12 Facts About Nurit Bird-David

Nurit Bird-David is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel.

Nurit Bird-David is best known for her study of the Nayaka hunter-gatherers in South India, 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.

Nurit Bird-David has been a research fellow at New Hall, Cambridge.

Nurit Bird-David was appointed as a lecturer in sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University and then moved in 1994 to Haifa University.

Nurit Bird-David became associate professor in 2008, and full professor in 2017.

Nurit Bird-David was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, at Harvard University and at University College London.

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

Nurit 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.

Nurit Bird-David is most well-known for her work on animism and more-than-human relations of contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples.

Nurit Bird-David's works have since been highly cited and referenced in studies discussing animism, hunter-gatherer cultural life, and more-than-human perceptions of the environment.

Nurit Bird-David is often credited as being among the initiators of the anthropological re-visitation of animism, 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 Nurit Bird-David received the award of life achievement by the International Society for Hunter Gatherer Research.