Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods

“Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods: A Cross-Environmental Ethnography of Moral Socialization in Three Small-Scale Societies” is a five-year research project (2025–29) investigating the impact of environmental changes on the moral development of children in three Indigenous societies. It is funded by an ERC Starting Grant and carried out by a team of international researchers at the RCC under the direction of Dr. Jan David Hauck.

Indigenous communities across the world have been experiencing rapid changes to the spaces they inhabit, such as deforestation or changing land use, forcing them to radically alter their ways of life and subsistence. But we know very little about how these may impact children’s upbringing, particularly their moral development and well-being. While the role of environments for the development of morality is widely recognized—on ontogenetic, historical, or evolutionary timescales—they are mostly taken for granted as providing stable contexts for human action. To date there is no study of the concrete ways of how the affordances of different environments and their transformations impact the socialization of children.

To address this gap, this project undertakes longitudinal, family-based ethnographic studies in three Indigenous former hunter-gatherer communities in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia. Each of these communities has experienced dramatic environmental changes and settled in villages or towns, but still goes on extended foraging treks in nearby nature reserves. Comparing these environments will allow the researchers to examine differences between past and present modes of existence and understand how environmental change impacts sociality and morality. Through video-based analysis, ethnography, interviews, and psychological experiments, Dr. Hauck and his team will analyze children’s everyday interactions with caregivers and peers across different environments and their reflexive understandings of attendant moral values.

The RCC is currently offering two doctoral positions for this project. Applications may be submitted by 31 March 2025. Please see the full call for more information.