drive decisions about how to tend the environment and treat human health disorders.
The broader impacts of the new knowledge to be created relate to environmental planners and decision makers who deal with "the Tragedy of the Commons" and related social dilemmas pertaining to resource use. This research will also show how environmental and human health are integrally related among Lowland Maya, which will be important for health planners.
