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Standard diagrammatic tools in ethnographies, locational maps, and kinship trees are supposed to help make fieldwork and its findings intelligible to readers. This article explores how, to the contrary, they obscure locals' lived worlds and the fieldwork process when they are used cross-culturally and cross-scalarly in studies of minuscule indigenous societies, anthropology's traditional study subject. I draw on my experience of producing and using these visuals, from fieldwork through to writing ethnography, in my work with foragers who live in South India in order to show the effect of these diagrammatic tools on our understanding of nanoscale communities and their intimate worlds.

In this article I examine relational child feeding in the Nayaka forest-world and problematize the concept of "nurturing" which interferes with understanding it. Several essentialist and individualist antecedents of "nurturing," I suggest, conflate child feeding with a one-way, top-down transfer of food; with training, controlling and loving the children; and with rearing them to grow up and separate from their parents. This conflation obscures the Nayaka relational senses which are embedded in an ontology of "living together" and in which child feeding is framed as an instance of sharing between coevals who remain closely related throughout their lives. As well as offering a corrective to "The Giving Environment" (), this article contributes a relational perspective to the study of children among forest-dweller hunter-gatherers. Methodologically, a case is made in the article for "bifocal ethnography" that pays attention not only to the subjects of the study but also—and ethnographically, as well— to selected key notions in the language in which the ethnography is written as a means of limiting readers' own inherent ontological biases and "fine-tuning" the ethnography.

A review of recent developments in economic anthropology reveals that an underlying concern with the cultural constitution of material life unites many current studies. This work has to be recognized for what it is: an emergent, broadly based culturalist school in economic anthropology. 2 photographs, 31 References. Adapted from the source document.

In 1980, the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu were chosen to be India's first biosphere reserve under theMan and the Environmentprogram launched by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in an attempt to conserve for study examples of characteristic eco-systems from each of the world's natural regions. Scholastic interest from a broad spectrum of disciplines has turned, therefore, to the Nilgiris, and it has become apparent that although the Nilgiris have been studied extensively, anthropological attention has been uneven and parts of the region have been grossly understudied. The present paper intends to provide a foundation for filling this gap in the Nilgiri scholarship.