November 16, 2007
From SATA-Peru-2007
Today was our last full day at Casa Matsigenka. I awoke at 6:15 with the intention of peeing and going back to sleep, but instead found myself heading for an early morning swim with Leia in the creek. We later found out that the creek may be populated by anaconda, but at the time the water was really refreshing.
After our swim we had a great breakfast of eggs and oatmeal and then it was time to return to our project on Matsigenka knowledge variation. Leia and I first warmed up with some bridges and handstands with the hope that our Matsigenka friends would join in but instead they just laughed, so we decided to do some work. We had finished a large portion of our work the day before so we just had to analyze our information and make a few graphs. With some assistance from Varun we were able to finish our project before lunch. Our power point showed how a combination of age, gender, and place of origin in the best way to explain knowledge variation among out Matsigenka informants. There is a clear relationship between age and knowledge, since the knowledge level increases until a peak age (with older men usually knowing more tree names and visa versa.) Gender makes a huge difference as well. Men spend more time in the forest and are more likely to know tree names while women mostly know palms and the trees that they use to bathe babies, etc. Those from the region are also more likely to have a greater knowledge level.
Most of the other groups continued working through the rainy afternoon, although Aims, Kerry and I had some time to watch a large group of monkeys behind our rooms.
We gathered together around 5 to start our presentations, which continued till after dinner. They ended up being really great and worth all the time and effort. Glenn translated the presentations into Matsigenka so that they could appreciate why we kept dragging them into the rainforest to ask them tree names and whether birds pooped out seeds or not.
After the last presentation we had a little fiesta to celebrate out last night at the Casa and then it was off to bed.
