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.
