Paraguay Research
From 1993 to 1997 I worked with a community of Aché foragers (or hunter gatherers) in Eastern Paraguay. I hope to be able to provide some insight into that experience here in the future; an excellent resource on the Aché can be found at the website of Kim Hill, an anthropologist now at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. For most of the time that I worked with the Aché, I lived in a village on the outskirts of the Mbaracayú Nature Reserve. The reserve protects some of the last remnants of the vast Atlantic Forest which was home to nomadic bands of Aché for centuries. In the 1950s and 60s, with government backing, Paraguayan settlers and large cattle ranches moved in along the forest frontier, dislocating the Aché and forcing them onto small, permanent settlements. The transition was devastating, not least of all because of the extremely high mortality they experienced from diseases previously unknown to them.
Today, the Aché continue to forage (the nature reserve grants them the right to hunt using traditional methods), and my initial work with them was as a field-coordinator for a study to measure the sustainability of that hunting on forest resources. The study was innovative in its design: Aché hunters used their wildlife tracking skills to identify encounters with wildlife during a series of extensive transects over a large area. I also raised money for and directed a project to improve hygiene and human health in two villages, and worked to help the Aché gain title to a contested piece of land that separated their village from the Mbaracayu Reserve.
