PUBLICATIONS
BOOK
Bird-David, N. (2017). Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Abstract: 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.
Available for purchase at Amazon.com, University of California Press or download a partial PDF of the book here.
Articles and Chapters
Bird-David, N. (2021). What Do Kinship Terms Do?. Rhetoric and Social Relations: Dialectics of Bonding and Contestation, 8, 80.
Bird-David, N. (2020). A peer-to-peer connected cosmos: Beyond egalitarian/hierarchical hunter-gatherer societies. L'Homme, (3), 77-106. PDF
Bird-David, N. and M. Shapiro. (2019). Domesticating spaces of security in Israel. In: Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control, edited by Low, S. and M. Macguire. New York: NYU Press. pp 163-184. PDF
Bird-David, N. (2019). Dis/working with Diagrams: How Genealogies and Maps Obscure Nanoscale Worlds (a Hunter-Gatherer Case). Social Analysis, 63(4), 43-62. PDF
Bird-David, N. (2019). Kinship and scale. Hunter Gatherer Research, 4, 177-192. PDF
Bird-David, N. (2019). Where have all the kin gone? On hunter-gatherers’ sharing, kinship and scale. In Towards a Broader View of Hunter Gatherer Sharing, eds. Lavi, N. and Friesem, D.E. McDonald Institute Monograph Series, Cambridge. pp. 15-24. PDF
Bird-David, N. (2018). Persons or relatives?: Animistic scales of practice and imagination. In Rethinking Relations and Animism. Routledge. pp. 25-34. PDF
Bird-David, N. (2018). Scalar paradox and the role of analysis, contribution to Forum: What is Analysis? Between Theory, Ethnography and Method. Social Analysis 62(1): 12-14. PDF
Bird-David, N. (2018). Size matters! The scalability of modern hunter-gatherer animism. Quaternary International 464(A):305-314. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2017). Before nation: Scale-blind Anthropology and foragers’ worlds of Relatives. Current Anthropology 58(2):209-226. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. and M. Shapiro. (2016). Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 0(0):1-19. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2015). Modern biases, hunter-gatherers' children: A relational perspective for making children visible in other cultural terms. In The Archaeological Study of Childhood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Archaeological Enigma. Güner Coşkunsu ed. New-York: SUNY Press. pp. 91-103. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2014). The social life of an ethnonym: The "Kattu Nayaka" of South India (Special issue: The Bison and the Horn: Indigeneity, Performance, and the State of India). Asian Ethnology 73(1):139-153. Abstract PDF
Naveh, D. and N. Bird-David. (2014). How persons become things: Shifts in hunter-gatherer Nayaka relational epistemology and ontology with the adoption of agriculture and animal husbandry. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20:74-92. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. and N. Lavi. (2014). At home under development: A housing project for the hunter-gatherers Nayaka of the Nilgiris. The Eastern Anthropologist 67(3-4):401-426. Abstract PDF
Naveh, D. and Bird-David, N. (2013). On Animisms, conservation and Immediacy. In A handbook on Contemporary Animism. Harvey, G. ed. Durham: Acumen Publishing, pp. 27-37. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. and T. Israeli. (2010). A Moment Dead, a Moment Alive: How a Situational Personhood Emerges in the Vegetative State in an Israeli Hospital Unit. American Anthropologist 112(1):54-65. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2009). Indigenous architecture and relational senses of personhood: A cultural reading of changing dwelling styles among forest-dwelling foragers. Design principles & practices: An international journal 3(5):203-210. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. and A. Darr. (2009). Commodity, gift and the mass-gift: On gift-commodity hybrids in advanced mass consumption cultures. Economy and Society 38(2):304-325. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. and A. Darr. (2009). Mass-gifts: On gifts in advanced capitalist markets. In Economic Persuations. Studies in Rhetoric and Culture. Gudeman, S. ed. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 118-134. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. and D. Naveh. (2008). Relational epistemology, immediacy, and conservation: Or, what do the Nayaka try to conserve? Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 2(1):55-73. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2008). Feeding Nayaka children and English readers: A bifocal ethnography of parental feeding in “The Giving Environment”. Anthropological Quarterly 81(3):523-550. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2006). Animistic epistemology: Why some hunter-gatherers do not depict animals. Ethnos 71(1):33-50. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2005).Studying children in 'hunter-gatherer' societies: Reflections from a Nayaka perspective. In Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods. Hewlett B. S. and E. Lamb eds. New York: Aldine, pp. 92-105. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2005). The property of sharing: Western analytical notions, Nayaka contexts. In Property and Equality. Vol 1 Ritualization, Sharing, Egalitarianism. Widlok, T. and T. Wolde eds. Oxford: Bergham, pp. 201-216. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2004). No past, no present: A critical-Nayaka perspective on cultural remembering. American Ethnologist 31(3):406-421. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (2004). Illness-images and joined beings: A critical-Nayaka perspective on intercorporeality. Social Anthropology 12(3):325-339. Abstract PDF
Weinstein-Evron, M. Kaufman, D. and N. Bird-David (2001). Rolling stones: Basalt implements as evidence for trade/exchange in the Levantine Epipaleolithic. Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Societies 31:25-42. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1999). "Animism" revisited: Personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology 40s:S67-S91. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1999). Research among Nayaka of the Wynaad, South India. In Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Lee, R. and R. Daly eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257-260. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1998 Hebrew [1990]). The giving environment: Another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-hunters. In: Intercultural Experience: A Reader in Anthropology, edited by Shoked, M. and S. Deshen. Tel-Aviv: Shoken, pp. 174-181 (Hebrew). PDF
Bird-David, N. (1997). Economies: A cultural-economic perspective. International Social Science Journal 154:463-475. PDF
Bird-David, N. (1996). Puja, or sharing with the gods? On ritualized possession among Nayaka of South India. Eastern Anthropologist 49(3-4):259-275. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1995). Hunter-gatherer’s research and cultural diversity. In Cultural Diversity among Twentieth-Century Foragers. Kent, S. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 297-304. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1995). Hunter-gatherers kinship organization: Implicit roles and rules. In Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence. Goody, E. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 68-84. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1994). Sociality and immediacy: Or, past and present conversations on bands. Man, (N.S., renamed Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) 29(3):583-603. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1994). The Nilgiri tribal systems: A view from below. Modern Asian Studies 28(2):339-355. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1993 Hebrew). Equality and liberty in a hunting and gathering society. In Equality and Its Limits. Unit 12, in The Kibbutz Society: Patterns of Change and Continuity. Ben-Rafael, E. ed. Open University. PDF
Bird-David, N. (1993). Tribal metaphorization of human-nature relatedness: A comparative analysis. In Anthropological Perspectives on Environmentalism. Milton, K. ed. Association of Social Anthropologists Monograph Series. London: Rutledge, pp. 112-125. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1992). Beyond "The Original Affluent Society": A culturalist reformulation. Current Anthropology 33(1):25-47. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1992). Beyond "the hunting and gathering mode of subsistence": Culture-sensitive observations on the Nayaka and other modern hunter-gatherers. Man, New Series (renamed Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) 27(1):19-44. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1990). The giving environment: Another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-hunters. Current Anthropology 31(2):189-196. PDF
Bird-David, N. (1989). An introduction to the study of the Naiken: The people and the ethnographic myth. In Blue Mountains: The Ethnography and Biography of a South Indian Region. Hockings, P. ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 249-281. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1988). Hunter-gatherers and other people. In Hunter and Gatherers I: History, Evolution and Social Change. Ingold, T. Woodburn, J. and D. Riches eds. Oxford: Berg, pp. 17-31. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1987). The Kurumbas of the Nilgiris: An ethnographic myth? Modern Asian Studies 21:173-189. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1987). Single persons and social cohesion in a hunter-gatherer society. In Dimensions of Social Life: Essays in Honor of David G. Mandelbaum. Hockings, P. ed. Berlin: Mouton, pp. 151-165. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1983). Wage-gathering: Socio-economic change and the case of the Naiken of South India. In Rural South Asia: Linkages, Changes and Development. Robb, P. ed. London: Curzon Press for S.O.A.S., pp. 57-86. Abstract PDF
Bird-David, N. (1982). "Inside” and “outside” in kinship usage: The hunter-gatherer Naiken of South India. Cambridge Anthropology 7(1-2):47-57. Abstract PDF
Holbraad, M., Green, S., Corsín Jiménez, A., Das, V., Bird-David, N., Kohn, E., Hage, G., Bear, L., Knox, H., & Kapferer, B. (2018). What is analysis? Social Analysis, 62(1), 1-30. Abstract PDF