Wesley Allen-Arave
University of New Mexico
March 7, 2017
Research in anthropology requires a balance of flexibility and focus. A challenge in anthropology graduate training is imparting students with flexibility to adapt their research plans as complications and insights arise without tempering the students’ focus on recording compelling data for their research question(s). Unlike scientists in disciplines characterized by tightly controlled lab experiments, anthropologists generally observe people in their natural environments and lack control over the research setting. This creates unforeseen challenges for even the most carefully considered research plans, but also sets up exciting opportunities for new insights. Although the structure of publications and grant proposals obscure the often accidental nature of discoveries by embedding unforeseen results in theory after a researcher arrives at a logical explanation for them, serendipity surely leads researchers across academic disciplines to discoveries. Indeed, many discoveries are unlikely to be made through reason alone and may even require some serendipity. By living alongside the people under study, fieldworkers inevitably have observations, conversations, and shared experiences that relate to broad aspects of the everyday lives of the people in the study community. This exposure to aspects of people’s lives beyond just the narrow aspects that a researcher reasoned to be relevant to a research question at the outset of a study can lead to new insights and/or spur exciting new research avenues.
I have found that the immersive and challenging aspects of studying people in their natural environments has enriched my own research. Early in graduate school, I was given an opportunity to conduct fieldwork with Ache forager-horticulturalists in Paraguay. We sought to determine whether the well-known unconditional band-wide food pooling that the Ache exhibit during extended forest foraging treks holds when the Ache are at the reservation where the social atmosphere is characterized by larger group sizes, more predictable food sources, and increased opportunities for privacy. Our initial plan was to collect food production, transfer, and consumption data at the level of each individual. We quickly found out, however, that residents of a household routinely eat from a common plate and freely pass food items back and forth. This made it unfeasible for us to track individual consumption, but also led us to the important realization that when food donors send food shares to a specific household they cannot target one desired recipient, but instead can expect all present members of the recipient household to consume portions. We realized that the relevant decision for a food sharer and the appropriate level of data analysis on the reservation, then, is at the household level. We also collected data to test for common explanations in behavioral ecology for resource sharing, including 1) imbalanced aid