
Us, Relatives
Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World
Nurit Bird-David(Author)
University of California Press
1st Edition
Published on 14. February 2017
Book
Hardback
296 pages
978-0-520-29340-3 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Series
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
14 b-w, 4 maps, 4 tables
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-520-29340-3 (9780520293403)
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Schweitzer Classification
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Book
02/2017
1st Edition
University of California Press
€37.14
Shipment within 10-20 days

E-Book
02/2017
1st Edition
University of California Press
€33.99
Available for download
Person
Nurit Bird-David is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Haifa and the author of numerous articles on hunter-gatherer lifeways.
Content
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PROLOGUE: ONE OF US INTRODUCTION: SCALAR BLINDNESS AND FORAGER WORLDS DOWNSCALE 1. MAPS OF HOME 1. AT HOME: SETTING AND MIND SETTING DOWNSCALE 2. CENSUS OF RELATIVES 2. LIVING PLURALLY: MOBILITY AND VISITING DOWNSCALE 3. TREE OF RELATIVES 3. THE SIB MATRIX: DYADIC AND SEQUENTIAL LOGIC 4. COUPLES AND CHILDREN: GENDER, CAREGIVING, AND FORAGING TOGETHER DOWNSCALE 4. TAXONOMY OF NONHUMAN RELATIVES 5. NONHUMAN KIN: UNISPECIES SOCIETIES AND PLURAL COMMUNITIES DOWNSCALE 5. FAMILY AND ETHNONYM 6. A CONTINUUM OF RELATIVES: OTHERING AND US-ING 7. THE STATE'S FORAGERS: THE SCALE OF MULTICULTURALISM EPILOGUE: PLURIPRESENT AND IMAGINED COMMUNITIES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES REFERENCES INDEX