The State’s Foragers

In recent years, India has seen a viral increase in the number of state-recognized Kattunayaka, the official name of the foragers at the heart of this ethnography. Their ethnonym is included in the Constitution list of “Scheduled Tribes” guiding India’s distributive justice system. Ethnography of claims of Kattunayaka identity shows the political fallout from cross-scalar spillage in understanding plural life. This chapter calls attention to scalar blindness in broader discussions of indigeneity and multiculturalism, with emphasis on India. It elucidates the broader relevance of an anthropological distinction that emerges from the book’s overall ethnography: a contrast between a pluripresent and an imagined community.

A Continuum of Relatives

Foragers’ relations with others have been explored in terms of boundaries, intergroup relations, and othering, in studies that have paid little or no attention to the tiny-scale context of their plural life and their own imaginations of communities. This chapter explores the “edges” of a forager community and compares their and their nonforager neighbors’ respective concepts of groupness. The ethnography spans the recent entry of the word boundary into local discourse, and intermarriages and close friendships with distant relatives and with migrants (plantation workers who have settled in the foragers’ home). The analysis reveals the foragers’ inclusion of migrants with whom they closely associate as “us, relatives” and the migrants’ collectivization of their forager associates as Naiken people and themselves, contrastively, as non-Naiken.

The Sib Matrix

Although in many tiny-scale forager-cultivator societies, residential cores comprise intermarried siblings, this pattern tends to remain invisible in ethnography. This chapter explores general causes of this ethnographic neglect (e.g., a large-scale-biased register that sees a hamlet’s members as residents and breaks a population down in terms of gender and age). It provides scale-sensitive ethnography of locals’ notions of a “good marriage,” the local scarcity of spouses, and the sib developmental cycle, with emphasis on visiting one’s married siblings; all aspects shed light on the sibling residential cores. Claude Lévi-Strauss famously suggested that the development of human society is predicated on men trading sisters for wives, instantiating exchange logic and alliance between groups. This ethnography illustrates a far different pattern: that of sequential sibling marriages that shape and reshape the contours of the forager group.

Census of Relatives

This interlude trains attention on demographic surveys of tiny-scale indigenous communities through terms drawn from large-scale societies (e.g., name, gender, age, place of residence). This convention, it suggests, distorts locals’ imaginations of their communities in kinship terms, abstracting relatives from the shifting pluralities within which they live and casting them as individuals classifiable in large-scale terms.

Maps of Home

Focusing on the locational map, this interlude is the first of several in the book that examine standard representational tools employed in the ethnography of indigenous peoples. It suggests that the locational map serves instant recognition of where on the globe the study-people live but that that recognition is dependent on readers’ own spatial imaginations and involves colossal scalar distortion of local worlds. In particular, mapping tiny-scale worlds obscures the local importance not of where people live but with whom.

Epilogue

The epilogue suggests that scale-blind multicultural anthropology, though well-meaning, may have blown forager-cultivator sociocultural structures up to monstrous proportions, beyond their innate scalability and, so, imbuing them with a radical alterity. In particular, it has eclipsed their modes of living plurally with humans and nonhumans, modes potentiated by their tiny scale, which allows participation of vivid members in one another’s lives. Their modes of belonging subvert the modern imagination of communities as “nations,” with its touchstone sameness of members, irrespective of their number or location. Their modes, and the idea of pluripresence developed to analyze them, have analytical purchase beyond the study of forager-cultivators themselves, while the cultures of such peoples show these modes at their most fully elaborated. These modes offer productive analytical entrée into plural structures, present, past and future; structures that are nested within, challenge, and resist the large-scale national mode; structures that preexisted and may outlive the modern imagination of communities as nations. And, as a practical matter, a multiscalar appreciation of alternative modes of imagining community can assist foragers’ political struggles in the contemporary world.

Nonhuman Kin

Theories of indigenous ontologies have depicted forager-cultivator worlds populated by human and nonhuman persons or even by societies of humans and nonhumans, ignoring the tiny-scale context of indigenous life. The idea of multiple unispecies societies is especially incongruent with tropical forest ecosystems (especially the Amazonian), where, rather than sameness, diversity of beings is striking at any particular locale. Through ethnography of spirit possession (during the “big animistic visit”) combined with glimpses into myths, interspecies kinship, and ad hoc approach to classification, this chapter depicts the foragers’ heterogeneous (human and nonhuman) community of being and the being-with instead of being like that is its ontological basis.

Couples and Children

The foragers’ tiny-scale context has been largely overlooked in discussions of foragers’ gendered division of labor, child-care, and alloparenting. Ethnography spanning ritual, foraging pursuits, narratives of conjugal attachment, child-care practices, and notions of growing up reveals the cultural salience of conjugal bipresence and children orbiting conjugal nuclei. Cautioning against cross-scalar slippages, this chapter shows locals’ primary concern to be not with the parent-child attachment but with the spousal attachment, and it reveals a cultural register in which children’s departure from their parents at a young age does not index individual autonomy as the essence of growing up but, to the contrary, the development of budi (~ the skills of living with diverse others).

Tree of Relatives

This interlude focuses on kinship diagrams. Drawing on the author’s fieldwork experience, it shows the scalar distortion inhering in construction of these “maps” to depict tiny-scale indigenous societies, communities of relatives: partial kinship diagrams (event-focused or otherwise circumscribed) conceal the encompassing community whose members are all close kin, and large inclusive family trees highlight shared ancestors rather than the commensal basis of the community.

Living Plurally

Hunter-gatherers’ mobility, nomadism, and travel are often discussed with emphasis on spatiality. This chapter, instead, dwells on locals’ notions and praxis of visiting, training attention on the interpersonal vector and the achievement of pluripresence. Scale-sensitive ethnography is provided of everyday visiting and of full attendance of everyone in the multisited community at births and deaths. The ethnography shows locals’ ideas of birthing a “relative” rather than a “new individual” and of the dead joining invisible members of the local community. It shows their project and ideal: a community subsisting in each member’s participation in the life of everyone else.