Environmental Change and Moral Development
No matter where we grow up, we all develop an intuitive understanding of fairness and justice, good and evil, and of our rights, duties, and obligations to others in childhood, through everyday interactions with caregivers and peers. But how does this happen in societies experiencing rapid changes to their ways of life and subsistence because of transformations of the environments in which they live? I investigate this question in my project “Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods,” for which I received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. For 5 years, my international team of researchers and I will conduct cross-cultural and cross-environmental ethnographic research with Indigenous former hunter-gatherer communities in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia, to understand how children are socialized into different moral norms and expectations, depending on the environment they are in: forest, desert, garden, village, or town. Each environment is tied to past and present ways of life in different ways for each community, and understanding their differences can give us insights into ongoing sociocultural and moral change.
Language Change and Language Emergence
Language endangerment is a concern for many minority communities around the world. But only little attention has been paid to new ways of speaking that many of these communities invent as their own creative responses to ongoing transformations of modes of subsistence, social organization, and cultural understandings. In my research with the Indigenous Aché in Paraguay, I have not only helped to document their heritage language, Aché, but also worked with children and their caregivers to understand the socialization patterns contributing to language shift towards the national language, Guaraní, as well as the emergence of a new mixed language that incorporates elements from both, called Guaraché. This new language is now learned by children as their first language and they have begun to create new patterns that are distinct from the input received from adults. In this context have also analyzed children’s language play and experimentation with linguistic resources from different origins, with a focus on the development of metalinguistic awareness, linguistic differentiation, and language emergence.
Other Research
My research spans a wide variety of topics concerning language, the environment, ethics and morality, and health and well-being. As part of efforts at intellectual decolonization I have advanced the concept of linguistic natures and language ontologies, challenging Western understandings of language from Indigenous epistemological perspectives. Bridging linguistic and psychological anthropology I have explored the role of narrative in the construction and transformation of self. I have published on Indigenous narratives about the experience of colonial violence as well as political apology in the US. My work also includes research on bilingualism and language planning in Paraguay in the context of regional integration, language ideologies, language mixing and grammaticalization, human–nonhuman interaction, as well as the cross-cultural semantics of philosophical concepts. I have furthermore conducted health services research at the Veterans Health Administration, focusing on Electronic Health Record transitions, training, and women’s health.
Learn more about my research here.