Who is Jerome Lewis, and what can the BaYaka teach us about equality?

Who is Jerome Lewis? #

An anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, where he is an Associate Professor. His research with Central African hunter-gatherers began in 1993, and his doctoral fieldwork with the Mbendjele ran from 1994 to 1997; he has gone back regularly ever since.¹² His interests run from egalitarian politics and economics to how forest peoples understand and care for the forest through taboo, myth, ritual, music and dance, and to the evolution of language and music.¹

He also works for forest peoples’ rights. In 2011 he set up Extreme Citizen Science at UCL with the geographer Muki Haklay, which builds tools that let communities gather and use their own data whatever their language or literacy, and in 2013 he helped found the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability. The Royal Geographical Society gave him its Cuthbert Peek Award in 2010 for work supporting forest peoples’ conservation efforts.¹

Who are the BaYaka? #

Forest peoples of the Congo Basin, often called “Pygmies” in the academic literature; bayaka is their own name. The Mbendjele, the group Lewis knows best, live in the equatorial forests of the northern Republic of Congo. Most spend about two-thirds of the year hunting and gathering in forest camps, and part of the year near the villages of farming neighbours, whom they call Bilo, where they also trade, work or perform services for food, goods, alcohol or money. Some are evangelised and fairly settled, and some work for long spells near logging towns.³

So they are hunter-gatherers living alongside farmers, and under heavy pressure. Lewis notes that most Central African forest groups are now more accurately “former hunter-gatherers”, as logging, mining, commercial hunting and protected areas close off the forest.³

What are immediate-return and delayed-return societies? #

A distinction from the anthropologist James Woodburn, which Lewis builds on. In immediate-return societies food is eaten soon after it is hunted or gathered and nothing much is stored, so nobody can build up more than others or control what others need, and anyone can simply move away. In these societies, Lewis writes, “pressure is not put on people to produce, but on them to share whatever they have produced.”⁴

In delayed-return societies people invest work over a long time before a yield comes in, as in farming, herding and capitalism, and also among some hunter-gatherers who store food. Someone then has to manage the work and the share-out, and dependence, authority and inequality follow. Immediate-return societies are rare today, and include some Pygmy groups, the Hadza of Tanzania, some San groups and several peoples of India and South-East Asia.⁴

How do the BaYaka keep things equal? #

By a set of everyday practices that never let anyone rise above the rest.

One is demand-sharing. Instead of the owner choosing what to give, people ask for what they need, and the one asked is expected to give it; refusing is rude. Anyone who rarely contributes, through age or illness, keeps the same right to ask. Living like this, Lewis writes, is “like living in a place where goods are free”, and the Mbendjele contrast their own “easy hands” with the farmers’ “hard hands”.⁵

Another is levelling the over-successful. A man who hunts so much that the camp is always eating his meat gets teased, mocked and gossiped about, and most such men stop hunting for a while. One obsessive hunter kept on, until the women of his camp agreed to refuse to cook any meat he brought in; he left to live with a neighbouring people. Anyone who brags or tries to impose their will is teased, fought, avoided, and if they persist, even exiled.⁵

Others are mobility and avoidance, since a person in a dispute can simply leave; moadjo, in which elderly women comically act out someone’s foolish behaviour, never naming them, whilst the camp laughs and comments; and the many kombeti, or elders. The oldest person in any group is its kombeti, so every camp has many, for the men, the women, the girls, the boys and so on, and their duty is to provide what younger people ask of them, not to command. Outsiders often mistake one of them for a chief, and when one man tried to play the chief to a visitor, a group of boys called out that he was a fake chief.⁵ Specialists such as healers, song-makers and spirit guardians are recognised for their skill but gain no privilege from it.⁵

How is equality passed on? #

Without anyone preaching it. “There is no explicit discourse on ‘equality’”, Lewis writes; it is learnt piecemeal over a lifetime through shared bodily practice and the pleasure, curiosity and satisfaction it brings.⁶ Two systems carry it. Ekila is a web of rules about blood, sharing meat, menstruation, hunting and laughter, which turns everyday bodily experience into a lifelong teaching.⁷ Massana means both play and ritual, and its spirit plays draw the whole camp together in polyphonic singing in which every singer must hold a different part without drowning out the others. Lewis sees this as training a kind of autonomy that is not selfish, but keenly aware of what others are doing and seeking to complement it, which is also how a camp’s daily foraging gets coordinated without anyone giving orders.⁶⁸

Do other anthropologists agree? #

Not on every point. The anthropologists Blurton-Jones (1987) and Peterson (1993) read sharing on demand as a form of tolerated theft, indirect exchange or generalised reciprocity. Lewis replies that it is none of these: hunters go to great trouble to carry kills back to camp to be shared, and the same few people tend to provision the group whilst being denied any recognition for it.⁹

Brunton (1989) argued that egalitarian societies are inherently unstable, their customs a chance assemblage that survives by luck. Lewis answers that massana and ekila act as a cultural store, carrying values across generations without giving anyone authority, and notes the same cluster of singing, sharing, forest life and equality among Pygmy groups that have had no contact with one another for thousands of years.⁹

Lewis also names a cost. The very features that keep equality alive inside the camp, no leaders, avoidance over confrontation, sharing over property, make it hard for these small peoples to resist being dispossessed by logging companies, roads and conservation schemes organised on opposite lines.⁹

How does his work sit beside Therapeutic Shamanism? #

It gives working detail, for one living people, of something Therapeutic Shamanism teaches about hunter-gatherers in general. Hunter-gatherers did not just practise and embody genuine equality, they fiercely protected it, using what the anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls a reverse dominance hierarchy: teasing anyone who tries to dominate, then ridicule and shaming, then refusing to cooperate, and finally casting them out.¹⁰ Lewis’s ladder of teasing, fighting, avoiding and exiling, and the women who would not cook for the over-successful hunter, show the same machinery at work. Boehm’s suggestion that projectile weapons let the weaker check a bully sits beside Lewis’s observation that the mere possibility of a poisoned arrow deters anyone from pushing too far.¹⁰¹¹ See What did Christopher Boehm find about how early humans kept power in check?

The same goes for leadership. In hunter-gatherer bands there were no permanent leaders or followers; order came by respectful discussion and consensus, with people taking the initiative, or being given authority, only for the task at hand.¹² Lewis’s elders who may not decide for anyone, and his specialists without privilege, describe that in practice. See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?

Two differences are worth holding. In Therapeutic Shamanism a would-be dominator in a band who persisted could in the last resort be cast out, or even killed;¹⁰ the hunter Lewis describes was in effect exiled by the women’s refusal to cook for him, and went to live with neighbouring Luma Pygmies, where he remains, and no killing is described. And Therapeutic Shamanism is careful that genuine hunter-gatherer cultures have all but gone, and that most surviving peoples are touched by farming and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer;¹³ the Mbendjele are among the few immediate-return peoples left, but they live alongside farmers and under heavy pressure, so they are evidence about one living people, not a picture of the deep past.