Biographical sketch

Originally from Northern California, I now live in the Portland area and am pursuing my PhD in anthropology from WSU. I spent my undergraduate years at the University of California, Santa Cruz where I ended up with a BA in psychobiology. I played around with many paths at UCSC, but always maintained an interest in biology, and in the biology of behavior in particular. Eventually I realized I most wanted to apply evolutionary theory to explain human behavior, something folks had recently been making great strides in doing, completely unbeknownst to me. After finding my way into the field of evolutionary anthropology, I narrowed my academic interest to the study of cultural transmission and children’s social development. It is clear to me that we must empirically study how children learn, and how we have evolved to learn during childhood, to understand how culture is created and transmitted within and across generations.

What I love most about the sort of science I do is its emphasis (in methods, theory, applications, and epistemology) on the universal aspects of being human as well as our unprecedented flexibility and variation.

Throughout my education I’ve developed a strong belief in the importance of teaching and the dissemination of the ideas and knowledge developed in academia. I find this to be especially important in the areas of parenting and child development because these are two things applicable to nearly everyone, yet they are under-appreciated and taken for granted in our culture. From studying childhood in multiple contexts we can understand what is universal about growing up human and what is not, and what the effects of particular contexts are. Hopefully we can then learn from this knowledge and make informed decisions about raising our children and, quite directly, improve the future for all.

As a part of informing others of the research I do, I aim to incorporate film and other media in my professional work, and to encourage dialogue across academic disciplines and outside of academia, helping to build bridges across traditional divides. Eventually you will see content on this web page, or links to other pages herein, which are beginning attempts to achieve this goal.

Research

For the first component of my PhD field research I spent four months in and around the forests of the southwest part of the Central African Republic (see Google map). While there, I carried out ethnographic interviews and systematic observations of children from several Aka communities. The Aka are a group of forest hunter-gatherers known for their high-investment parenting, individual autonomy, and widespread cooperation and sharing. My research focused on how Aka kids from age 5 until adulthood spend their time and, more specifically, how they learn, on their own or from the other people in their environment, their culture’s ways of living and getting along. The goal of this research was to empirically capture how children during this period of active learning engage their environment, and to reveal any developmental trends in behaviors such as observation, imitation, receiving and giving instruction, and in the contexts in which learning occurs (e.g. play, hunting/gathering, food preparation, food distribution, with adults, without adults, with same-age or different age children, etc.).

Publications

Boyette (in review) Middle Childhood among Aka Forest Foragers of the Central African Republic: A Comparative Perspective. pdf

Boyette, A. H. (in prep). Culture in Transmission: A Quantitative Account of Daily Learning Among Aka Forest Forager Children from Middle to Late Childhood.

Courses

Research projects

• African Research Group