Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World (Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity)

Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity

by Nurit Bird-David

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.

Genres: Anthropology

292 pages, Paperback

Published February 14, 2017

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A profound book of navel gazing. Latin terms and what this and that academic has said. The observations seem to be there just to fit the author's narrative.

[Gyrus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, essential for understanding hunter-gatherer society. My full review: https://dreamflesh.com/review/book/us...