The Shuar Life History Project is part of the UCSB
Center
for Evolutionary Psychology’s Human Universals Project, and is a collaborative
effort involving researchers from the University of Oregon, UCSB
Center for
Evolutionary Psychology, UCLA, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian Health
Ministry Hospital in Sucúa, Ecuador.
The goal is to conduct a wide range of integrated studies in the Morona-Santiago region of Ecuador over the next four years. The range of conditions experienced by Shuar provides an excellent opportunity to test evolutionary life history predictions, as well as the universality of hypothesized psychological adaptations. Studies will investigate Shuar health, subsistence, economy, parenting, reasoning, and demography. For instance, preliminary data on over 2000 Shuar schoolchildren collected by our Ecuadorian colleagues show significant variation in child health both within and between villages, and between areas with different levels of acculturation and road access.
The next stage of the project will involve the collection of medical histories, physical exams, census and genealogical data for nearly 20,000 people by Shuar Federation and Health Ministry medical personnel. Co-Director for CEP Field Research Lawrence Sugiyama, project coordinator Aaron Blackwell, and their colleagues then plan to collect more detailed behavioral, dietary, socio-economic, and ecological data in individual study villages to explain observed health variance. The data collected will be used to test a wide variety of life history hypotheses related to evolution of the juvenile period and long lifespan, as well as the decision making adaptations underlying economic, mating, reproductive, and parenting strategies, cooperation, health care, and health outcomes. Collaborators in psychology and anthropology will also send students to Ecuador to work in villages testing additional hypotheses cross-culturally.
The Shuar Life History Project is in its early stages, and is presently seeking students interested in working in the area. Graduate students already enrolled in other programs who are interested in conducting research in the area and collaborating on the project are encouraged to contact the organizers. Interested prospective students are encouraged to apply to the University of Oregon graduate program in anthropology. Research foci might include studying the socio-ecological determinants of birth outcomes, assessing water and soil quality, mapping and measuring garden productivity, examining attractiveness psychology and mating patterns, studying politics and warfare, measuring hormone levels in relation to behavior, or examining human/primate interactions, just to name a few possibilities. The broad goal is to collect as much data as possible about the Shuar, their socio-ecological environment, and their decision making psychology (broadly defined) to produce an integrated study of one society from an evolutionary, adaptationist perspective, since all factors are ultimately interrelated and affect life history decisions and phenotypic outcomes.