Jerome Lewis

University College London | UCL · Department of Anthropology

This study contributes an ethnographic perspective to the study of infant-directed (ID) communicative activities. We compare soundscapes of infant care and ID vocal communication in two egalitarian, forest-dwelling, mobile hunter-gatherer groups: Mbendjele BaYaka/Aka in Northern Congo-Brazzaville and the Maniq of Southern Thailand. Across the uniqu...

Sub-Saharan Africa is often presented as the continent most vulnerable to climatic change with major repercussions for food systems. Coupled with high rates of population growth, continued food insecurity and malnutrition, thus the need to enhance food production across the continent is seen as a major global imperative. We argue here, however, tha...

Music is a cultural activity universally present in all human societies. Several hypotheses have been formulated to understand the possible origins of music and the reasons for its emergence. Here, we test two hypotheses: (1) the coalition signaling hypothesis which posits that music could have emerged as a tool to signal cooperative intent and sig...

Sub-Saharan Africa is often presented as the continent most vulnerable to climatic change with major repercussions for food systems. Coupled with high rates of population growth and existing nutritional deficiencies, the need to enhance food production across the continent is thus seen as a major global imperative. We argue here, however, that curr...

Sapelli is a group of open-source applications, aimed to be used within a wider socio-technical approach which means that the software is expected to be used within a social process that considers inclusivity, equity, and risks and benefits. The software enables people with no or limited literacy as well as limited technical literacy to collect, sh...

The overwhelming global dominance of modern industrialism stifles the visibility of alternative ways of being in the present and of what solutions to large-scale challenges may be appropriate. This paper describes how novel high-tech digital tools can be co-designed with people with different worldviews or ‘ontologies’ to better represent their nor...

Sub-Saharan Africa is often presented as the continent most vulnerable to climatic change with major repercussions for food systems. Coupled with high rates of population growth and existing nutritional deficiencies, the need to enhance food production across the continent is thus seen as a major global imperative. We argue here, however, that curr...

The participation of communities living in high conservation value areas is increasingly valued in conservation science and practice, potentially producing multiple positive impacts on both biodiversity and local people. Here, we discuss important steps for implementing a successful extreme citizen science project, based on four case studies from c...

The Sapelli smartphone application aims to support any community to engage in citizen science activities to address local concerns and needs. However, Sapelli was designed and developed not as a piece of technology without a context, but as the technical part of a socio-technical approach to establish a participatory science process. This paper pro...

Social science is becoming increasingly important in conservation, with more studies involving methodologies that collect data from and about people. Conservation science is a normative and applied discipline designed to support and inform management and practice. Poor research practice risks harming participants and, researchers, and can leave neg...

This book was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme (7FP), TropicMicroArch 623293 Project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/187754_en.html). The book will be Open Access, thanks to FP7 post-grant Open Access (https://www.openaire.eu/postgrantoapilot).

Climate change solutions, indigenous rights, wisdom traditions, biological diversity, cultural diversity, great extinction The report ‘Flourishing Diversity: Learning from Indigenous Wisdom Traditions’ aims to cultivate hope amongst all people and engender resistance to damaging agricultural and industrial practices. Rooted in anthropological rese...

There are many competing definitions of sustainability, but most of them stem from the long Euro-American tradition of managing natural resources. Anthropology can offer an alternative view of sustainability, starting from the recognition that a view of sustainability based on the objectification of nature is grounded in the very same ontology that...

Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners’ resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted i...

Providing indigenous communities with ICT tools and methods for collecting and sharing their Traditional Ecological Knowledge is increasingly recognised as an avenue for improvements in environmental governance and social-environmental justice. In this paper we show how we carried out a usability engineering effort in the "wild" context of the Cong...

Many hunter-gatherers today find themselves caught between the dominance of neoliberal perspectives on development and progress that focus on extractive opportunities for supplying markets with natural resources, and on conservationists’ views of landscapes as wildernesses that require protection from any human activity, apart from their own. This...

An examination of musical participation and taboo among the egalitarian Mbendjele BaYaka illustrates how cultural learning can be organized without recourse to figures of authority. The chapter describes two complementary pedagogic processes that accompany BaYaka as they move through life. One acts on groups of people playing together (massana), th...

We use data on game harvest from 60 Pygmy and non-Pygmy settlements in the Congo Basin forests to examine whether hunting patterns and prey profiles differ between the two hunter groups. For each group, we calculate hunted animal numbers and biomass available per inhabitant, P, per year (harvest rates) and killed per hunter, H, per year (extraction...

Humans possess the unique ability for cumulative culture [1, 2]. It has been argued that hunter-gatherer's complex social structure [3-9] has facilitated the evolution of cumulative culture by allowing information exchange among large pools of individuals [10-13]. However, empirical evidence for the interaction between social structure and cultural...

A conservação da biodiversidade é uma questão que tem preocupado o mundo todo. Nas últimas décadas, centenas de áreas protegidas foram criadas para assegurar a preservação da biodiversidade no planeta. Um grande número de áreas protegidas é habitado por comunidades que dependem do uso de seus recursos naturais não apenas para a sua sobrevivência, m...

Pygmy populations occupy a vast territory extending west-to-east along the central African belt from the Congo Basin to Lake Victoria. However, their numbers and actual distribution is not known precisely. Here, we undertake this task by using locational data and population sizes for an unprecedented number of known Pygmy camps and settlements (n =...

Forest hunter-gatherers in Western Central Africa participate in an unusual economic system that transacts material production in a very different way to intellectual production. While material goods, such as food, tools or clothing, are generally freely given when demanded, intellectual goods, such as the right to perform specific rituals or to re...

Forest hunter-gatherers in Western Central Africa participate in an unusual economic system that transacts material production in a very different way to intellectual production. While material goods, such as food, tools or clothing, are generally freely given when demanded, intellectual goods, such as the right to perform specific rituals or to re...

Conservationists are increasingly engaging with the concept of human well‐being to improve the design and evaluation of their interventions. Since the convening of the influential Sarkozy Commission in 2009, development researchers have been refining conceptualizations and frameworks to understand and measure human well‐being and are starting to co...

Offering an exciting new perspective on the origins of language, this book places social life centre-stage. Challenging assumptions about the causal role of mutations and gene sequences, the authors picture the biological faculty evolving incrementally on the basis of capacities already in existence, genetic change occurring as previous adaptations...

Presents a new theoretical framework for the origins of human language Adopts an interdisciplinary approach with contributors from diverse fields of research Sets key issues in language evolution in their wider context within biological and cultural evolution This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is con...

For grammar to evolve, it was not enough for social relations to become more cooperative. Before grammaticalization processes could get under way, primate-style dominance/submission dynamics had to be decisively countered by coalitionary resistance culminating in an egalitarian social order based on “reverse dominance”. Only once unprecedentedly tr...

ExCiteS (Extreme Citizen Science) brings together scholars from diverse fields to develop and contribute to the guiding theories, tools and methodologies that will enable any community to start a Citizen Science project to deal with issues that concern them, regardless of their background or literacy level.

With this poster we announce the imminent release of Sapelli, a new mobile data collection and sharing platform designed with a particular focus on non-literate and illiterate users.

The concepts associated with what English speakers recognize as music and dance are not shared cross-culturally. In some societies there are no general terms for music and dance; instead, specific names describe different performances that involve music and dance. In other societies the same word is used to refer to music-making, singing, dancing,...

This chapter captures extensive discussions between people with different forms of expertise and viewpoints. It explores the relationships between language and music in evolutionary and cultural context. Rather than trying to essentialize either, they are characterized pragmatically in terms of features that appear to distinguish them (such as lang...

A presentation of music and language within an integrative, embodied perspective of brain mechanisms for action, emotion, and social coordination. This book explores the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: song and dance as a bridge between music and language; multiple level...

A presentation of music and language within an integrative, embodied perspective of brain mechanisms for action, emotion, and social coordination. This book explores the relationships between language, music, and the brain by pursuing four key themes and the crosstalk among them: song and dance as a bridge between music and language; multiple level...

This paper describes a project initiated by non-literate indigenous people to equip their own "citizen scientists" with rugged smartphones running adapted software that enable them to share some of their detailed environmental knowledge in ways that improve the sustainable management of their forest. Supporting local people to share their environme...

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagemen...

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate elites, but be opened up for societal engagemen...

This commentary discusses the anthropological implications of Richard Widess’ paper by summarizing some anthropological approaches to music, especially focusing on the way musical participation inculcates and transmits an aesthetic orientation that guides action across cultural domains such as politics, economics and religion. The paper ends by sug...

Many rural communities in the global South – including some 370 million indigenous peoples – directly depend on biodiversity and related traditional knowledge for their livelihoods, food security, healthcare and well-being. But with the loss of biodiversity, valuable resources such as climate-resilient crops, medicinal plants and wild foods are bei...

Supporting local communities to share their environmental knowledge by utilizing scientifically accepted tools and methodologies can lead to improvement in environmental governance, environmental justice and management practices. Mbendjele hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Congo are collaborating with the ExCiteS Research Group at University C...

This commentary discusses the anthropological implications of Richard Widess’ paper by summarizing some anthropological approaches to music, especially focusing on the way musical participation inculcates and transmits an aesthetic orientation that guides action across cultural domains such as politics, economics and religion. The paper ends by sug...

Laura A. German, Alain Karsenty, Anne-Marie Tiani

This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also consi...

Mbendjele forest hunter‐gatherers in northern Congo refer to a confusing body of seemingly unconnected and diverse practices and beliefs as ‘ ekila ’. Ethnographically, ekila has many meanings. I suggest a number of possible ways to understand what connects these different practices, but argue that it is only when considering learning in this egali...

DART (Digital Anthropology Resources for Teaching) is a JISC/NSF-funded project involving the London School of Economics (LSE) and Columbia University in New York, aiming to address problems in the undergraduate teaching of anthropology through the development of digital learning tools and other learning activities. At Columbia the team are address...

Book description: The ethnography of egalitarian social systems was first met with sheer disbelief. Today it is still hotly debated in a number of fields and has gained sophistication as well as momentum. This collection of essays on "property and equality" acknowledges this diversification by presenting research results in two complementary volume...

This article forms part of an ongoing debate on rights and the use of the term ‘indigenous’, which has so far included exchanges in Current Anthropology, the New Humanist, and ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY, as indicated in the bibliography. The authors here respond specifically to an article by Adam Kuper, published in Current Anthropology and the New Humanis...

Book description: As the world continues to shrink owing to globalization, the need to understand the diversity of culturally distinct societies and their interactions with neighboring groups becomes greaterthan ever. Susan Kent has invited an international team of experts to present their insights into how one type of society, African hunter-gathe...

This thesis is about a forest hunter-gatherer people, the Mbendjele Yaka Pygmies of northern Congo-Brazzaville. The thesis is based on field research carried out between 1994 and 2001. I begin by examining certain key terms used in the thesis and by situating my research within the existing literature. Research methodologies are presented and the f...

With reference to the current situation of the Mbendjele Yaka in northern Congo (Brazzaville) this paper summarises some of the problems facing them as outside interest in their forest increases. Issues relating to traditional and modern land ownership, international forest exploitation by both commercial loggers and wildlife protectionists, and re...