Researching Well-Being in an Indigenous Amazon Community

This book aims to provide the first comprehensive, multi-year, systematic, empirical assessment in the behavioral sciences of how well-being changes over time in a rural society of Indigenous People in the Global South.

Ricardo Godoy is a Professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. With William R. Leonard (Northwestern University) he helped to established the Tsimane' Amazonian Panel Study (TAPS).

About the Author Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. Tsimane', their neighbors, and Westerners: the past 500 years Chapter 2. History and findings from TAPS and longitudinal studies in anthropology Chapter 3. The setting and methods to gather information Chapter 4. Asking what makes people happy and sad is a gateway into the perceived causes of subjective well-being Chapter 5. Using food to assess well-being, income, and income inequality Chapter 6. Farming, an indirect runway to Tsimane' subjective well-being Chapter 7. Well-being: staying healthy despite breakdowns Chapter 8. Well-being: a world of limited and wilting sociality Chapter 9. The marketplace: cash earnings, expenditures, swaps, and asset borrowing to bolster well-being. Chapter 10. Economic inequalities and well-being: why yoke them? Chapter 11. Takeaways and the future Appendix A. Where to find TAPS datasets and the electronic report of the longitudinal study Appendix B. A selective review of cross-sectional studies by the TAPS team