Acculturation and the Persistence of Indigenous Food Avoidances in the Ituri Forest, Zaire

A biocultural evolutionary approach is used to investigate whether acculturation is leading to the demise of food avoidances in a population of foragers and horticulturalists living in the Ituri Forest of Zaire. Multivariate statistical models, based on variation in these traditional cultural beliefs as well as their nutritional consequences, show that schooling and Christianity (the primary acculturating forces introduced into the area by Western missionaries), are associated among horticulturalists with a decline in the authority of social sanctioning systems that sustain traditional restrictions against food consumption. Nutritional deficits resulting from the practice of food avoidances are also sufficient in some cases to compromise fertility. Thus, relatively acculturated horticulturalists enjoy both cultural and biological advantages which should reduce the future viability of the food avoidance system in this group. However, among foragers, the transmission of new avoidances from horticulturalists...