I have authored 18 article in peer-reviewed journals since 2014, as well as three book chapters and edited a monograph. Below are the abstracts and links to several of my key publications. For the full list of my publications, see my CV
Ninkova, V., Hays, J., Lavi, N., Ali, A., Lopes da Silva Macedo, S., Davis, H. E., Lew-Levy, S. (2024). Hunter-gatherer children at school: A view from the Global South. Review of Educational Research. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543241255614
Universal formal education is a major global development goal. Yet hunter-gatherer communities have extremely low participation rates in formal schooling, even in comparison with other marginalized groups. Here, we review the existing literature to identify common challenges faced by hunter-gatherer children in formal education systems in the Global South. We find that hunter-gatherer children are often granted extensive personal autonomy, which is at odds with the hierarchical culture of school. Hunter-gatherer children face economic, infrastructural, social, cultural, and structural barriers that negatively affect their school participation. While schools have been identified as a risk to the transmission of hunter-gatherer values, languages, and traditional knowledge, they are also viewed by hunter-gatherer communities as a source of economic and cultural empowerment. These observations highlight the need for hunter-gatherer communities to decide for themselves the purpose school serves, and whether children should be compelled to attend.
Lavi, N. (2022). ‘We only teach them how to be together’: Parenting, child development and engagement with formal education among the Nayaka in South India. Anthropology and Education Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1111/aeq.12406
Children's school performance is often associated with parenting practices, implying a direct link between parents' behavior, child-development and academic success. Through the case of an Indian forest-dwelling community, I offer an alternative view of child-development, learning and teaching, which prioritizes social skills above – and as a pre-condition of – academic/practical ones. I discuss the implications of such view to the evaluation of parenting, and more broadly, of formal education for marginalised indigenous communities.
Lavi, N. (2022). The freedom to stop being free: Rethinking school education and personal autonomy among Nayaka children in South India. Hunter Gatherer Research.
This paper examines education programmes for South Indian Nayaka, traditionally classified as hunter-gatherers and officially recognised as one of India’s poorest populations. With persistently high school dropout rates among their children, Nayaka parents find themselves today at the focus of formal education initiatives, constructed both as a central obstacle for children’s success in school and as responsible to facilitate it. The paper focuses on Nayaka’s sense of autonomy as a core social notion which is mainly practiced by avoidance from directing other’s actions and decisions, including children. The notion of autonomy plays a central role in constructing adult-child relations. I demonstrate how parents negotiate between conflicting senses of parenthood expected from them by development workers and educators on one hand and their families on the other. I argue that what is described by teachers as parental carelessness and lack of responsibility is in fact a deliberate and thoughtful avoidance from ordering others, which in turn encourages the development of children’s autonomy. I then show how the experience of school alters children’s sense of their own autonomy and as a result, their sense of their selves. Last, I explore the paradoxical role of the notion of autonomy in the unexpected trajectories of social change, when local attempts to maintain autonomy in contemporary circumstances in fact allow this value to diminish and thus invite significant social change. Overall, this paper demonstrates the importance of paying attention to local ideas for understanding the experience of development programs and illuminate the pitfalls of education programmes.
Lavi, N., Rudge, A., Warren, G. (in press). Rewilding our inner hunter-gatherer: how an idea about our ancestral condition is recruited into popular debate in Britain and Ireland. Current Anthropology.
Rewild your inner hunter-gatherer examines how hunter-gatherers are imagined in popular debate in Britain and Ireland. We show that in debates about topics such as physical health, mental health, bush-craft and survivalism a stereotypical account of how hunter-gatherers past and present behave is recruited to support and sell claims. Acting like a hunter-gatherer is argued to re-wild us through reconnecting us with our supposedly ancestral condition – the ‘inner hunter-gatherer’ that represents our evolved sense and is lost and misplaced in the modern urban world. This stereotypical hunter-gatherers is both the antithesis and antidote to the perceived crises of contemporary society. We show that the image of the hunter-gatherer in many of these debates is constructed through nostalgic, colonial views of human nature. These are then commodified within a contemporary neoliberal context. Understanding the types of claims being made by this recruitment of the idea of hunter-gatherers is a valuable lens for considering the problems people perceive in modern urban life. But these stereotypes of hunter-gatherers often repeat and sustain damaging perceptions of hunter-gatherer lifeways and equally damaging and misleading assumptions about human nature and the significance of our evolutionary past. They therefore require critical attention.
Lavi, N., Friesem, D.E. (2019), Towards a Broader View of Hunter Gatherer Sharing. McDonald Institute Monographs Series, Cambridge. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/300107
This edited monograph brings together a collection of papers that re-open and re-examine the concept of sharing among hunting and gathering societies in the past and present. It presents novel theories and offers new frameworks that re-shape the ways we should think and understand this central practice, its social implications and its role in people’s daily life. Broadening the concept of sharing allowed us to engage with fascinating new aspects of this practice (e.g., sharing of selves, space and time to be equally perceived and valued by people as sharing of food). It delivers new perspectives on Sharing’s intangible aspects such as relatedness, sociality, values, identities as well as perceptions of society, environment, and the self. In this book, scholars from diverse fields provide inter-disciplinary perspectives on the study of hunting and gathering societies from the early Palaeolithic to modern times and in a wide range of geographic areas and contexts.
Lew-Levy, S., Lavi, N., Reckin, R., Cristobal-Azkarate, J., Ellis-Davies, K. (2018). How do hunter-gatherer children learn social and gender norms? A meta-ethnographic review. Cross Cultural Research 52, 213-255. https://doi.org/10.1177/1069397117723552
Forager societies tend to value egalitarianism, cooperative autonomy, and sharing. Furthermore, foragers exhibit a strong gendered division of labor. However, few studies have employed a cross-cultural approach to understand how forager children learn social and gender norms. To address this gap, we perform a meta-ethnography, which allows for the systematic extraction, synthesis, and comparison of quantitative and qualitative publications. In all, 77 publications met our inclusion criteria. These suggest that sharing is actively taught in infancy. In early childhood, children transition to the playgroup, signifying their increased autonomy. Cooperative behaviors are learned through play. At the end of middle childhood, children self-segregate into same-sex groups and begin to perform gender-specific tasks. We find evidence that foragers actively teach children social norms, and that, with sedentarization, teaching, through direct instruction and task assignment, replaces imitation in learning gendered behaviors. We also find evidence that child-to-child transmission is an important way children learn cultural norms, and that noninterference might be a way autonomy is taught. These findings can add to the debate on teaching and learning within forager populations.
Lew-Levy, S., Reckin, R., Lavi, N., Cristobal-Azkarate, J., Ellis-Davies, K. (2017). How do hunter-gatherer children learn subsistence skills? A meta-ethnographic review. Human Nature 28, 367-394. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-017-9302-2
Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observation, and participation. By the end of middle childhood, most children are proficient food collectors. However, it is not until adolescence that adults (not necessarily parents) begin directly teaching children complex skills such as hunting and complex tool manufacture. Adolescents seek to learn innovations from adults, but they themselves do not innovate. These findings support predictive models that find social learning should occur before individual learning. Furthermore, these results show that teaching does indeed exist in hunter-gatherer societies. And, finally, though children are competent foragers by late childhood, learning to extract more complex resources, such as hunting large game, takes a lifetime.
Lavi, N., Bird-David, N. (2014). At Home Under Development: A Housing Project for Hunter-gatherers Nayaka of the Nilgiris. Eastern Anthropologist 66, 407-432. https://www.academia.edu/download/51573515/At_Home_in_a_Changing_World.pdf
This paper examines house-building development projects for the Nayaka, forest dwellers hunter-gatherers in South India. By taking a long-term perspective on Nayaka houses, the traditional built-by-them ones, and the modern ones they receive through contemporary development projects, we look at questions of social change and continuity in an era of modernization, globalization and development. Houses provide a unique anthropological site as they reflect their builders' ideas, values and norms and they are also a prime agent of socialization. While in the 1970s Nayaka lived in huts that they built for themselves according to their own cultural ideas, today most of them own houses designed for them by non-Nayaka development agents, according to the latter's notions of dwellings. Looking at how new houses are designed and built reveals much about the relations between the developers and the developed. Looking at the new externally built houses and at the ways in which Nayaka perceive, relate and actually dwell in them reflects a great deal of cultural resilience even under intensive pressure to change.