A baby tapir growing up in the Aché village is curious about his human playmate.
A baby tapir growing up in the Aché village is curious about his human playmate.
Photo by Jan David Hauck.
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Hauck, Jan David, and Pooja Nayak. “Growing Up amid Environmental Change: A Conversation with Jan David Hauck.” Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review, no. 9 (February 2026). https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc-springs-20765.
Jan David Hauck is an anthropologist who has been working with the Indigenous Aché communities in Paraguay since 2007 on topics including language shift, child socialization, ethics and morality, health care, and environmental transformations. Recently settled hunter-gatherers, the Aché like to make fun of his lack of hunting skills whenever he accompanies them on forest treks. If he manages to capture anything, it’s not an armadillo or peccary but video footage, which he analyzes to understand linguistic, cultural, and moral change. At the RCC, he is principal investigator of the project “Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods: A Cross-Environmental Ethnography of Moral Socialization in Three Small-Scale Societies,” for which he received an ERC Starting Grant. Pooja Nayak is a sociocultural anthropologist of environments and modern South Asia, researching how aspects of work, biodiversity, state capitalism, and more-than-human relations overlap in post-extraction settings in the Western Ghats. In Munich and nearby, she’s been enjoying getting to know the moods of various pools and waterbodies through swims. Here, Pooja and Jan discuss environmental change and language, ethnographic practices, different forms of subsistence, as well as conceptions of morality and well-being. (From the article)
This article was originally published in Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review. Springs is an online publication featuring peer-reviewed articles, creative nonfiction, and artistic contributions that showcase the work of the Rachel Carson Center and its community across the world.
2026 Jan David Hauck and Pooja Nayak
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