Guest Talk Jan David Hauck

14 July 2025, 16:15
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Oettingenstraße 67
80538 München

Dr. Jan David Hauck (Rachel-Carson-Center, LMU München):

Indigenous Childhoods in Times of Change: Navigating Moral Landscapes across Environmental Transitions

How do contemporary transformations of socio-natural environments impact the moral socialization of Indigenous children? For Indigenous people, environmental uncertainty has been a reality for much longer than the current crescendo of interest in climate change. Deforestation, changing land uses, and displacement have forced them to radically reinvent themselves and their ways of subsistence.

It is an anthropological axiom that the environment in which we grow up has an impact on the kind of person we become. Our basic understandings of rights and duties, fairness and justice emerge through family and peer-group interactions in the course of everyday activities within specific environments. What are the consequences of environmental changes on the socialization of morality?

In this talk, I will present a new project that investigates this question through cross-cultural and cross-environmental research in three former hunter-gatherer communities: Aché (Paraguay), Batek (Malaysia), and Ju|’hoansi (Namibia). They all have settled in villages or towns in response to environmental changes and colonial violence but also still go on extended foraging treks in nearby nature reserves. Comparing children’s interactions across environments and their reflexive understandings of attendant moral values allows us to examine differences between past and present modes of existence and how environmental change impacts sociality and morality.
After laying out the theoretical background and broader goals of the project, I will present a case study from my own previous ethnographic fieldwork among the Aché. Through detailed analysis of children’s everyday interactions in forest and the village, I will discuss differences of moral understandings and practices as they surface during subsistence activities as well as in conversations in the peer group.

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