Nurit Bird-David
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520293403
- eISBN:
- 9780520966680
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520293403.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
Anthropologists have long looked to animistic forager-cultivator cultures for insights into the spectrum of human lifeways. Yet they have largely failed to appreciate indigenous horizons of concern ...
More
Anthropologists have long looked to animistic forager-cultivator cultures for insights into the spectrum of human lifeways. Yet they have largely failed to appreciate indigenous horizons of concern and, in cross-cultural comparisons, to factor in enormous disparities in population size between these cultures and others. Us, Relatives examines how scalar blindness has limited our understanding of key issues in forager studies and distorted the insights these societies offer us. In particular, the book argues that contemporary anthropology’s scale-blind multicultural ethos unleashes the power of large-scale conceptual language—of persons, relations, and ethnic groups—into the study of indigenous peoples and eclipses local modes of living plurally that encompass humans and nonhumans through notions of kinship and shared humanity. Drawing on long-term research with a community of South Asian foragers and emphasizing scaling as a universal and variable human activity, Nurit Bird-David develops this argument through a scale-sensitive ethnography of these foragers’ lifeways and horizons. Through the idea of pluripresence, she reveals a mode of belonging that subverts the modern ontological touchstone of “imagined communities,” a mode that is not rooted in sameness among strangers but in diversity among relatives, whatever their form.Less
Anthropologists have long looked to animistic forager-cultivator cultures for insights into the spectrum of human lifeways. Yet they have largely failed to appreciate indigenous horizons of concern and, in cross-cultural comparisons, to factor in enormous disparities in population size between these cultures and others. Us, Relatives examines how scalar blindness has limited our understanding of key issues in forager studies and distorted the insights these societies offer us. In particular, the book argues that contemporary anthropology’s scale-blind multicultural ethos unleashes the power of large-scale conceptual language—of persons, relations, and ethnic groups—into the study of indigenous peoples and eclipses local modes of living plurally that encompass humans and nonhumans through notions of kinship and shared humanity. Drawing on long-term research with a community of South Asian foragers and emphasizing scaling as a universal and variable human activity, Nurit Bird-David develops this argument through a scale-sensitive ethnography of these foragers’ lifeways and horizons. Through the idea of pluripresence, she reveals a mode of belonging that subverts the modern ontological touchstone of “imagined communities,” a mode that is not rooted in sameness among strangers but in diversity among relatives, whatever their form.
Nurit Bird-David
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520293403
- eISBN:
- 9780520966680
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520293403.003.0011
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
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 ...
More
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.Less
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.
