1970s
A01=Nurit Bird-David
academic
anthropologists
anthropology
Author_Nurit Bird-David
Category=JBFU
Category=JHB
Category=JHBK
Category=JHMC
Category=QDTS
communities
community
cultivor
culture
cultures
diversity
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
forager
forager culture
foraging
human life
human lifeways
imagined communities
indigenous
intellectual
intimacy
lifeways
nonhuman life
population growth
population size
scalar blindness
scholarly
social science
south asian
Product details
- ISBN 9780520293427
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 14 Feb 2017
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Anthropologists have long looked to forager-cultivator cultures for insights into human lifeways. But they have often not been attentive enough to locals' horizons of concern and to the enormous disparity in population size between these groups and other societies. Us, Relatives explores how scalar blindness skews our understanding of these cultures and the debates they inspire. Drawing on her long-term research with a community of South Asian foragers, Nurit Bird-David provides a scale-sensitive ethnography of these people as she encountered them in the late 1970s and reflects on the intellectual journey that led her to new understandings of their lifeways and horizons. She elaborates on indigenous modes of "being many" that have been eclipsed by scale-blind anthropology, which generally uses its large-scale conceptual language of persons, relations, and ethnic groups for even tiny communities. Through the idea of pluripresence, Bird-David reveals a mode of plural life that encompasses a diversity of humans and nonhumans through notions of kinship and shared life.
She argues that this mode of belonging subverts the modern ontological touchstone of "imagined communities," rooted not in sameness among dispersed strangers but in intimacy among relatives of infinite diversity.
Nurit Bird-David is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Haifa and the author of numerous articles on hunter-gatherer lifeways.
