Nurit Bird-David
professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel
Nurit Bird-David (Hebrew: נורית בירד-דוד; born 29 September 1951) is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. She 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.
Biography
Bird-David studied economics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (BA cum laude 1975) and social anthropology at Cambridge University, Trinity College (PhD 1983). Her doctoral work was conducted with the Nayaka people in South India, studying their social system. Bird-David has been a research fellow at New Hall, Cambridge (1985–1987). She was appointed as a lecturer in sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University (1987–1995) and then moved in 1995 to Haifa University. She became associate professor in 2008, and full professor in 2017. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge (Smuts Institute for Commonwealth Studies, 1991), at Harvard University (2008) and at University College London (2017).
Bird-David is a member of the Advisory Board of the World Council of Anthropological Associations.
Much of her work is based on her early ethnographic fieldwork on the Nayaka.
“Nurit Bird-David” enters the record as professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nurit, Bird-David and professor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q73546166. VIAF identifies the subject as 121851301. The Library of Congress control number is no2016108853. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1975, 1983 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nurit Bird-David” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.