Nurit Bird-David | University of Haifa (original) (raw)
Books by Nurit Bird-David
Anthropologists have long looked to forager-cultivator cultures for insights into human lifeways.... more 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.
Articles in Refereed Journals by Nurit Bird-David
Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a ... more Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a concern with method. So while some generations ago we would tend to identify ourselves as anthropologists with reference to particular theoretical paradigms-for example, Marxism, (post-)structuralism, cognitivism, cultural materialism, interpretivism-these days our tendency is to align ourselves, often eclectically, with proposals conceived as methodological: entanglements, assemblages, ontologies, technologies of description, epistemic partnerships, problematizations, collaborative anthropology, the art of noticing, and so on. In an attempt to get a handle on this shift and explore its implications, this forum section focuses on the activity of analysis-itself an ambiguous notion in the practice of anthropology. Analysis, it seems, shifts unstably between theory, method, and ethnography. One way to think of it is as the set of activities that take place in the 'middle ground' between ethnographic materials and their anthropological theorization, that is, as the interface of the empirical and the conceptual. But if method is increasingly occupying the slot of theory in anthropologists' preoccupations, then has analysis and its cognates become increasingly indistinguishable from theory? Is one's analytical approach the same as one's theoretical approach? What difference does it make, in any event, to think of such diverse activities as anthropological description, evocation, explanation, interpretation, and conceptualization as 'analytical operations'? In fact, can a distinction between theory, method, and analysis be stabilized at all? Or is the ambiguous movement between them a characteristic part of anthropological practice-an element of its particular form of creativity, even?
This paper addresses the nature of 'community' for hunter-gatherers, in the wake of previous inte... more This paper addresses the nature of 'community' for hunter-gatherers, in the wake of previous interest in their senses of the 'person'. It is argued that in order to understand their senses of 'community', we must freshly take up issues of kinship and scale that have been marginalised for several decades now within hunter-gatherer scholarship. Newly approached, kinship and scale should be broadly integrated as key issues in describing, analysing and theorising hunter-gatherer life-ways. I examine how commonplace discursive norms in anthropological writing, unintentionally and yet effectively, jeopardise studying hunter-gatherers own understandings of their social reality, including identifying their groups by ethnonyms and their members as individuals. It is suggested that their human and non-human communities are better understood through relational kinship perspectives.
Reproducing this article (including by photocopying) is only authorized in accordance with the ge... more Reproducing this article (including by photocopying) is only authorized in accordance with the general terms and conditions of use for the website, or with the general terms and conditions of the license held by your institution, where applicable. Any other reproduction, in full or in part, or storage in a database, in any form and by any means whatsoever is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of the publisher, except where permitted under French law.
Social Analysis, 2019
Standard diagrammatic tools in ethnographies, locational maps, and kinship trees are supposed to ... more Standard diagrammatic tools in ethnographies, locational maps, and kinship trees are supposed to help make fieldwork and its findings intelligible to readers. This article explores how, to the contrary, they obscure locals' lived worlds and the fieldwork process when they are used cross-culturally and cross-scalarly in studies of minuscule indigenous societies, anthropology's traditional study subject. I draw on my experience of producing and using these visuals, from fieldwork through to writing ethnography, in my work with foragers who live in South India in order to show the effect of these diagrammatic tools on our understanding of nanoscale communities and their intimate worlds.
Cultural anthropology has for decades been committed to the tenet that all cultures deserve equal... more Cultural anthropology has for decades been committed to the tenet that all cultures deserve equal scholarly consideration, regardless of population or community size. In this article, I argue that the minuscule size of hunter-gatherer communities, as well as how they scale and imagine their worlds, are critical factors that should not be glossed over in their study. To illustrate my point, I examine the distortive effect of scale-blind research on a long-studied topic currently drawing renewed interest: indigenous animism. I demonstrate how uncritical use of key terms in analyzing animism, without regard for scale, inadvertently leads to serious disfiguring of hunter-gatherer worlds.
Cross-culturally, tiny hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities refer to themselves by such terms a... more Cross-culturally, tiny hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities refer to themselves by such terms as "real people," "humans," and "kinspeople." Anthropology has generally neglected their "we designations," because its large-scale project is predicated on ethnonymic identifications. Ethnographers either assign these groups proper names or use the local terms as if they were proper names, leaving local identity categories understudied. Inspired by Benedict Anderson's "styles" of imagining communities and the "ontological turn," I argue that indigenous we designations reveal modes of "being many" unlike that expressed in the modern "nation." The kin-based idiom used by the South Indian foragers that I consider in this article, in fact, signals a subversion of nation. Their mode of being many accommodates diverse members (including nonhumans) at the price of low scalability, whereas the national style assembles unlimited numbers of dispersed but similar members. Focusing on scale, scaling, and scalability, I question scholars' inattention to locals' self-determined horizons of concern when analyzing indigenous cultures and ontologies and to huge disparities in population size when comparing indigenous and Western societies. My case illustrates how scale-blind anthropology generally distorts understanding of tiny indigenous communities' lifeways, ontologies, and political struggles.
The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every reside... more The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call 'routinergency': the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship.
The ontologies and epistemologies of hunter-gatherers have attracted growing attention in recent ... more The ontologies and epistemologies of hunter-gatherers have attracted growing attention in recent years as these people are undergoing changes. We examine these changes, focusing on one particular case based on our studies of the South Indian Nayaka; they have recently added cultivation and animal husbandry to their partially ongoing hunting and gathering life-style. Resisting analysis based on an assumed forest/domesticated dichotomy, we show that forest and domesticated animals and plants are both regarded as sentient co-dwellers in some cases, and as objects in others, depending not on what they are in essence, or where they are, but on when, by whom, and for what purpose they are approached. We argue that pockets of utilitarian framing emerge within the continuing relational epistemology of the Nayaka along with a growing departure from immediacy in the production-consumption nexus. In these pockets, the vivid presence of animals and plants is concealed, and they no longer appear as persons but as things.
Here we address the personhood of patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS), who fall outsid... more Here we address the personhood of patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS), who fall outside categories of "alive" or "dead" and "subject" or "object." Drawing on fieldwork in an Israeli hospital, we examine multiple and shifting approaches to PVS patients, which are articulated in the course of caring for and living with them. We argue that, alongside the institutional definition of these patients as being in a PVS, which, as Kaufman showed, evokes irresolvable confusion as to their ontological nature, there appear and disappear other senses of their personhood. Allying with other studies of cognitively impaired patients (e.g., those with dementia and Alzheimer's), we explore this relational person-concept while demonstrating its situational nature. We analyze patients' admission to the hospital, showing how their essentialistic personhood is "emptied" and how and when their fluid, relational personhood appears and disappears, further showing how this personhood is reified by imagined life stories.
In this paper we ask whether and in what way Animism relates to conservation, with focus on one g... more In this paper we ask whether and in what way Animism relates to conservation, with focus on one group, the Nayaka of South India. We argue that in order to pursue this question one must first recognize the immediate quality of Nayaka Animism as well as some important aspects in their relational epistemology . Our analysis shows that Nayaka are not committed to conserve their environment. Their concern lies mainly with keeping good relations with specific codwellers in the shared environment in ways and for reasons which we explore in the paper. This concern has indeed some conservationist effects, but as a byproduct. Our analysis also shows a valuable way-of-knowing, as much as the nowadays appreciated 'indigenous knowledge'. These arguments are supported by Nayaka ethnography, and are further clarified by a preliminary heuristic comparison between the model which can be identified from the ethnography and the model which informs an ambitious international program for biodiversity conservation which is implemented in the Nilgiris of South India, where the Nayaka live.
In this article I examine relational child feeding in the Nayaka forest-world and problematize th... more In this article I examine relational child feeding in the Nayaka forest-world and problematize the concept of "nurturing" which interferes with understanding it. Several essentialist and individualist antecedents of "nurturing," I suggest, conflate child feeding with a one-way, top-down transfer of food; with training, controlling and loving the children; and with rearing them to grow up and separate from their parents. This conflation obscures the Nayaka relational senses which are embedded in an ontology of "living together" and in which child feeding is framed as an instance of sharing between coevals who remain closely related throughout their lives. As well as offering a corrective to "The Giving Environment" (Bird-David 1990), this article contributes a relational perspective to the study of children among forest-dweller hunter-gatherers. Methodologically, a case is made in the article for "bifocal ethnography" that pays attention not only to the subjects of the study but also-and ethnographically, as wellto selected key notions in the language in which the ethnography is written as a means of limiting readers' own inherent ontological biases and "fine-tuning" the ethnography. [
Anthropologists have long looked to forager-cultivator cultures for insights into human lifeways.... more 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.
Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a ... more Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a concern with method. So while some generations ago we would tend to identify ourselves as anthropologists with reference to particular theoretical paradigms-for example, Marxism, (post-)structuralism, cognitivism, cultural materialism, interpretivism-these days our tendency is to align ourselves, often eclectically, with proposals conceived as methodological: entanglements, assemblages, ontologies, technologies of description, epistemic partnerships, problematizations, collaborative anthropology, the art of noticing, and so on. In an attempt to get a handle on this shift and explore its implications, this forum section focuses on the activity of analysis-itself an ambiguous notion in the practice of anthropology. Analysis, it seems, shifts unstably between theory, method, and ethnography. One way to think of it is as the set of activities that take place in the 'middle ground' between ethnographic materials and their anthropological theorization, that is, as the interface of the empirical and the conceptual. But if method is increasingly occupying the slot of theory in anthropologists' preoccupations, then has analysis and its cognates become increasingly indistinguishable from theory? Is one's analytical approach the same as one's theoretical approach? What difference does it make, in any event, to think of such diverse activities as anthropological description, evocation, explanation, interpretation, and conceptualization as 'analytical operations'? In fact, can a distinction between theory, method, and analysis be stabilized at all? Or is the ambiguous movement between them a characteristic part of anthropological practice-an element of its particular form of creativity, even?
This paper addresses the nature of 'community' for hunter-gatherers, in the wake of previous inte... more This paper addresses the nature of 'community' for hunter-gatherers, in the wake of previous interest in their senses of the 'person'. It is argued that in order to understand their senses of 'community', we must freshly take up issues of kinship and scale that have been marginalised for several decades now within hunter-gatherer scholarship. Newly approached, kinship and scale should be broadly integrated as key issues in describing, analysing and theorising hunter-gatherer life-ways. I examine how commonplace discursive norms in anthropological writing, unintentionally and yet effectively, jeopardise studying hunter-gatherers own understandings of their social reality, including identifying their groups by ethnonyms and their members as individuals. It is suggested that their human and non-human communities are better understood through relational kinship perspectives.
Reproducing this article (including by photocopying) is only authorized in accordance with the ge... more Reproducing this article (including by photocopying) is only authorized in accordance with the general terms and conditions of use for the website, or with the general terms and conditions of the license held by your institution, where applicable. Any other reproduction, in full or in part, or storage in a database, in any form and by any means whatsoever is strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of the publisher, except where permitted under French law.
Social Analysis, 2019
Standard diagrammatic tools in ethnographies, locational maps, and kinship trees are supposed to ... more Standard diagrammatic tools in ethnographies, locational maps, and kinship trees are supposed to help make fieldwork and its findings intelligible to readers. This article explores how, to the contrary, they obscure locals' lived worlds and the fieldwork process when they are used cross-culturally and cross-scalarly in studies of minuscule indigenous societies, anthropology's traditional study subject. I draw on my experience of producing and using these visuals, from fieldwork through to writing ethnography, in my work with foragers who live in South India in order to show the effect of these diagrammatic tools on our understanding of nanoscale communities and their intimate worlds.
Cultural anthropology has for decades been committed to the tenet that all cultures deserve equal... more Cultural anthropology has for decades been committed to the tenet that all cultures deserve equal scholarly consideration, regardless of population or community size. In this article, I argue that the minuscule size of hunter-gatherer communities, as well as how they scale and imagine their worlds, are critical factors that should not be glossed over in their study. To illustrate my point, I examine the distortive effect of scale-blind research on a long-studied topic currently drawing renewed interest: indigenous animism. I demonstrate how uncritical use of key terms in analyzing animism, without regard for scale, inadvertently leads to serious disfiguring of hunter-gatherer worlds.
Cross-culturally, tiny hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities refer to themselves by such terms a... more Cross-culturally, tiny hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities refer to themselves by such terms as "real people," "humans," and "kinspeople." Anthropology has generally neglected their "we designations," because its large-scale project is predicated on ethnonymic identifications. Ethnographers either assign these groups proper names or use the local terms as if they were proper names, leaving local identity categories understudied. Inspired by Benedict Anderson's "styles" of imagining communities and the "ontological turn," I argue that indigenous we designations reveal modes of "being many" unlike that expressed in the modern "nation." The kin-based idiom used by the South Indian foragers that I consider in this article, in fact, signals a subversion of nation. Their mode of being many accommodates diverse members (including nonhumans) at the price of low scalability, whereas the national style assembles unlimited numbers of dispersed but similar members. Focusing on scale, scaling, and scalability, I question scholars' inattention to locals' self-determined horizons of concern when analyzing indigenous cultures and ontologies and to huge disparities in population size when comparing indigenous and Western societies. My case illustrates how scale-blind anthropology generally distorts understanding of tiny indigenous communities' lifeways, ontologies, and political struggles.
The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every reside... more The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call 'routinergency': the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship.
The ontologies and epistemologies of hunter-gatherers have attracted growing attention in recent ... more The ontologies and epistemologies of hunter-gatherers have attracted growing attention in recent years as these people are undergoing changes. We examine these changes, focusing on one particular case based on our studies of the South Indian Nayaka; they have recently added cultivation and animal husbandry to their partially ongoing hunting and gathering life-style. Resisting analysis based on an assumed forest/domesticated dichotomy, we show that forest and domesticated animals and plants are both regarded as sentient co-dwellers in some cases, and as objects in others, depending not on what they are in essence, or where they are, but on when, by whom, and for what purpose they are approached. We argue that pockets of utilitarian framing emerge within the continuing relational epistemology of the Nayaka along with a growing departure from immediacy in the production-consumption nexus. In these pockets, the vivid presence of animals and plants is concealed, and they no longer appear as persons but as things.
Here we address the personhood of patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS), who fall outsid... more Here we address the personhood of patients in a permanent vegetative state (PVS), who fall outside categories of "alive" or "dead" and "subject" or "object." Drawing on fieldwork in an Israeli hospital, we examine multiple and shifting approaches to PVS patients, which are articulated in the course of caring for and living with them. We argue that, alongside the institutional definition of these patients as being in a PVS, which, as Kaufman showed, evokes irresolvable confusion as to their ontological nature, there appear and disappear other senses of their personhood. Allying with other studies of cognitively impaired patients (e.g., those with dementia and Alzheimer's), we explore this relational person-concept while demonstrating its situational nature. We analyze patients' admission to the hospital, showing how their essentialistic personhood is "emptied" and how and when their fluid, relational personhood appears and disappears, further showing how this personhood is reified by imagined life stories.
In this paper we ask whether and in what way Animism relates to conservation, with focus on one g... more In this paper we ask whether and in what way Animism relates to conservation, with focus on one group, the Nayaka of South India. We argue that in order to pursue this question one must first recognize the immediate quality of Nayaka Animism as well as some important aspects in their relational epistemology . Our analysis shows that Nayaka are not committed to conserve their environment. Their concern lies mainly with keeping good relations with specific codwellers in the shared environment in ways and for reasons which we explore in the paper. This concern has indeed some conservationist effects, but as a byproduct. Our analysis also shows a valuable way-of-knowing, as much as the nowadays appreciated 'indigenous knowledge'. These arguments are supported by Nayaka ethnography, and are further clarified by a preliminary heuristic comparison between the model which can be identified from the ethnography and the model which informs an ambitious international program for biodiversity conservation which is implemented in the Nilgiris of South India, where the Nayaka live.
In this article I examine relational child feeding in the Nayaka forest-world and problematize th... more In this article I examine relational child feeding in the Nayaka forest-world and problematize the concept of "nurturing" which interferes with understanding it. Several essentialist and individualist antecedents of "nurturing," I suggest, conflate child feeding with a one-way, top-down transfer of food; with training, controlling and loving the children; and with rearing them to grow up and separate from their parents. This conflation obscures the Nayaka relational senses which are embedded in an ontology of "living together" and in which child feeding is framed as an instance of sharing between coevals who remain closely related throughout their lives. As well as offering a corrective to "The Giving Environment" (Bird-David 1990), this article contributes a relational perspective to the study of children among forest-dweller hunter-gatherers. Methodologically, a case is made in the article for "bifocal ethnography" that pays attention not only to the subjects of the study but also-and ethnographically, as wellto selected key notions in the language in which the ethnography is written as a means of limiting readers' own inherent ontological biases and "fine-tuning" the ethnography. [
In this chapter I trouble the tradition started by Irving Hallowell that places personhood at the... more In this chapter I trouble the tradition started by Irving Hallowell that places personhood at the centre of studying animistic worlds. I suggest that instead of "the person", we perhaps should think about "the relative" as a productive concept for approaching hunter-gatherers' animistic cosmos. This proposal partly builds on and partly revises my early work. Two decades ago, I proposed that various kinship relations are salient in foragers' cosmos. I suggested that parental, procreative, affinal and namesake relations are respectively central in the animistic worlds of tropical forest, Australian Aboriginal, North American Indian and South African hunter-gatherers (Bird-David 1990 , 1993). However, I then turned after Hallowell, to "the person" as analytical currency in the study of animism. I argued that the animistic person, transcending human/nonhuman distinctions, is relational and situational (Bird-David 1999). Studies of kinship, personhood and animism have since been newly aligned. Among others, Marshall Sahlins (2013) now calls for disengaging the entangled studies of kinship and personhood and, instead, for approaching kinship as being about "the mutuality of being", "the participation of kin in each other's lives". Viveiros de Castro (2009) shows how the study of animism can open new ways for approaching kinship. My proposal, which is part of a larger project that I briefly introduce in a moment, resonates with these approaches. In it, I try to rethink animism through kinship; in particular, here, suggesting that "relatives" (in the plural) is a more productive concept than "the person" for exploring huntergatherers' animistic cosmos. My analytical platform for making this proposal is a broad argument that I develop in an ethnographic book (2017a, also see 2017b, 2017c) about the distortive effect of what I call the scale-blind regime in the anthropology of tinyscale hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities. By "scale-blind" I refer to ethnographic and comparative analysis which overlooks, if not obscures, the population size of hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities, as well as the modes of plural life their size potentiates, and their horizons of imagination. A central premise in this larger project is that scale/ing is something that people do and so, in Bruno Latour's words, we should explore how and what "actors achieve by scaling, spacing and contextualizing each other"
Sharing space and selves among Nayaka people in South India. Image taken and processed by D.E. Fr... more Sharing space and selves among Nayaka people in South India. Image taken and processed by D.E. Friesem and N. Lavi. Edited for the Institute by James Barrett (Series Editor). This book was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme (7FP), TropicMicroArch 623293 Project (http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/187754_en.html). The book will be Open Access, thanks to FP7 post-grant Open Access (https://www.openaire.eu/postgrantoapilot). v Contents Contributors ix Figures xi Tables xi Why hunter-gatherers? Why sharing? About the book Innovative perspectives of sharing: chapters outline Concluding remarks Part I Intimacy, presence and shared-living Chapter 1 Where have all the kin gone? On hunter-gatherers' sharing, kinship and scale 15 Nurit Bird David The unscalability of kinship identities Enter individuals Kinship as a root metaphor Demand-sharing constitutes social relations Re-enter kinship, talk and presence Conclusions Chapter 2 Extending and limiting selves: a processual theory of sharing 25 Thomas Widlok What is wrong with evolutionary models of sharing? The problem of historical diversity The problem of outcome Extending the self Limiting the self The analytical purchase of the new theories of sharing The opportunity to request The opportunity to respond The opportunity to renounce Conclusions
Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb-shelters as an integrat... more Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb-shelters as an integrated room within every residential unit throughout the country, replacing neighbourhood underground bunkers and communal shelters located in the basement floor of apartment blocks. A secured residential space (popularly called mamad) , this space is commonly used as an ordinary room (a children room, extra bedroom, home office, etc.), one of the 3-5 rooms of the majority of apartments in Israel. Only during times of emergency, it is used by household members as a shelter. Based on fieldwork in Israel from January 2014 to January 2015, a period covering the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, we explore in this paper the blurring of distinction between emergency and routine as concepts and experiences involved in domesticating spaces of security in Israel.
In this chapter, I consider a fundamental problem weighing on the growing comparative research of... more In this chapter, I consider a fundamental problem weighing on the growing comparative research of children, in response to the growing call to redress their previous invisibility. I explore implicit biases inherent in using the English language concept "children" in cross-cultural research. This English language word has its cultural, historical, and ontological antecedents. I examine some of these biases, pitted against the ethnography of contemporary hunter-gatherers. I focus on the lived realities of children in these societies, and on the symbolic meanings of the indigenous concepts of them. Their cases, I argue, suggest that in some social contexts (not necessarily restricted to hunter-gatherers) children and parents are better studied and made visible as inseparable subjects and constructs. "Children" are better explored relationally, rather than as a separate class and population.
This article was originally published in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behaviora... more This article was originally published in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and providing a copy to your institution's administrator. All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution's website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier's
Social Analysis, 2018
Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a ... more Recent years in anthropology have seen a noticeable trend, moving from debates about theory to a concern with method. So while some generations ago we would tend to identify ourselves as anthropologists with reference to particular theoretical paradigms—for example, Marxism, (post-)structuralism, cognitivism, cultural materialism, interpretivism—these days our tendency is to align ourselves, often eclectically, with proposals conceived as methodological: entanglements, assemblages, ontologies, technologies of description, epistemic partnerships, problematizations, collaborative anthropology, the art of noticing, and so on.
Current Anthropology, 1996
Current Anthropology, 2012
![Research paper thumbnail of [Ph.D. Dissertation] Bird-David, N. (1983). Conjugal units and single persons: An analysis of the social system of the Naiken of the Nilgiris (South India); English; 266 pages. Supervised by Prof. Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge University.](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/40690377/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb-shelters as an integrat... more Since 1992 a law in Israel obliges building contractors to construct bomb-shelters as an integrated room within every residential unit throughout the country, replacing neighbourhood underground bunkers and communal shelters located in the basement floor of apartment blocks. A secured residential space (popularly called mamad), this space is commonly used as an ordinary room (a children room, extra bedroom, home office, etc.), one of the 3-5 rooms of the majority of apartments in Israel. Only during times of emergency, it is used by household members as a shelter. Based on fieldwork in Israel from January 2014 to January 2015, a period covering the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, we explore in this paper the blurring of distinction between emergency and routine as concepts and experiences involved in domesticating spaces of security in Israel.
Current Anthropology, 2017
Cross-culturally, tiny hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities refer to themselves by such terms a... more Cross-culturally, tiny hunter-gatherer-cultivator communities refer to themselves by such terms as “real people,” “humans,” and “kinspeople.” Anthropology has generally neglected their “we designations,” because its large-scale project is predicated on ethnonymic identifications. Ethnographers either assign these groups proper names or use the local terms as if they were proper names, leaving local identity categories understudied. Inspired by Benedict Anderson’s “styles” of imagining communities and the “ontological turn,” I argue that indigenous we designations reveal modes of “being many” unlike that expressed in the modern “nation.” The kin-based idiom used by the South Indian foragers that I consider in this article, in fact, signals a subversion of nation. Their mode of being many accommodates diverse members (including nonhumans) at the price of low scalability, whereas the national style assembles unlimited numbers of dispersed but similar members. Focusing on scale, scaling, and scalability, I question scholars’ inattention to locals’ self-determined horizons of concern when analyzing indigenous cultures and ontologies and to huge disparities in population size when comparing indigenous and Western societies. My case illustrates how scale-blind anthropology generally distorts understanding of tiny indigenous communities’ lifeways, ontologies, and political struggles.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015