5. Preparing for the field

Dorsa Amir received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University, US. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University and the Director of the Mind & Culture Lab. Dorsa’s work focuses on cognitive development across diverse cultures, with a particular focus on judgement and decision-making.

Adam Boyette is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Culture, Cooperation and Child Development research group. He is trained as an evolutionary cultural anthropologist with a specialization in cultural learning, cultural evolution, and the anthropology of childhood. He is particularly interested in the ways that people cooperate in caring for and educating children and the role of culture in shaping norms of cooperation and conceptions of children’s development. He has worked with Congo Basin peoples since 2008.

Alejandrina Cristia is Research Director at Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d’études cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSL University, France. Alejandrina Cristia’s long-term aim is to shed light on child language development, both descriptively and mechanistically. To this end, her team draws methods and insights from linguistics, psychology, anthropology, economics, and speech technology. With an interest in cumulative, collaborative, and transparent science, she co-founded the first meta-meta-analysis platform (metalab.stanford.edu) and several international networks, including DAylong Recordings of Children’s Language Environment (darcle.org), and the Consortium on Language Variation in Input Environments around the World (LangVIEW), which aims to increase participant and researcher diversity in language development studies.

Alyssa Crittenden is Professor of Anthropology and Human Biology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, US. Her work contributes to the broader understanding of the evolution of human life history by exploring the intersection of nutrition, social behavior, reproduction, and child rearing. Her cross-cultural research, particularly with Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, examines how children acquire knowledge and skill through foraging practices and social learning. She is also the co-founder and co-director of a mutual aid organization, Olanakwe Community Fund, that supports the educational sovereignty of children in the Hadza community.

Ardain Dzabatou holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology at Marien Ngouabi University Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo. Since 2018, he has also worked as a research assistant, supporting studies on child development among BaYaka foragers and Bandongo fisher-farmers.

Michael Gurven is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at The University of California, Santa Barbara, US, where he is Associate Chair of Integrative Anthropological Sciences, and Associate Director of the Broom Demography Center. He is a founder and co-Director of the Tsimane Health and Life History Project, a longitudinal study focused on how aspects of environment and lifestyle affect health and lifespan in subsistence-oriented populations of the Bolivian Amazon. His work addresses how acculturation and market integration impact social behavior and chronic disease risk (including heart disease, diabetes, dementia, depression) among Indigenous populations.

Vidrige Kandza is a conservation biologist and a native Lingala speaker with extensive experience collecting a wide variety of data from populations living in the Congo Basin tropical forest. His PhD focuses on the dynamics of inter-ethnic cooperation at the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. His research seeks to understand why BaYaka forest foragers in the Republic of the Congo choose to practice shotgun hunting for hire despite apparently highly asymmetrical benefits accrued by neighboring farming groups (BaYambe) who have exclusive ownership over shotguns and bullets.

Patricia Kanngiesser is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth. She studies social norms, cooperation and cultural learning from a developmental and cross-cultural perspective. She has conducted fieldwork in Argentina, Bolivia, India, Kenya, and Namibia. She has a multidisciplinary background in natural and social sciences, holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Bristol, and was a visiting researcher at Harvard and Kyoto University, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and a research group leader at Freie Universität Berlin.

Nokwanda (Kwanda) Ndlovu is a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at Purdue University and she is from Durban, South Africa. Her passion lies in decolonized community work where she collaborates with community-based organizations particularly in South Africa, and leverages community assets and strengths to address issues faced by vulnerable children and families. Through that lens, Kwanda’s past research has looked into Indigenous parenting values, traditions, and mores within the context of South Africa. Most recently, Kwanda has been studying systems of healing as conceptualized by traditional healers within the South African context.

Sarah Pope-Caldwell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, USA. Sarah’s research focuses on cognitive flexibility, problem-solving, and decision-making, with a strong emphasis on how these processes are shaped by cultural environments and experiences across the lifespan. She explores these areas through a cross-cultural lens, incorporating research from communities around the world, including the United States, Namibia, Germany, and the Republic of the Congo. Additionally, Sarah studies nonhuman primates like baboons, chimpanzees, rhesus macaques, and capuchin monkeys to understand the evolution of flexible problem-solving.

Marie Schäfer is a Researcher in Developmental Psychology at Leipzig University, Germany, with a background in cognitive science and anthropology. She completed her PhD and conducted postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Her research focuses on the psychological foundations and development of the human capacity to cooperate and share resources and knowledge based on social norms. She has conducted fieldwork in different communities in the Central African Republic, Kenya, and Namibia.

Andrea Taverna holds a PhD in psychology and works as a researcher at the Instituto Rosario de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Educación (IRICE), Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR), Argentina. Her current interest is the study of the acquisition of Wichi, an Indigenous language spoken in northern Argentina, as a mother tongue. She is currently describing the early grammaticalization process of complex morphology and the socialization context in which this ancestral language emerges. She is a group leader and since 2010 she and her students have been conducting fieldwork in the Wichi communities in collaboration with Indigenous teachers and community leaders.