The project team members carried out a series of research trips to Urarina, Shuar, Achuar, and Cacua indigenous communities in the Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon. In the field, researchers drew primarily on ethnographic methods, supplemented with studies and experiments supplemented with studies and experiments adapted from relevant work in cognitive psychology and experimental philosophy, as a way of probing nuances of intuitions and interpretations beyond what is possible using ethnography alone. In total, the project team completed around 24 months of fieldwork.
A series of workshops and events were held throughout the project, with an interdisciplinary focus, such that anthropologists were brought into dialogue with psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists around topics including fairness and impartiality, responsibility, justice, egalitarianism, and values. Participants were encouraged to engage with Amazonian research data, and collaborate on identifying promising future research directions.
The project results significantly enlarge our understanding of the politics and ethics of small-scale ‘egalitarian’ societies, such as those characteristic of the Amazonian lowlands. In particular, they draw attention to the crucial role played by emotional and affective experience; the ways in which moral judgements are embedded in concrete social relationships, even when the justifications of those judgements invoke relatively abstract principles; the importance of studying children’s moral learning for understanding complex social change; the capacity to move between contrastive forms of moral evaluation, according to context, as a central dimension of ethical transformation; and the relationship between forms of government and local theories about the ‘opacity’ of other minds.
Key project outputs include two monographs, three edited volumes, a series of articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, and a short film. Results have also been disseminated in a number of workshops, conferences and special events in Europe, the US, and South America.
