Archival Version

The Tsimane' Amazonian Panel Study (TAPS) is a study of the Tsimane', a native Amazonian society of horticulturist-foragers in the early stages of incessant exposure to the market economy. TAPS is one of a few panel studies in an out-of-the-way, small-scale rural society undergoing lifestyle changes from unabating contact with the market economy and the outside world. The purpose of the study was to find out why and how trade with the outside world shaped the well-being of people near autarchy. Well-being in this study includes monetary income, asset wealth, conviviality, consumption, production, health (both physical and psychological), and human capital, a term encompassing formal schooling or educational attainment, academic skills learned in school (e.g., reading, math), and traditional or folk knowledge of local plants, animals, parasites, or weather. Repeated measures from the same people and households--via annual surveys over 9 years--make it possible to estimate cause-and-effect relations unattainable with data gathered only at one time. Data in this study can be used to estimate the standard link between two variables, such as the link between the amount of monetary earnings and good health. It can also be used to estimate growth rates of variables, or the link between the level of a variable in the past with the level of the variable in the future. For instance, one can estimate the association between the height of children during early childhood and the height of the same children during puberty, or the annual growth rate in height between early childhood and puberty. TAPS has roots in a panel study among the Tawahka, a Native American society in eastern Honduras. Centered on two nearby villages along the Patuca River varying in their proximity to a small rural town downriver, the study produced a short panel of six consecutive quarters (June 1994 - December 1995). The study dealt with the footprint of market exposure on people's use of natural resources and on the abundance of those resources in the wild. Research in Honduras had two shortcomings: a small sample of observations and little variation in contact with the market, making it impossible to generalize from the study. The Tsimane' in Bolivia were a larger group with more variation in contact with the market. They encompassed bilingual speakers fluent in Spanish and Tsimane' who were accustomed to dealing with Westerners, and secluded monolinguals dwelling several days away from towns. Research began after the study team received approval from the Tsimane' Council and wrote a code of ethics for the planned panel study. A three-part pre-study conducted between 1999 - 2000 provided the ethnographic and quantitative information necessary to design the TAPS model and sample.