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Nurit Bird-David

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Nurit Bird-David
Born (1951-09-29) 29 September 1951 (age 73)
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
Academic work
DisciplineCultural anthropology
Main interestshunter-gatherers, Animism, cultures of home making and intimacy, micro-scale societies, relational epistomology
Websitehttps://sites.google.com/soc.haifa.ac.il/bird-david/

Nurit Bird-David (Template:Lang-he; born 29 September 1951) is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel.[1][2] She is best known for her study of the Nayaka hunter-gatherers in South India,[3] upon which she based much of her writings on animism, relational epistemology, and indigenous small-scale communities, and which later inspired additional fieldwork and insights on home-making in contemporary industrial societies, and the theoretical concept of scale in anthropology and other social sciences.

Biography

Bird-David studied economics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA cum laude 1975) and social anthropology at Cambridge University, Trinity College (PhD 1983).[3] Her doctoral work was conducted with the Nayaka people in South India, studying their social system. Bird-David has been a research fellow at New Hall, Cambridge (1985-1987).[4] She was appointed as a lecturer in sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University (1987-1995) and then moved in 1994 to Haifa University. She became associate professor in 2008, and full professor in 2017. She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge (Smuts Institute for Commonwealth Studies, 1991), at Harvard University (2008) and at University College London (2017).

Bird-David is a member of the Advisory Board of the World Council of Anthropological Associations.[5]

Much of her work is based on her early ethnographic fieldwork on the Nayaka. Bird-David began working with them in 1978, a decade before governmental and nongovernmental agents reached them, and has since continued to study their changing lifeways for four decades.[6]

Bird-David is most well-known for her work on animism and more-than-human relations of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples. Studying the Nayaka, she noted their approach to the natural environment as a community of related humans and nonhumans. Bird-David argued that this animistic approach embodies a mode of knowing and being in the world that can be called a “relational epistemology”.[7] In turn, she claimed that this mode fosters an intimate understanding of the environment[8] and shapes manifold aspects of hunter-gatherer cultures, such as affluent economies,[9] sharing,[10] communication with ancestors, illness-healing practices, and parent-child relations.[11] Her works have since been highly cited and referenced in studies discussing animism, hunter-gatherer cultural life, and more-than-human perceptions of the environment.[12][13][14] She is often credited as being among the initiators of the anthropological re-visitation of animism,[15][16] leading to a new academic discourse on human and non-human relations, and standing at the root of the ontological turn in anthropology.

In 2018 Bird-David received the award of life achievement by the International Society for Hunter Gatherer Research (ISHGR).

Bird-David's experience with hunter-gatherers led her to consider other cases of indigenous small-scale societies, particularly the significance of the concept of scale in anthropological theory. Ethnographically describing the distinctive phenomenological and cultural experiences of life in minuscule hunter-gatherer societies, she argues that Anthropology has long neglected group size, horizons of concerns, and scalability in describing and explaining such small-scale worlds and comparing them to larger-scale societies (especially global society and nation-states).[17][6][18]

Bird-David's interest in small-scale communities, scale, and perceptions of the environment, has led her to later study cultures of home in the neoliberal and digital age.[3] Extending the notions of intimate communal structures and scalability developed in her previous research, she studied home-construction and home-design practices in Israeli society, and is currently conducting a cross-cultural study of Airbnb home-sharing with strangers. In these projects Bird-David examines the relation between digitally-enabled huge scales of connectivity, and small-scale cultures of home and daily living.

References

  1. ^ "Website of the Department of Anthropology at Haifa University".
  2. ^ "Nurit Bird-David | University of Haifa - Academia.edu". haifa.academia.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-04.
  3. ^ a b c "About Nurit Bird-David, from the International Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS) website".
  4. ^ "Nurit Bird-David | Radical Anthropology Group". radicalanthropologygroup.org. Retrieved 2019-11-04.
  5. ^ "International Society for Hunter Gatherer Research » Home". ishgr.org. Retrieved 2019-10-15.
  6. ^ a b Bird-David, Nurit (2017). Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  7. ^ Bird-David, Nurit (1999). ""Animism" revisited: personhood, environment, and relational epistemology". Current Anthropology. 40(S1): pp.S67–S91.
  8. ^ Bird-David, Nurit (1990). "The giving environment: another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-hunters". Current Anthropology. 31 (2): 189–196. doi:10.1086/203825.
  9. ^ Bird-David, Nurit (1992). "Beyond" The Original Affluent Society": A Culturalist Reformulation". Current Anthropology. 33 (1): 25–47. doi:10.1086/204029.
  10. ^ Bird-David, Nurit (2005). "The property of sharing: Western analytical notions, Nayaka contexts". In Widlok, T. and T. Wolde (ed.). Property and Equality. Vol 1 Ritualization, Sharing, Egalitarianism. Oxford: Bergham. pp. 201–216.
  11. ^ Bird-David, Nurit (2015). "Modern biases, hunter-gatherers' children: A relational perspective". In Güner, Coşkunsu (ed.). The Archaeological Study of Childhood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Archaeological Enigma. SUNNY press, Albany, US.
  12. ^ Ingold, Tim (2002). The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge. p. 47.
  13. ^ Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2004). "Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies". Common Knowledge. 1 (3): 463–484.
  14. ^ Descola, Philippe. Beyond nature and culture. University of Chicago Press. p. 250.
  15. ^ Harvey, Graham (2005). Animism: Respecting the living world. Wakefield Press.
  16. ^ Harvey, Graham (2019). "Animism and ecology: Participating in the world community". The Ecological Citizen. 3: 79–84.
  17. ^ Bird-David, Nurit (2017). "Before nation: Scale-blind anthropology and foragers' worlds of relatives". Current Anthropology. 58 (2): 209–226. doi:10.1086/691051.
  18. ^ Bird-David, Nurit. 2018. Size matters! The scalability of modern hunter-gatherer animism. Quaternary International 464: 305-314.
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