Living Well Together

The CHAGS13 theme ‘Living Well Together’ is drawn from Nurit Bird-David’s key note address at CHAGS12, Penang, “The kinship infrastructure of the hunter-gatherer world: or, paradoxes in hunter-gatherer studies and how to overcome them.” In the context of the keynote paper, the phrase emphasised how hunter-gatherers seek to live well with all of the other forms of being with which they share and shape their worlds.

Our usage of this phrase includes these meanings, but expands it to refer also to the research community, encouraging us to ‘live well together’ across disciplinary boundaries, to emphasise the relationships that bind researchers and foraging communities in the present; and the compelling need to enable hunter-gatherers to live well with their neighbours, state and other external agencies that threaten their ways of life.