Anthropology corner: What do I do?

So now that our holidays are over it's time to think about work again... and I realised that while quiet a lot of you know that a) I am an anthropologist who b) lives with a foraging population in the far north of the Philippines, it is not so clear what I actually do with my day and what this means in the grand scheme of anthropological research. So I thought I would spend the time to give you all the low-down.

My main area of research is children, their wellbeing and who cares for them. This is an aspect of anthropological research called cooperative breeding. It is argued that no human mother would be able to raise lots of children by herself, so she is helped by other mothers, her mother, her partner and her other children, siblings, cousins and so forth.  So it is interesting to study these relationships with the Agta as hunter-gather groups are, in general, very cooperative in many aspects of life.

It is almost if the Agta have an informal creche system. At different times different mothers will go out to collect food, work in a field or go visiting someone, leaving a large horde (I literally mean horde) of kids behind normally with one mum and a couple of babies. It's funny how all of a sudden the kids run down to the riverbank to greet the returning parents and grab the food (all I hear is excited mumbling of "ielos, ielos"..."mmmm, masarap"... basically translated into "potato like thing, mmmm very tasty").  I can't tell you yet (but I hope to before our journey is over) if there is a system to this, but the mum's certainly depend on one another and their oldest children (both boys and girls). 

So to systematically study this (in the hope of someone giving me a PhD as some point - please!)  Wallace and I conduct 9 hour observation periods on children of all different ages, from babies to those aged around 5 - 6 years old. I have created data collection sheets which I fill in every 30 seconds, recording who is around the child of interest, who tells them off, who plays with them, cuddles them, or teaches them. This way it's possible to understand who cares for children, how much and what type of care. It's just for me to work out why later :)

Wallace with the headphones in. One beep in 30s for 400h in total

In total with Wallace's invaluable and wonderful assistance we hope to be able to study over 80 children before the year is finished. Which will produce over 720 hours of observations, or 86,400 data points! So far we have observed 42 children so we are well on our way with many more to go, phew..

What is great is that we spend hours with families and become fast friends with the kids and mums alike. That's all for now folks, more anthropology in a few weeks!