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Dis/working with Diagrams
How Genealogies and Maps Obscure Nanoscale Worlds (a Hunter-Gatherer Case)
in Social Analysis
Author:
Nurit Bird-David
Nurit Bird-David
PhD, University of Cambridge, England nurit.birddavid@gmail.com
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Abstract
Standard diagrammatic tools in ethnographies, locational maps, and kinship trees are supposed to help make fieldwork and its findings intelligible to readers. This article explores how, to the contrary, they obscure locals’ lived worlds and the fieldwork process when they are used cross-culturally and cross-scalarly in studies of minuscule indigenous societies, anthropology's traditional study subject. I draw on my experience of producing and using these visuals, from fieldwork through to writing ethnography, in my work with foragers who live in South India in order to show the effect of these diagrammatic tools on our understanding of nanoscale communities and their intimate worlds.
Contributor Notes
Nurit Bird-David received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Haifa. She is the author of Us, Relatives: Scaling and Plural Life in a Forager World (2017), and dozens of her articles have appeared in leading journals. Her research interests include hunter-gatherers’ environmental perceptions and ontologies, shifting scales of practice and imagination, alternative notions of nation and community, neo-liberal notions of personhood, home, and security, and the new algorithmic-based ‘sharing economy’. E-mail: nurit.birddavid@gmail.com