ABOUT

Nurit Bird-David studied economics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA cum laude 1975) and social anthropology at Cambridge University, Trinity College (PhD 1983). She has been a research fellow at New Hall, Cambridge; a visiting scholar at Harvard University; and a visiting professor at University College London. Bird-David is past president of the Israeli Anthropological Association, and recipient of the International Society of Hunters and Gatherers Research's life achievement award. In addition to numerous articles in international scholarly journals, she is the author of Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World. California University Press, 2017. 

Research interests. My research has focused on three main areas. The first is the cultural worlds of contemporary hunting and gathering people. These groups approach the natural environment as a community of related humans and nonhumans. I argue that their animistic approach embodies a mode of knowing and being in the world that can be called a “relational epistemology”. In turn, this mode fosters an intimate understanding of the environment and shapes manifold aspects of their cultures, such as affluent economies, communication with ancestors, healing illnesses, and parent-child relations. The research draws on ethnographic fieldwork with foraging people living in the forests of South India, known as Nayaka (or Kattunayaka, ‘the forest Nayaka’). I began working with them in 1978, a decade before governmental and nongovernmental agents reached them, and have since continued to study their changing lifeways alongside my students, Dr. Daniel Naveh and Noa Lavi.

My second research area is indigenous nanoscale societies, taking hunter-gatherers as a case in point. Anthropology has long neglected group size, horizons of concerns, and scalability in describing and explaining the worlds of small-scale indigenous societies. This research seeks to explore the distinctive phenomenological and cultural possibilities of living in minuscule hunter-gatherer societies. Among other things, it shows an indigenous mode of communality that, on the one hand, is open to a diversity of human and nonhuman beings, yet, on the other hand, has a limited scalability. I explore this concept in my book and in several articles, in part, by comparing small-scale, indigenous alternatives to modern perceptions of the individual, community, society generally, and the nation-society especially. 

My third, new, research area focuses on the cultures of home in the neoliberal and digital age. Extending the notions of intimate communal structures and scalability developed in my previous research, the new direction draws on three ethnographic projects: a) studying Israeli families who privately design and build their homes, b) investigating everyday uses of the “secured room [bunker]” in Israeli private dwellings, and (c) a cross-cultural study of Airbnb home-sharing with strangers. The research is driven by my interest in the relation between digitally-enabled huge scales of connectivity and unfolding cultures of home life and intimate groups.