Introduction

Contemporary multiculturalist anthropology overlooks huge disparities in population size as well as ethnographic actors’ own scaling of their practices and imaginations. Arguing that scale-blindness limits our understanding of key issues in forager studies and distorts the insights these societies offer us, the introduction develops a theoretical framework for integrating scaling into their analysis. Drawing from studies of kinship, animism, multiscalar anthropology, imagined communities, and notions of being-with, it develops the idea of pluripresence. This theoretical approach is applied in the volume to the ethnography of a South Asian foraging people known as Nayaka, whom the author has studied since the late 1970s. They are introduced as an exemplar of hunter-gatherer peoples, who are among the tiniest communities studied by ethnographers, and as one of many indigenous peoples who have no ethnonyms for themselves and, instead, use terms of kinship and shared humanity as their we-designations. Their plural modes especially are eclipsed by the scale-blind regime, which, in fact, is large-scale inflected since the ethnonyms and other representational conventions (e.g., maps) that are indispensable in anthropology’s large-scale project embody modern imaginations of communities. The introduction explains the volume’s strategy for studying this tiny community.