Jerome Lewis

Accounting for the impact of conservation on human well-being

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 converge on a common understanding of how best to do this. In conservation, the term human well-being is in widespread use, but there is a need for guidance on operationalizing it to measure the impacts of conservation interventions on people. We present a framework for understanding human well-being, which could be particularly useful in conservation. The framework includes 3 conditions; meeting needs, pursuing goals, and experiencing a satisfactory quality of life. We outline some of the complexities involved in evaluating the well-being effects of conservation interventions, with the understanding that well-being varies between people and over time and with the priorities of the evaluator. Key challenges for research into the well-being impacts of conservation interventions include the need to build up a collection of case studies so as to draw out generalizable lessons; harness the potential of modern technology to support well-being research; and contextualize evaluations of conservation impacts on well-being spatially and temporally within the wider landscape of social change. Pathways through the smog of confusion around the term well-being exist, and existing frameworks such as the Well-being in Developing Countries approach can help conservationists negotiate the challenges of operationalizing the concept. Conservationists have the opportunity to benefit from the recent flurry of research in the development field so as to carry out more nuanced and locally relevant evaluations of the effects of their interventions on human well-being. Consideración del Impacto de la Conservación sobre el Bienestar Humano Resumen Los conservacionistas cada vez más se comprometen con el concepto del bienestar humano para mejorar el diseño y la evaluación de sus intervenciones. Desde la convención de la influyente Comisión Sarkozy en 2009, los investigadores del desarrollo han estado refinando las conceptualizaciones y los marcos de trabajo para entender y medir el bienestar humano y están comenzando a convergir con un entendimiento común de cuál es la mejor forma de hacer esto. En la conservación el término bienestar humano tiene un uso amplio, pero existe la necesidad de la orientación en su operación para medir los impactos de las intervenciones de la conservación sobre la gente. Presentamos un marco de trabajo para entender el bienestar humano que podría ser útil particularmente en la conservación. El marco de trabajo incluye tres condiciones: cumplir con las necesidades, perseguir objetivos y experimentar una calidad satisfactoria de vida. Resumimos algunas de las complejidades involucradas en la evaluación de los efectos del bienestar de las intervenciones de la conservación con el entendimiento de que el bienestar varía entre la gente, en el tiempo y con las prioridades del evaluador. Los retos clave para la investigación de los impactos del bienestar de las intervenciones de la conservación incluyen la necesidad de crear una colección de estudios de caso para trazar lecciones generalizables: hacer uso del potencial de la tecnología moderna para apoyar la investigación del bienestar; y contextualizar espacial y temporalmente las evaluaciones de los impactos de la conservación sobre el bienestar dentro del marco más amplio del cambio social. Existen caminos que atraviesan la confusión que rodea al término bienestar, y los marcos de trabajo existentes, como el del acercamiento de Bienestar en Países en Desarrollo, pueden ayudar a los conservacionistas a negociar los obstáculos de la operación del concepto. Los conservacionistas tienen la oportunidad de beneficiarse del frenesí reciente de investigación en el campo del desarrollo para así realizar evaluaciones más matizadas y relevantes localmente de los efectos de sus intervenciones sobre el bienestar humano.

Distribution and Numbers of Pygmies in Central African Forests

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 = 654) in five of the nine countries where currently distributed. With these data we develop spatial distribution models based on the favourability function, which distinguish areas with favourable environmental conditions from those less suitable for Pygmy presence. Highly favourable areas were significantly explained by presence of tropical forests, and by lower human pressure variables. For documented Pygmy settlements, we use the relationship between observed population sizes and predicted favourability values to estimate the total Pygmy population throughout Central Africa. We estimate that around 920,000 Pygmies (over 60% in DRC) is possible within favourable forest areas in Central Africa. We argue that fragmentation of the existing Pygmy populations, alongside pressure from extractive industries and sometimes conflict with conservation areas, endanger their future. There is an urgent need to inform policies that can mitigate against future external threats to these indigenous peoples’ culture and lifestyles.

Taking Participatory Citizen Science to Extremes

University College Londons Extreme Citizen Science research group (UCL ExCiteS) is experimenting with ways to incorporate the most marginalized communities into participatory citizen science activities through which they can share their indigenous knowledge. The group works with communities at the extremes of the globalized world--both because of nonliteracy and the remote or forbidding environments they inhabit. These groups are the gatekeepers of some key environments on which the future health of the planet depend--from tropical forests to Arctic sea-ice. This article presents the methodologies and tools the group is developing to give these people a voice. This article is part of a special issue on pervasive analytics and citizen science.

The Social Origins of Language

PART 1 THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS PART 2 LANGUAGE AS A COLLECTIVE OBJECT PART 3 APES AND PEOPLE, PAST AND PRESENT PART 4 THE SOCIAL ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE PART 5 THE JOURNEY THEREAFTER

Differences between Pygmy and Non-Pygmy Hunting in Congo Basin Forests

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 rates). We assess the impact of hunting of both hunter groups from estimates of numbers and biomass of prey species killed per square kilometre, and by examining the proportion of hunted taxa of low, medium and high population growth rates as a measure of their vulnerability to overhunting. We then map harvested biomass (kg-1P-1Yr-1) of bushmeat by Pygmies and non-Pygmies throughout the Congo Basin. Hunting patterns differ between Pygmies and non-Pygmies; Pygmies take larger and different prey and non-Pygmies sell more for profit. We show that non-Pygmies have a potentially more severe impact on prey populations than Pygmies. This is because non-Pygmies hunt a wider range of species, and twice as many animals are taken per square kilometre. Moreover, in non-Pygmy settlements there was a larger proportion of game taken of low population growth rate. Our harvest map shows that the non-Pygmy population may be responsible for 27 times more animals harvested than the Pygmy population. Such differences indicate that the intense competition that may arise from the more widespread commercial hunting by non-Pygmies is a far more important constraint and source of conflict than are protected areas.

Introducing Sapelli: a mobile data collection platform for non-literate users

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.

Play, Music, and Taboo in the Reproduction of an Egalitarian Society

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), the other on individuals as they are differently affected by taboos (ekila). Both serve to lead growing BaYaka into opportunities for learning more abstract cultural knowledge at salient points in the life cycle.

Introduction: The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress

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 has allowed the global ecological crisis that crowns the new epoch in which we now live: the Anthropocene. This chapter introduces the book with a call to arms: anthropologists have a responsibility to demonstrate the importance of social, cultural, ontological diversity for resilience, adaptation and sustainable innovation.

Wild Voices: Mimicry, Reversal, Metaphor, and the Emergence of Language

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 in the human case, we argue, because the original victims of our species’ first deceptive vocalizations were nonhuman animals. When our ancestors were vulnerable hominins equipped with limited weaponry, they kept predators away by increasing the range and diversity of their vocal calls. This led to choral singing, primarily by females, and deceptive mimicry of animal calls, primarily by scavenging and hunting males. A critical feature of our model is the core principle of reversal, whereby deceptive signals aimed originally by a coalition against an external target are subsequently redeployed for honest communicative purposes within the group. We argue that this dynamic culminated ultimately in gestural, vocal, and ritual metaphor, opening the way to word formation and the rapid emergence of grammar.

Book Review: Jacqueline Solway (ed.), The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Berghahn, 2006

This warm and engaging festschrift in celebration of Richard Lee’s important contribution to anthropology is a welcome reminder of the continuing relevance and theoretical importance of anthropological studies of egalitarian societies and the value of a critical, socially engaged anthropology for those studied. Richard Lee rightly earned his anthropological reputation through his vivid, meticulous and empathetic ethnographic accounts of the changing lives of Kalahari peoples, especially of the San hunter-gatherers of Dobe in Botswana. Beginning in the early 1960s, Lee and other colleagues involved in the Harvard Kalahari Project set about a multi-disciplinary documentation of the Kalahari San. The corpus of work produced by this project, of which Lee’s The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (1979) is an ethnographic centrepiece, has had a great impact on anthropological theorizing about hunter-gatherers, and our understanding of social systems that do not depend on structural inequality and institutionalized hierarchy. Lee’s ethnographic accounts, along with those of Colin Turnbull and James Woodburn, critically inspired Sahlins’s famous essay ‘The Original Affluent Society’. An abridged version of this masterful polemic is reprinted here and prefaced with an interesting appraisal of how it has stood the test of time. One encounters more than just Lee the anthropologist. We also read about his family and upbringing, his cultural origins as a Jewish American committed to social justice and the impact this has had on his work and long-term support for the San. Stimulated by Lee’s work, Christine Ward-Gailey re-examines Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks, and Bruce Trigger seeks to challenge the ideological hegemony of 21stcentury capitalism. He asks ambitious questions for ‘progressive anthropologists’ about how large-scale enduring egalitarian societies might be fashioned – what mechanisms would ensure both democracy and economic egalitarianism, or social control without an elitist state? There is some excellent new ethnography presented in the volume. In particular, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas provides a beautifully observed and fascinating account of how the lion–Bushman relationship has transformed since the 1950s as the San at Nyae Nyae have moved from hunting to herding. Matthias Guenther describes how modern San artists have evolved in conjunction with their communities’ political awakening. In the hubris of cultural politics in southern Africa following the fall of apartheid, the San developed an awareness of their dispossession and marginalization that led to them making claims for political, civic and territorial rights. Guenther’s analysis criticizes the Western predilection for ‘primitivizing’ this work. Instead he emphasizes the relationship of the San’s artistic production with their increasing engagement with modernity and their desire to promote a vision of San culture – from veldt animals and plants to the trance dance and mystical worlds of healers – that provides a platform for political claims. At a subtler level, Guenther argues that the artists’ frequent juxtapositions of items coming from the new economic and social order with things from tradition serve to refer the former back to the latter and thus challenge the forces pushing for absorption into the modern nation-state. Ida Susser’s recent research at Tsumkwe and Dobe into the epidemiology of HIV and AIDS infection provides a disturbing but elegant summary of the contemporary situation of San. She considers the relationship between high levels of sedentarism, migrant work, alcoholism, domestic violence and HIV/AIDS infection in comparison with other San communities, such as Dobe, which did not have so many migrants 108