Quantification of cultural identity through artificial intelligence: a case study on the Waorani Amazonian ethnicity

Abstract

The first step toward a Smart Village is that the community itself can benefit from the novel techniques that are applied. Some communities are far from being able to use the benefits that these technologies usually offer; however, they can benefit from the techniques that have led to the development of smart cities. This is the case of the indigenous people belonging to communities in the Amazon: They have seen their identity drastically eroded in recent decades as a result of the process of Western acculturation. In this context, the use of artificial intelligence techniques may contribute to the detection and quantification of cultural identity loss by identifying the most and least affected identity components of this process. This research work presents a quantitative method, which evaluates several variables of the cultural identity of an Ecuadorian Amazonian indigenous community: the Waorani. The proposed method automatically classifies the individuals and provides a subspace of it able to identify the weights of the subcomponents of this instrument in regard to its contribution to the Waorani identity. The systematic application of the instrument together with the artificial intelligence-based approach can provide decision makers with valuable information about which aspects of their identity are most sensitive to change and thus help design development policies that minimally interfere with their ethnic identity.