Anthropology fieldwork on the banks of the Amazon
The LIFE Lab group in Leticia, Colombia © Johanna Gonçalves Martin
This past summer, six EPFL students travelled to the Colombian city of Leticia for 21 days to do anthropological fieldwork on language learning and epidemiology, as part of the LIFE Laboratory (Leticia Immersive Fieldwork Experience) program in the College of Humanities (CDH).
The fieldwork, which ended in September, was the culmination of the students’ spring semester projects. Each focused on a different aspect of one of two core themes: the development of a gamified app for teaching the indigenous language Tikuna to local children, and the creation of epidemiological models of water-borne disease transmission.
However, the main objective for the trip to Leticia – which lies at the southernmost tip of Colombia, on the banks of the Amazon River – was to have an immersive experience of anthropological methods and practice.
“The experience is an eye-opener to the complexity of the world, and to how one can use that complexity to improve one’s ideas, and be better able to help. Without being able to observe, listen to, and speak with people, it’s difficult to do a project that can bring something to the world,” explains program organizer Johanna Gonçalves Martin, a scientist in the CDH Institute for Area and Global Studies (IAGS).
Putting research into context
For the language app project, Digital Humanities Master’s students Paola Bello and Arthur Parmentier worked with Daniel Gatica-Perez, a professor in the CDH Digital Humanities Institute (DHI) and the IDIAP Lab at EPFL (LIDIAP), as well as with Bertil Wicht of the University of Lausanne (UNIL). The goal was to develop an interactive tool for the children of Leticia to learn the indigenous language Tikuna, which is in danger of dying out as more people in the region become city dwellers and speak only Spanish. The students explored ideas for crowdsourcing linguistic and cultural knowledge, and for involving Tikuna elders and children in the game’s design and development.
For the eco-epidemiology theme, Environmental Sciences and Engineering master’s students Hugo Cruz, Laura Mekarni and Claudine Karlen worked with Javier Pérez Sáez from the EPFL Eco-hydrology lab. They explored how urbanization and climate change have altered the way land and the river are used in Leticia, and how these changes have made it difficult for residents to access clean water, promoting the spread of water-borne diarrheal disease. Meanwhile, Life Sciences Engineering master’s student Laure Vancauwenberg did an independent project on ecological microbiome relations in the context of diarrheal disease, and University of Geneva (UNIGE) student Sara Botero worked on local health policies and interculturality.
“All the students had projects that seemed very different and individual, but the idea is that when they come to the field and put things into context, they realize they are all working on the same problem: how to live well in a growing Amazonian city,” Martin explains.
A transformative experience
Once on the ground in Colombia, the Swiss-based students worked together with students and professors from the Universidad Nacional de Leticia, as well as with local residents. For the first half of the trip, the students even stayed with indigenous families to learn about their culture and relationship to the land and to the river.
“I think the experience was quite transformative. The students had really insightful observations about the Amazon River and what’s important to people, but also about what they want to do with their careers and lives,” Martin reflects. “For many, it seemed to change how they thought about their position in society as engineers. Many of them spoke of their wish to do engineering with people in the future."
