Nurit Bird-David

Commodity, gift and mass-gift: on gift–commodity hybrids in advanced mass consumption cultures

Abstract While ‘gifts’ and ‘commodities’ as theoretically distinct forms of circulation are central to economic sociology and anthropology, we argue that in practice they are often hybridized. Inspired by Bruno Latours work, we first describe the use in supermarkets and chain stores of one hybrid category, the mass-gift, which is neither a commodity nor a gift. Through our empirical investigation of sales interactions we critically describe the emergence of a vibrant mass-gift economy in which the meaning of ‘gifts’ and ‘commodities’ as well as their hybrid forms is infused with ambiguity which is strategically played out by agentive social actors throughout the sales process. We suggest going beyond depictions of mass-gifting as merely a calculative strategy for promoting sales. Instead, we illustrate how mass-gifting establishes a relational space in which actors can negotiate the ambivalence of the cultural script of the ‘gift’: they can re-qualify the seller–buyer relationship as a socially binding one; and they can use the ambiguity infused into the notion of the mass-gift to express economic might and generate symbolic as well as material gains.

Feeding Nayaka Children and English Readers: A Bifocal Ethnography of Parental Feeding in "The Giving Environment"

In this article I examine relational child feeding in the Nayaka forest-world and problematize the concept of “nurturing” which interferes with understanding it. Several essentialist and individualist antecedents of “nurturing,” I suggest, conflate child feeding with a one-way, top-down transfer of food; with training, controlling and loving the children; and with rearing them to grow up and separate from their parents. This conflation obscures the Nayaka relational senses which are embedded in an ontology of “living together” and in which child feeding is framed as an instance of sharing between coevals who remain closely related throughout their lives. As well as offering a corrective to “The Giving Environment” (), this article contributes a relational perspective to the study of children among forest-dweller hunter-gatherers. Methodologically, a case is made in the article for “bifocal ethnography” that pays attention not only to the subjects of the study but also—and ethnographically, as well— to selected key notions in the language in which the ethnography is written as a means of limiting readers’ own inherent ontological biases and “fine-tuning” the ethnography.

Animistic epistemology: Why do some hunter-gatherers not depict animals?

Abstract This paper addresses the question of why certain hunter-gatherers (of the ‘immediate-return’ type in Woodburns terms) have little interest in visual art. Their lack of interest is striking in comparison with the elaborate traditions of painting and carving in Australia and the circumpolar North, which Ingold (2000) compares, showing that they correspond to totemic and animic ontologies respectively. The ‘immediate-return’ class of hunter-gatherers is examined in relation to Ingolds typology, using the Nayaka of South India as a specific example. It is argued that their lack of interest in depictions corresponds to an ontology which is inseparable from their animistic epistemology (Bird-David 1999). This ontology differs from Ingolds animic and totemic types and can be added to his scheme.

How persons become things: economic and epistemological changes among Nayaka hunter‐gatherers

The ontologies and epistemologies of hunter-gatherers have attracted growing attention in recent years as these people are undergoing changes. We examine these changes, focusing on one particular case based on our studies of the South Indian Nayaka; they have recently added cultivation and animal husbandry to their partially ongoing hunting and gathering life-style. Resisting analysis based on an assumed forest/domesticated dichotomy, we show that forest and domesticated animals and plants are both regarded as sentient co-dwellers in some cases, and as objects in others, depending not on what they are in essence, or where they are, but on when, by whom, and for what purpose they are approached. We argue that pockets of utilitarian framing emerge within the continuing relational epistemology of the Nayaka along with a growing departure from immediacy in the production-consumption nexus. In these pockets, the vivid presence of animals and plants is concealed, and they no longer appear as persons but as things.

Routinergency: Domestic securitization in contemporary Israel:

The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ‘routinergency’: the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship.

Hunting and Gathering Societies: Anthropology

The perspectives taken on the contemporary peoples referred to by this term have changed considerably since its early uses in the eighteenth century. I describe its evolving meanings, and then several clusters of features partially shared by these peoples, including sharing, perceptions of the environment, animism, relational knowledge, and relational ontologies. Though their cases are rare, they remain pivotal in modern thought as our ultimate ‘Other’ and our ultimate ‘Us.’