Dr Jerome Lewis is a Reader in Social Anthropology at University College London. He has undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics and 25 years of research experience working with Pygmy hunter-gatherers and former hunter-gatherers in the Congo Basin.
He is Co-Director of the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) Research group at University College London (UCL) which develops tools and methods to enable anybody, regardless of education or background, to collect information to support environmental justice. He is also a director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability (CAoS) at UCL. We spoke to Jerome to find out more about his work with hunter-gatherer societies, get his views on the challenges for conservation in the Congo Basin and understand more about the role of citizen science in conservation.
Hunter-gatherer societies
Q: Where does your interest in hunter-gatherer societies come from?
I’m particularly interested in hunter-gatherer societies because of their egalitarianism. These are societies in which people are very autonomous, there is no gender inequality, no ageism. I find this egalitarianism fascinating: how to live without hierarchy, without people bossing you around, how to experience the world as an equal to everyone around you.
I have a deep interest in politics, religion and language. Understanding how these groups organise themselves and are structured has been an enduring fascination for me. In terms of religion, for example, what hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate is a religious system that has no dogma and no liturgy. It is entirely based on music, song and dance, and from an anthropological perspective that gets right to the heart of what religious experience is about.
My main academic work is on the evolution of language and of music, but that broadens out into questions of how human societies endure within a landscape, a question which has a bearing on ideas about sustainability:
What does it mean to be so aligned with the landscape you depend upon that you can live there for thousands of years?
Hunter-gatherers are currently facing a range of external pressures and challenges, most of which stem from our world, so I have also been investigating questions around forest certification, conservation, indigenous rights and human rights, particularly in the Congo Basin, where there has been a lot of conflict.
Q: The idea of a culture and people that are aligned with their landscape raises questions around the extent to which people shape and are shaped by their environment. How would you describe the connections between people and biodiversity in some of the areas in which you have worked?
The first thing to say is that cultural diversity and biological diversity are not coincidental