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Contemporary multiculturalist anthropology overlooks huge disparities in population size as well as ethnographic actors’ own scaling of their practices and imaginations. Arguing that scale-blindness limits our understanding of key issues in forager studies and distorts the insights these societies offer us, the introduction develops a theoretical framework for integrating scaling into their analysis. Drawing from studies of kinship, animism, multiscalar anthropology, imagined communities, and notions of being-with, it develops the idea of pluripresence. This theoretical approach is applied in the volume to the ethnography of a South Asian foraging people known as Nayaka, whom the author has studied since the late 1970s. They are introduced as an exemplar of hunter-gatherer peoples, who are among the tiniest communities studied by ethnographers, and as one of many indigenous peoples who have no ethnonyms for themselves and, instead, use terms of kinship and shared humanity as their we-designations. Their plural modes especially are eclipsed by the scale-blind regime, which, in fact, is large-scale inflected since the ethnonyms and other representational conventions (e.g., maps) that are indispensable in anthropology’s large-scale project embody modern imaginations of communities. The introduction explains the volume’s strategy for studying this tiny community.

Theories of indigenous ontologies have depicted forager-cultivator worlds populated by human and nonhuman persons or even by societies of humans and nonhumans, ignoring the tiny-scale context of indigenous life. The idea of multiple unispecies societies is especially incongruent with tropical forest ecosystems (especially the Amazonian), where, rather than sameness, diversity of beings is striking at any particular locale. Through ethnography of spirit possession (during the “big animistic visit”) combined with glimpses into myths, interspecies kinship, and ad hoc approach to classification, this chapter depicts the foragers’ heterogeneous (human and nonhuman) community of being and the being-with instead of being like that is its ontological basis.

Foragers’ relations with others have been explored in terms of boundaries, intergroup relations, and othering, in studies that have paid little or no attention to the tiny-scale context of their plural life and their own imaginations of communities. This chapter explores the “edges” of a forager community and compares their and their nonforager neighbors’ respective concepts of groupness. The ethnography spans the recent entry of the word boundary into local discourse, and intermarriages and close friendships with distant relatives and with migrants (plantation workers who have settled in the foragers’ home). The analysis reveals the foragers’ inclusion of migrants with whom they closely associate as “us, relatives” and the migrants’ collectivization of their forager associates as Naiken people and themselves, contrastively, as non-Naiken.

Although in many tiny-scale forager-cultivator societies, residential cores comprise intermarried siblings, this pattern tends to remain invisible in ethnography. This chapter explores general causes of this ethnographic neglect (e.g., a large-scale-biased register that sees a hamlet’s members as residents and breaks a population down in terms of gender and age). It provides scale-sensitive ethnography of locals’ notions of a “good marriage,” the local scarcity of spouses, and the sib developmental cycle, with emphasis on visiting one’s married siblings; all aspects shed light on the sibling residential cores. Claude Lévi-Strauss famously suggested that the development of human society is predicated on men trading sisters for wives, instantiating exchange logic and alliance between groups. This ethnography illustrates a far different pattern: that of sequential sibling marriages that shape and reshape the contours of the forager group.

The foragers’ tiny-scale context has been largely overlooked in discussions of foragers’ gendered division of labor, child-care, and alloparenting. Ethnography spanning ritual, foraging pursuits, narratives of conjugal attachment, child-care practices, and notions of growing up reveals the cultural salience of conjugal bipresence and children orbiting conjugal nuclei. Cautioning against cross-scalar slippages, this chapter shows locals’ primary concern to be not with the parent-child attachment but with the spousal attachment, and it reveals a cultural register in which children’s departure from their parents at a young age does not index individual autonomy as the essence of growing up but, to the contrary, the development of budi (~ the skills of living with diverse others).

This interlude reflects on the anthropologist’s effort to collect information about the fauna and flora utilized by forager-cultivator people. It relates the author’s experience of foragers’ reluctance to list what they gather and their inconsistent naming of those species (not unlike other Asian foragers). It also considers the botanists to whom she turns for taxonomic identifications and compares the foragers’ and the botanists’ respective scales of concern.

In recent years, India has seen a viral increase in the number of state-recognized Kattunayaka, the official name of the foragers at the heart of this ethnography. Their ethnonym is included in the Constitution list of “Scheduled Tribes” guiding India’s distributive justice system. Ethnography of claims of Kattunayaka identity shows the political fallout from cross-scalar spillage in understanding plural life. This chapter calls attention to scalar blindness in broader discussions of indigeneity and multiculturalism, with emphasis on India. It elucidates the broader relevance of an anthropological distinction that emerges from the book’s overall ethnography: a contrast between a pluripresent and an imagined community.

The epilogue suggests that scale-blind multicultural anthropology, though well-meaning, may have blown forager-cultivator sociocultural structures up to monstrous proportions, beyond their innate scalability and, so, imbuing them with a radical alterity. In particular, it has eclipsed their modes of living plurally with humans and nonhumans, modes potentiated by their tiny scale, which allows participation of vivid members in one another’s lives. Their modes of belonging subvert the modern imagination of communities as “nations,” with its touchstone sameness of members, irrespective of their number or location. Their modes, and the idea of pluripresence developed to analyze them, have analytical purchase beyond the study of forager-cultivators themselves, while the cultures of such peoples show these modes at their most fully elaborated. These modes offer productive analytical entrée into plural structures, present, past and future; structures that are nested within, challenge, and resist the large-scale national mode; structures that preexisted and may outlive the modern imagination of communities as nations. And, as a practical matter, a multiscalar appreciation of alternative modes of imagining community can assist foragers’ political struggles in the contemporary world.

The problem of naming forager-cultivator peoples is well-known. They call themselves by terms of kinship and shared humanity, but other people give them a variety of confusing and often derogatory names. Yet ethnonyms underpin ethnographic writing and cross-cultural comparison. This interlude relates the author’s experience of choosing an ethnonym for her study group, whose members call themselves sonta (us, relatives). It shows the appellatory confusion arising in areas with a rich colonial history, like the Nilgiris, where generations of travelers, administrators, and scholars have tried to ethnically map scattered forest groups, ignoring local population sizes and locals’ imaginations of their communities.

This interlude focuses on kinship diagrams. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork experience, it shows the scalar distortion inhering in construction of these “maps” to depict tiny-scale indigenous societies, communities of relatives: partial kinship diagrams (event-focused or otherwise circumscribed) conceal the encompassing community whose members are all close kin, and large inclusive family trees highlight shared ancestors rather than the commensal basis of the community.

The Western philosophical “dwelling-in-the-world” perspective carries into hunter-gatherer studies distortive large-scale biases, and the ecological-anthropological perspective registers foragers’ dwellings as temporary huts. Aligning with studies of homes and houses as cultural sites, this chapter examines the forager hamlet as the physical setting and the mind setting of everyday life. Ethnography spanning the foragers’ vernacular architecture, domestic routines (especially sleeping and storage), (dis)order in the hamlet, material belongings, and semantics of dwelling(s) reveals the value accorded diversity, togetherness, and undivided habitus as well as locals’ conceptions of existence as pregiven being-with others and of plurality as encompassing diverse-and-related beings.

Hunter-gatherers’ mobility, nomadism, and travel are often discussed with emphasis on spatiality. This chapter, instead, dwells on locals’ notions and praxis of visiting, training attention on the interpersonal vector and the achievement of pluripresence. Scale-sensitive ethnography is provided of everyday visiting and of full attendance of everyone in the multisited community at births and deaths. The ethnography shows locals’ ideas of birthing a “relative” rather than a “new individual” and of the dead joining invisible members of the local community. It shows their project and ideal: a community subsisting in each member’s participation in the life of everyone else.

This interlude trains attention on demographic surveys of tiny-scale indigenous communities through terms drawn from large-scale societies (e.g., name, gender, age, place of residence). This convention, it suggests, distorts locals’ imaginations of their communities in kinship terms, abstracting relatives from the shifting pluralities within which they live and casting them as individuals classifiable in large-scale terms.