Dr Lewis Daly

Academic position: Lecturer in Social Anthropology of the Environment

Department: UCL Anthropology

Websites: UCL Anthropology and TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly

Biography:

I am a Lecturer in Social Anthropology of the Environment at UCL. My research interests include the ethnography of Amazonia / lowland South America, human-environmental relationships, indigenous knowledge and rights, agriculture and fermentation technologies, shamanism and animist cosmologies, and the politics of conservation and sustainable development. Theoretically, my work is situated between social and environmental anthropology, and engages with ethnoecology, multispecies ethnography, posthumanist theory, and ontological approaches to anthropology. I am particularly interested in advancing a dedicated Anthropology of Plants / Phytoethnography.

I completed my doctorate (DPhil) in Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2015, focusing on indigenous ecological knowledge and practices in the savannahs and rainforests of northern Amazonia. My doctoral thesis, a product of eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with the Makushi people of southern Guyana, concerned people-plant relationships in the indigenous lifeworld and cosmology – largely in the domains of gardening, cooking and fermentation, traditional medicine, and shamanism. The study was framed by an appraisal of the impact of conservation and ecotourism on Makushi lifeways and environmental practices.

Relevant Publications:

Daly, Lewis (In press). Cassava Spirit and the Seed of History: On Garden Cosmology in Indigenous Amazonia. Anthropological Forum, Special Issue: The Art of Gardens. L. Bolton and J. Mitchell (eds.)
Daly, Lewis and Glenn H. Shepard Jr. (2019) Magic Darts and Messenger Molecules: Toward a Phytoethnography of Indigenous Amazonia. Anthropology Today, Special Issue: Ethnography of Plants, 35(2):13–18.
Daly, Lewis (2019) The Nature of Sweetness: An Indigenous Fermentation Complex in Amazonian Guyana. In K. Hockings and R. Dunbar (eds.), Alcohol and Humans: A Long and Social Affair. Pp. 130–146. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Daly, Lewis and Kay Lewis-Jones (2018) Plant Worlds: Assembling the Ethnobotanical. TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly, Issue 1: Winter 2018 [online]
Daly, Lewis, Luiseach Nic Eoin, Katherine French, and Theresa Miller (2016) Integrating Ontology into Ethnobotanical Research. Journal of Ethnobiology, Special Section: Botanical Ontologies, 36(1):1–9.
Daly, Lewis (2015) What Kind of People are Plants? The Challenges of Researching Human-Plant Relations in Amazonia. Engagement, a blog of the Anthropology and Environment Society, American Anthropological Association (AAA). December 8, 2015 [online]

Editorial Work:

Co-editor - TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly, an online open-access magazine about people-plant relationships
Guest editor – Botanical Ontologies, Special Section, Journal of Ethnobiology, 2016, 36(1)

Conference Organisation:

2017 – Plant Worlds, Centre for Biocultural Diversity (CBCD), University of Kent
2014 – Botanical Ontologies, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford

Teaching:

I teach across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules in Social and Environmental Anthropology, including:

ANTH0003: Introduction to Social Anthropology (UG)
ANTH0069: Ethnography of Forest Peoples (UG and PG)
ANTH0106: Anthropology of Development (PG)
ANTH0105: Resource Use and Impacts (PG)
ANTH0209: Biosocial Medical Anthropology (PG)
Multispecies Ethnography in the Anthropocene (PG) – from 2021
Environmental Anthropology (UG) – from 2021