UC Santa Cruz

The goals of my dissertation are first to gain a better understanding of the variety and breadth of a set of environmental practices that I call canny consumption practices, and second to provide empirical evidence that canny practices are part of Indigenous-descent families' daily activities and their connections to Indigenous principles which consider all living entities—human and non-human—to be persons and part of one body. Twenty Indigenous-descent mothers or fathers from rural and urban communities of Guatemala were interviewed together with their pre-teen or teenage children. Parents’ responses to the semi-structured interviews showed that canny practices are indeed part of Guatemalan Indigenous-descent families’ daily lives and that these cultural practices are aligned with Indigenous Worldview principles. These findings are important for research that focuses on Indigenous-descent communities, particularly in the developmental field, because they bring a culturally relevant lens to explore the development of Indigenous-descent children’s environmental concepts.