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= Nurit Bird-David =

Nurit Bird-David is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Haifa.

She is best known for her study of the Nayaka hunter-gatherers in South India, from which she has launched several comparative analyses of hunter-gatherer perspectives, behaviors, and economics that have proved influential beyond hunter-gatherer studies.

Background
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). 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). 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. Bird-David was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge (Smuts Institute for Commonwealth Studies, 1991), at Harvard University (2008) and at the University College London (2017).

Contribution
Bird-David’s research focuses on three main areas. The first is the cultural worlds of contemporary hunting and gathering people. These groups approach the natural environment as a community of related humans and nonhumans. Bird-David argues that their animistic approach embodies a mode of knowing and being in the world that can be called a “relational epistemology”. In turn, this mode fosters an intimate understanding of the environment and shapes manifold aspects of their cultures, such as affluent economies, communication with ancestors, illness-healing practices, and parent-child relations. This research draws on four decades of ethnographic fieldwork with the Nayaka in South India. Bird-David began working with them in 1978, a decade before governmental and nongovernmental agents reached them, and have since continued to study their changing lifeways alongside her students, Daniel Naveh and Noa Lavi.

Bird-David’s second research area is indigenous nanoscale societies, taking hunter-gatherers as a case in point. She points out how Anthropology has long neglected group size, horizons of concerns, and scalability in describing and explaining the worlds of small-scale indigenous societies. In her research she explores the distinctive phenomenological and cultural possibilities of living in minuscule hunter-gatherer societies. Among other things, it shows an indigenous mode of communality that, on the one hand, is open to a diversity of human and nonhuman beings, yet, on the other hand, has limited scalability. Bird-David explores this concept in her book – ‘Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World’ (published in 2017 by California University Press), and in several articles, in part, by comparing small-scale, indigenous alternatives to modern perceptions of the individual, community, society generally, and the nation-society especially.

Her third, and more recent research area focuses on the cultures of home in the neoliberal and digital age. Extending the notions of intimate communal structures and scalability developed in her previous research, she draws on three ethnographic projects: a) studying Israeli families who privately design and build their homes, b) investigating everyday uses of the “secured room [bunker]” in Israeli private dwellings, and (c) a cross-cultural study of Airbnb home-sharing with strangers. In this research Bird-David examines the relation between digitally-enabled huge scales of connectivity to unfold cultures of home life and intimate groups.

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

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

Selected bibliography
Bird-David, Nurit. 1990. The giving environment: Another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-hunters. Current Anthropology 31(2):189-196.

Bird-David, Nurit. 1992. Beyond “the original affluent society”: A culturalist reformulation. Current Anthropology 33 (1):25-47.

Bird-David, Nurit. 1999. “Animism” revisited: Personhood, environment and relational epistemology, Current Anthropology 40s: S67-S91.

Bird-David, Nurit. 2005. The property of sharing: Western analytical notions, Nayaka contexts. In ''Property and Equality. Vol 1 Ritualization, Sharing, Egalitarianism''. Widlok, T. and T. Wolde eds. Oxford: Bergham, pp. 201-216.

Bird-David, Nurit. 2015. Modern biases, hunter-gatherers' children: A relational perspective In: The Archaeological Study of Childhood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Archaeological Enigma. Güner Coşkunsu, Ed. SUNY Press, Albany, NY/U.S.A.

Bird-David, Nurit. 2017. Before nation: Scale-blind Anthropology and foragers’ worlds of Relatives. Current Anthropology 58(2): 209-226.

Bird-David, Nurit. 2017. Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bird-David, Nurit. 2018. Size matters! The scalability of modern hunter-gatherer animism. Quaternary International 464: 305-314.