How Does Cultural Change Affect Indigenous Peoples' Hunting Activity? An Empirical Study Among the Tsimane' in the Bolivian Amazon

Anacatarina Luz,Martí Orta-Martínez,Joan Pino,Maximilien Guèze,Victoria Reyes-García,Jaime Paneque-Gálvez,Manuelj Macía

doi:10.4103/0972-4923.179879

Abstract

Wildlife hunting is an important economic activity that contributes to the subsistence of indigenous peoples and the maintenance of their cultural identity. Changes in indigenous peoples' ways of life affect the way they manage the ecosystems and resources around them, including wildlife populations. This paper explores the relationship between cultural change, or detachment from traditional culture, and hunting behaviour among the Tsimane', an indigenous group in the Bolivian Amazon. We interviewed 344 hunters in 39 villages to estimate their hunting activity and the degree of cultural change among them. We used multilevel analyses to assess the relationships between three different proxies for cultural change at the individual level (schooling, visits to a market town, and detachment from tradition), and the following two independent variables: 1) probability of engaging in hunting (i.e., hunting activity) and 2) hunting efficiency with catch per unit effort (CPUE). We found a statistically significant negative association between schooling and hunting activity. Hunting efficiency (CPUE biomass/km) was positively associated with visits to a market town, when holding other co-variates in the model constant. Other than biophysical factors, such as game abundance, hunting is also conditioned by social factors (e.g., schooling) that shape the hunters' cultural system and impel them to engage in hunting or deter them from doing so.

Highlights

Neotropical rainforests contain much of the world’s wildlife diversity; at the same time, they home to a diversity of indigenous peoples who have used and managed these ecosystems for millennia (Redford and Stearman 1993; Redford and Sanderson 2000; Toledo 2001; Sunderlin et al 2005)
Almost 60% of the kills occurred within a range of ten minutes to three hours walking from the village centre, with only 8% of the kills occurring at a distance of more than five hours walking
In this article we have examined how individual cultural change relates to subsistence hunting in an indigenous society

Summary

Introduction

Neotropical rainforests contain much of the world’s wildlife diversity; at the same time, they home to a diversity of indigenous peoples who have used and managed these ecosystems for millennia (Redford and Stearman 1993; Redford and Sanderson 2000; Toledo 2001; Sunderlin et al 2005). Several researchers have highlighted that despite the geographic overlap between indigenous territories and areas of high biodiversity (Toledo 2001; Sunderlin et al 2005), there is not necessarily a causal relationship between the two phenomena, because wildlife conservation by indigenous peoples may not be intentional but rather a side effect of low population density, the use of traditional hunting technologies, and the lack of external markets to impel high rates of game extraction (Smith and Wishnie 2000; Hames 2007). We would expect that as the traditional lifestyles of indigenous peoples change or as their populations increase, the way in which they use and manage wildlife would change (Gross et al 1979; Godoy et al 2005b; Shen et al 2012). With the focus on economic change, there has been less research on how cultural changes relate to indigenous peoples’ hunting activity

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Conclusion