This grant supports a summer fieldwork training program for doctoral students in cultural anthropology. It continues and expands a program supported by a previous NSF grant (BCS-0353137). Training takes place in Bolivia, in two villages of the Tsimane people, a native Amazonian group, where there has been ongoing research since 1999. Faculty, all of whom donate their time, include six cultural and three biological anthropologists. Students are moved through all stages of research (design, hypotheses formulation, analysis, presentation). They are exposed to interdisciplinary research in progress; provided with tools for conducting successful collaborative research; taught to adapt and apply formal methods of data collection in the field; and provided with a stimulating, supportive atmosphere where they experience the realities of fieldwork while exploring their own research interests. Students are taught to collect data in ecology, demography, experimental and household economics, cognitive anthropology, folk knowledge, natural resource use and health. Procedures for validating data and achieving inter-observer reliability across sites will be taught as well as how to deal with missing data; how to code, store and clean data in the field; how to explain human subject protection protocols to research participants; how to do preliminary data analysis and write up, how to deal with logistical and ethical problems that arise in the field situation; and how to give something back and explain research findings to the host community before leaving the research site. With this award, the PIs, who include two Hispanic researchers, also are committed to trying to broaden participation in science by actively recruiting minority students.
