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Seminar: Egalitarian Societies with Jerome Lewis

February 3rd 12pm ET / 5pm UTC

ProSocial Commons

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Jerome Lewis

Free 1 hour seminar with Q&A

View Full Seminar: https://youtu.be/9V-ODSuCWJo

This talk will introduce the diversity of hunter-gatherer societies today and focus in on those that have societies that value personal autonomy, sharing and joy, while they reject property, inequality, status positions and authority of any kind. I will present commonalities and differences between these egalitarian societies and reflect on some of the implications of these insights for understanding human evolution.

Jerome Lewis (Reader in Social Anthropology, University College London) works with BaYaka forest hunter-gatherers in Congo-Brazzaville since 1993 on egalitarian politics, taboo and myth, and the role of ritual, music and dance in society. Jerome’s applied research supports conservation efforts by forest people to secure their land and better represent themselves to outsiders using new technologies (Extreme Citizen Science). He is director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability, and co-director of Flourishing Diversity.

Links to online material for those who want to learn more in preparation:

Whiten, A. and D. Erdal 2012. The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins.
‍Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 367: 2119-2129. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2012.0114
Laws, M., 2022. Egalitarianism. In The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology
‍https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/egalitarianism
Woodburn, J., 1982. ‘Egalitarian Societies’. JRAI (Man) 17(3): 431-451.
‍https://files.libcom.org/files/EGALITARIAN%20SOCIETIES%20-%20James%20Woodburn.pdf‍
Knight C, and Lewis J., 2017. Wild voices: mimicry, reversal and the invention of metaphor.
‍Current Anthropology 58(4): 435-453. https://doi.org/10.1086/692905 OR researchgate.net ‍
‍Whiten, A. and D. Erdal 2012. The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins.
‍Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 367: 2119-2129. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2012.0114‍
Video: Daniel Bitten’s ‘What is Politics?’ channel: Episode 10.1 Do "Egalitarian Societies" Exist?
David Graeber & David Wengrow’s "The Dawn of Everything"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vNADAH-Rxk

View Recording