Bird-David, Nurit (1951– ) Anthropologist at the University of Haifa, Israel, whose article “Animism Revisited” is of considerable importance in understanding animism, the worldview and lifeways of shamans and their communities. Her research extends the insights of Irving Hallowell by discussing her research among the Nayaka, a hunter-gatherer community of the Gir Valley in the Nilgiri region of South India. She has also written insightfully about the sexual, marital, and other relational languages and performances that express human–animal and wider human–nature encounters. Her demonstration that hunting is frequently spoken of in sexual terms (including “courtship, seduction/abduction, consummation and procreation/ reproduction”) should be read alongside Carlos Fausto’s linkage between shamans, hunters, and warriors that place all in a relation to predation and blood.
SOURCE:
Historical Dictionary of Shamanism by Graham Harvey and Robert J. Wallis 2007