Lewis Daly

Lecturer in Social Anthropology of the Environment

Websites: UCL Anthropocene and TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly

Keywords

Environmental Anthropology; Multispecies Ethnography; Ethnobotany; Ethnoecology; Indigenous Knowledge; Political Ontology; Anthropocene; Amazonia; Caribbean.

Research Summary

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.

I am co-editor of TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly -- an open-access online magazine about people-plant relationships.

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

PhD Supervision

Alice Vittoria – Contested Forests in the Congo Basin: Logging, Conservation, and the BaYaka (Anthropology, 2018–)
Julian Riveros Clavijo – A Tale of Development and Migration: An Ethnography of Pacific Afro-Colombians Migrants in Antofagasta, Chile (Anthropology, 2019–)
Sarah Fischel – Multispecies Care and Coral Restoration in Bonaire (Geography, 2019–)
Juan Mejia Lopez – Reserves, Fishermen, NGOs, and Blue Crabs: The Multiple Makings of Guaimoreto Lagoon in Northern Honduras (Anthropology, 2020–)
Faidon Papadakis – Fungi, Plants, and Gardeners: Multispecies Socialities in the Context of Urban Gardening in Athens, Greece (Anthropology, 2020–)
Jack Jenkins-Hill – Sovereign Forests: Conservation and Expressions of Sovereignty in Tanintharyi, Myanmar (Anthropology, 2020–)
Sahib Singh – The Reluctant Forest: Mining, Environmentalism, and Resistance in Central India (Anthropology, 2020–)
Matthew French – Panpsychism in Western Europe (Anthropology, 2020–)
Sonia Dhandha – Conservation Prioritisation of Wild Orchids in International Trade (UCL Anthropology and Kew, 2020–)

Recent 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.) – in press.
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

Editor – Anthropolitan, annual magazine and blog of UCL Anthropology
Co-editor – TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly, an online, open-access magazine about people-plant relationships
Guest editor – Botanical Ontologies, Special Section of the 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