Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance

By Roma Chatterji

The essays in this book explore the critical possibilities that have been opened by Veena Das’s work. Taking off from her writing on pain as a call for acknowledgment, several essays explore how social sciences render pain, suffering, and the claims of the other as part of an ethics of responsibility. They search for disciplinary resources to contest the implicit division between those whose pain receives attention and those whose pain is seen as out of sync with the times and hence written out of the historical record.

Another theme is the co-constitution of the event and the everyday, especially in the context of violence. Das’s groundbreaking formulation of the everyday provides a frame for understanding how both violence and healing might grow out of it. Drawing on notions of life and voice and the struggle to write one’s own narrative, the contributors provide rich ethnographies of what it is to inhabit a devastated world.

Ethics as a form of attentiveness to the other, especially in the context of poverty, deprivation, and the corrosion of everyday life, appears in several of the essays. They take up the classic themes of kinship and obligation but give them entirely new meaning.

Finally, anthropology’s affinities with the literary are reflected in a final set of essays that show how forms of knowing in art and in anthropology are related through work with painters, performance artists, and writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823261871

Book preview

Wording the World

ONE

Conversations, Generations, Genres: Anthropological Knowing as a Form of Life

Roma Chatterji

The love of anthropology may yet turn out to be an affair in which when I reach bedrock I do not break through the resistance of the other. But in this gesture of waiting, I allow the knowledge of the other to mark me.

—VEENA DAS, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Ethnography as a genre seems to me to be a form of knowledge in which I come to acknowledge my own experience within a scene of alterity.

—VEENA DAS, interview with Brazilian social scientists

Veena Das is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding anthropologists of our times, noted especially for the manner in which she brings the everyday and the ordinary to bear on questions of ethics, politics, and the making of anthropological knowledge. Das has been lauded for the ways she has sustained throughout her career a high degree of both patience and curiosity of a kind by no means common in prominent scholars. To this one might add that a special quality of Das’s writing is the tact with which she thinks and writes about the intimate lives of the widely diverse communities she studies. Although regarded as the most philosophical of anthropologists, Das does not look to philosophy as if it were anthropology’s theory—rather, she shows in her work that a philosophical puzzle is one that might arise anywhere in the weave of life. How have her ideas been incorporated in the thought and anthropological practice of another generation? This book is conceived as a critical examination of the leading themes of Das’s work—the ethical bases for writing and thinking about the pain and suffering of others; the question of what constitutes an event and its relation to the everyday of ordinary experience; and the question of the nature and ethics of anthropological knowledge—through the work of a younger generation of anthropologists strongly influenced by her work.

In this introductory essay, I hope to trace the threads of connection through the chapters that follow and show how these sets of questions are in some important ways profoundly related to one another, as they have been in Das’s own work. Yet I want to emphasize that the idea here is to examine how Das’s work has been critically assimilated in the writings of a younger generation, reflecting contradictory tendencies and even tensions that were perhaps implicit or explicit in her own work, rather than to assemble essays written in praise. Accordingly, the authors were asked to forefront their own ethnographies in their work but also to track how an idea or an insight from Das finds its way into their writing. Das has written a concluding essay that takes up the themes developed in the essays explicating her idea of what constitutes a conversation both as pedagogy and as ethnography. In any case, as she continues to open up new arenas of research, stimulated and also provoked by events that she feels invited to respond to, it would not be possible to celebrate Das’s work as something that is now part of an archive. There are many more surprises to come.

Although the contributors to this volume were not given any particular topic to write on, there are overlapping themes that emerge in the following essays. The first is the theme of pain, social suffering, and claims of the other as part of the ethics of responsibility. The second, related theme is that of the event and the everyday and their co-constitution with specific reference to violence. The third theme relates to the ethics and aesthetic of relations followed by a section on the nature of anthropological knowledge. The final theme explores the affinity between anthropology and art as ways of disclosing a particular world. These themes appear both separately and conjointly in several chapters, which is the reason why there is no neat division one can impose on the chapters as belonging to one or another theme. The authors also engage such issues as multiple and overlapping temporalities; the relation between a figure and its ground; and the way we might think of what work well-known classics in anthropology do in our present conceptual struggles in relation to the empirical. Moving in and out of the fabric of these essays like a needle that stitches together different parts of a garment are the concerns with subjectivity, temporality, and the making of the anthropological self. Das provides her own reflections on what it is to think with others responding to the themes in the these chapters, but also opening up the question of how one becomes a part of different conversational milieus and what is specific to the form of life in which anthropological becoming happens.

Pain, Social Suffering, and the Claims of the Other

In response to probing questions posed by Kim Turcot DiFruscia on her book Life and Words for an interview that appeared in the Canadian journal Alterité, Das says:

I am somewhat critical of the trauma model at least as it now functions as a too readily available concept. I try to think beyond the idea of scenes of trauma as pure scenes of repression and of the unspeakability of pain. I try to see how pain is written into everyday life. In fact I defined healing in a very strange way in these texts. The notion of healing carried two ideas: the idea of endurance, and the idea of establishing a particular relationship to death.… I was very struck by the way in which pain … writes itself enduringly in people’s lives. It was not about a thunderous voice of pain, but about the manner in which pain was woven into the patterns of life. So, for me, being attentive to acknowledgement in relationship to pain is not a question of locating broken lives and healed ones. It is about learning to recognize … the way that pain enduringly writes a person’s relationships, and yet, remains open to the possibility of an adjacent self, if you will, of a self coming into being. (DiFruscia 2010: 140)

There is a resonance that this formulation has with Sylvain Perdigon’s problematic in his chapter, Ethnography in the Time of Martyrs (Chapter 2), which puts pain at the center of our understanding of modern temporalities and knowledge practices. As Perdigon says, the scenes that anthropologists routinely encounter in their fieldwork now are marked with pain, suffering, violence, and death—whether this be the routine and corroding degradation of environments in which marginalized groups live, or the suffering created by spectacular acts of violence such as the public killings of war, executions, or militancy. Perdigon then suggests that Das’s work (along with that of Elizabeth Povinelli and Talal Asad) defines how our own regime of historicity, which is shaped by modern notions of time as linear and oriented, rests on certain scaffolding ideas about pain and suffering that make other ideas about historicity stick. Thus modern states make a distinction between those whose pain is considered worthy of attention and amelioration and those whose pain is seen to be trifling and dismissed. This question echoes Das’s work on the way that divisions are created between those whose lives are to be enhanced and those who are simply allowed to let die (Das and Das 2007), but Perdigon makes explicit the stakes for knowledge in these acts of recognition, misrecognition, and what he calls surplus of explanation. Thus, for instance, when certain kinds of attitudes to the body in pain do not fall within acceptable templates, they drop out of history and are seen as part of residues of a past that should have been left behind and then disciplinary expertise of anthropology or psychiatry is called for to explain how they can inflict this kind of bodily pain on themselves and others. What comes to the forefront in this formulation is the relation between discourse and carnal existence and the legitimacy of certain forms of life as appropriately belonging to the currents of history while others are seen as simply stuck in a past. How, otherwise, to explain why the suffering caused by cluster bombs is seen as regrettable but necessary collateral damage of a just war, while the suffering caused by suicide bombing that uses the only weapon that is available to those who do not have access to weapons of large-scale destruction (the suicide bomber’s body) causes such horror? In her own reflections on such issues Das’s point is not that the latter is morally justified but that such discrepancy stands in need of explanation (Das 2010f), and Perdigon too is more interested in asking how problems are constituted within modern forms of knowledge than in taking a moralistic stand on these issues.

Aaron Goodfellow’s chapter (Chapter 3) on the policing of sexual behavior in the interest of enhancing the health of the population takes the theme of pain and belonging in the direction of a reformulation of the classical theories of gift exchange. In a chapter devoted to the discussion of pain in her book Critical Events, Das (1995a) focused on Durkheim’s descriptions of rites of initiation to argue that beyond the double character of society as immanent in the individual and also transcendent to him (the masculine pronoun is intended here, for women did not fully belong to the social in Durkheim), we have a vision of society as creating future memory in the person through the infliction of pain. The totemic patterns inflicted on the body of the young initiate within a communal setting, she argued, establishes the notion internalized through the body that pain is the price that individuals must pay for the privilege of belonging (see also Das 1995a, 2007). Das has repeatedly argued that agreement within the social is not a cognitive, rationally chosen agreement in opinions, but rather that one’s allegiance to society is secured through the experience of pain and its memory that is inscribed on the body. We shall see later that the opposite pole of this relation between individual and society is that pain is also the point of resistance or interrogation of the social—but let us dwell a little longer on the idea of pain as the point of transaction between the individual and the collective through the remarkable ethnography presented by Goodfellow.

On the face of it, the scene of suffering presented by Goodfellow is far removed from the pain that young initiates undergo in the rituals of Australian aborigines. Goodfellow’s writing moves between different scales, incorporating overarching entities such as the State and the medical establishment not by direct observations on patient–doctor interactions, for instance, but by tracking how these entities appear in the narratives of his respondents. His ethnography moves from the cityscapes in which hoardings such as a few minutes of pleasure, a lifetime of pain confront the senses in a very ordinary manner, to the circulation of statistics gathered by State institutions on the prevalence of STDs in the city. His analysis also incorporates the criminal legal system that punishes certain forms of addiction but not others, as well as the narrations of those who seek out the clinic for the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases in the city of Baltimore. Linking these different forces at work into a single assemblage, Goodfellow is able to show that the marginalized individuals of his field site in Baltimore are incorporated into the State through a form of sexual citizenship in which having engaged in acts that departs from the normative sexual behavior, they are not so much punished as made to feel obliged to offer up their bodies to the medical establishment as a kind of gift. Medically administered forms of sexuality to which individuals have to consent—both because they seek cure from their disease but also because the compensation received through participation in the research projects of the two major universities in Baltimore is the only way they can economically survive—takes on the force of prescription for them. Das, too, has written extensively on the sexualization of the social contract and especially on the pathological parodying of this contract in scenes of rape and widespread sexual violence in communal riots in India (Das 2007, 2008). Goodfellow’s notions of the sexual contract, however, take us into an entirely new direction about the biopolitical State, along with scholars such as Lawrence Cohen (2004) who have characterized the sick body of the individual as bioavailable—offered up to the medical establishment for both cure and generation of knowledge through risky procedures.

Tracking how pain becomes the point of transaction between the State and the sexed citizen reveals the double nature of the State—its benevolence in offering the gift of free medical care but also its policing functions in bringing the individual into a regime of sexual surveillance. Yet Goodfellow (as distinct from Cohen and many others) does not stop at the point at which the individual body is made available, but shows how the individuals living under conditions of economic marginality, addiction, and frequent incarceration for drug use constitute their own understanding of the place of the clinic as one that embodies this double character of the State as they move in and out of the medical regimes. This has important implications for our picture of the biopolitical State since Goodfellow uses shifting scales—from the State as embodied in numbers to hoardings that visually carry the message of how you become beholden to the State and the clinic as the site of an exchange that has all the prescriptive elements of the gift (you must give) that was ideologically supposed to be freely given. Das’s idea that margins are not peripheral places in which the reach of the State is limited, but rather spaces in which the State is made and remade (Das and Poole 2004) is beautifully demonstrated here with regard to the clinic that works within the nexus of State discourses to treat and punish addiction.

What is it to know the pain of the other? In her justly famous essay Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain, Das (1996a) has written that even when the enormity of pain is not in question for her in the historical event of the massive sexual and reproductive violence inflicted on women during the Partition of India in 1947, the languages of pain often elude her. In his profound reflections on this essay, Cavell states, If the scientific intellect is silent on the issue (of pain), she who speaks scientifically—committed to making herself intelligible to others similarly committed—is going to have to beg, borrow, steal, and invent words and tones of words with which to break this silence (1996a: 93). It is to this particular region of thought in Das’s work that Lotte Buch Segal’s (Chapter 4) ethnography of the wives of prisoners in Palestine is devoted. The main thrust of Buch Segal’s argument is that unlike the figure of the martyr on which much has been written and whose death itself settles all doubts about his political and personal life, the prisoner seems to emerge in this ethnography as both a figure of heroic struggle and a figure of suspicion, for no one can be sure when prison life and prolonged experience of torture would become too much and the prisoner transformed into a collaborator (see also Talebi 2012 for the ubiquity of such affects among political prisoners).

Placed in such circumstances, the wife has to publicly display her complete faith in the prisoner–husband and suppress all signs of her own sexuality, for clandestine desires might be seen as a betrayal of not only a husband but also of the Palestinian cause. In her discussion on the way that nature is constructed within founding theories of the State, Das (2006) has argued that with the secularization of the State a pressing problem emerges—that of finding secular means for neutralizing the effects of time and mortality on the constitution of the State. She argued that the State continues to draw life from the family: Within this scheme, women’s allegiance to the state is proved by bearing legitimate children (recall the remark about the crime of bringing illegitimate children in the world being not about infidelity but about treason), whereas men become good citizens by being prepared to die in order to give life to the sovereign (Das 2006: 109). Buch Segal’s ethnography adds weight to Das’s retelling of a foundational story by showing not only how the public discourse puts pressure on individuals to perform their allegiance to the political projects of Palestinian Statehood, but also how protracted warfare and political struggles bring out the ambiguity of the political projects, which become palpable in individual lives and for which there are no standing languages. In conversation with Perdigon’s chapter we might ask if the problem of acknowledgment—namely, whose pain can be acknowledged—links the individual and the collective at many different scales of social formation. It is not only fully constituted States that demand the kind of sacrifice that makes for citizenship but also political struggles in which the lines between voluntary acceptance of suffering and the imposition of suffering become blurred.

The question of what it is to feel the pain of the other is also the defining question of the jointly authored chapter by Ein Lall and Roma Chatterji (Chapter 5). The chapter originated in an experiment on contemporary dance and video installations initiated by Ein Lall, who ask, how can a dancer use his or her body to both experience and portray the pain of the other? Lall took the defining parameter of her experiment to be constituted by two phrases in Das’s Life and Words. The first phrase is the intriguing phrase from Wittgenstein to which Das has repeatedly returned—This would be pain felt in another’s body (Das 2007: 40)—and the second is the subtitle of her book that privileges a descent into the ordinary. In Cavell’s commentary on Das’s inhabitation of the first phrase, he says that it is conceivable for Wittgenstein that I locate my pain in another’s body, and that this does not literally happen in our lives means that the fact of our separateness has to be conceived as an act of imagination: To know your pain I cannot locate it as I locate mine, but I must let it happen to me (Cavell 1996: 95). The act of imagination, however, as Lall and Chatterji show, requires certain techniques of the body through which the opening of the actor’s body to the pain of the other is made to happen. The chapter juxtaposes photographs of one of the dancers with words from two different times with overlapping instructions and descriptions (Enter the kitchen, put your right hand up, and switch on the light—His elbows are bent, his knees are bent) to which the dancer responds spontaneously with movements and gestures. We are thus able to see (not just read) what it is to experience the pain of the other in a scene that resonates with Das’s description of a descent into the ordinary. What does it say about Das’s work that it has inspired such artists as Nalini Malani, whose installation Mother India was based on the reading of the essay on pain, and Ein Lall, who show how a new language, both visual and tactile, emerges in relation to the phrases from the textual body of Das’s writing?

All three of the essays that address issues of pain take off from Das’s discussion of pain—yet none is simply an application of her ideas for they carry these ideas into new realms of description and analysis. And as we see in the concluding essay by Das, the question of suffering is encountered again as she shows how social scientists put up further defenses against the problematic of suffering by, for instance, the contempt that comes into their prose on the everyday and on those who cannot ascend to higher realms of self-reflection when faced with suffering.

Violence: The Everyday and the Event

In his astute reading of the conceptual features of the concept of the event Bhrigupati Singh (Chapter 6) argues in his chapter that the concept of event subtly shifts between Das’s first book (Structure and Cognition), in which it is paired primarily with structure, and the most recent book (Life and Words), in which it comes to be understood in relation to the everyday (Das 1977, 2007). Although Structure and Cognition was published in the seventies when structuralism provided an important conceptual vocabulary to Das, Singh notes that the place of the event was very differently configured in her text than the frequently understood hard opposition of structure and event, or the corresponding opposition of anthropology and history. After all, a major part of Structure and Cognition was based on a regional Sanskrit text that presented itself as a history of a specific caste group, and especially of the subdivisions that arose within the group. It was located in a particular region (Gujarat) and in a period of history when social upheavals led to the emergence of a regional literature modeled on the Puranas, which tried to provide stabilizing narratives to caste groups—not the usual scene in which structuralism was at home. Thus, rather than positing a relation of exclusion between structure and event, Das conceived of the event as moving between certain coordinates that she called the conceptual structure of Hinduism. Written almost two decades later, her second book, Critical Events, was much more mindful of the way that an event exceeded the coordinates within which it moved. As Singh puts it, the event does not annul the properties of structure—but even if all the properties of structure were known, the event could not have been foreseen or its reverberations known in advance. In Life and Words, there is remarkable conceptualization of the event as still retaining the quality of rupture, but it is now seen as joined to the everyday by its tentacles, as Das has put it. It is interesting that the words Das conjures in describing this relation between the event and the everyday—such as the event being folded into the everyday, or that the everyday is itself evented—point to the toxicity of the scenes of violence that she has described and also an understanding of the nature of everyday as constantly shadowed by skepticism. Singh wonders if the term collective violence that she sometimes uses to describe these scenes is at all adequate to capture the toxicity of the sexual and reproductive violence of the Partition of India—rather, it is in such phrases as saying that words to describe this violence had become numb, drained of life, like frozen slides, that she captures not only the toxicity but also the trancelike nature of the everyday itself that comes from the ever-present possibility of violence embedded in the everyday.

Perdigon’s chapter has already alerted us to the possibility that over time, affect-saturated terms such as martyrdom might be uttered in ways that drain them of their heroic qualities, expressing fleeting desires, not even acted upon, but nevertheless coloring the atmosphere as if the temptation to escape from the everyday was also part of the everyday. Singh has pointed to the way that expressions of violence draw on notions of life and of voice; these terms came to be deployed by Das to speak of language as experienced, a distinction between voice and speech being used to show the complex relation between words that are pulsating with life and bear the signs of authorship, and those that are either reduced to lifeless speech or those that have run wild (see also Vogel 2009). A theme relating to these formulations is that of words and gestures in the scene of violence that finds elaboration in the chapters by Pratiksha Baxi (Chapter 7) and Don Selby (Chapter 8), while Yasmeen Arif (Chapter 9) takes up the related theme of how violence is weaved into the everyday to reconfigure the relation between the individual and community.

Baxi’s chapter brings into focus the figure of the child who in the course of an adversarial court trial has to learn to gaze at her body as if it were the body of an adult woman and yet, her language must capture the suggestion of the innocence of a child. This double requirement is shown in Baxi’s sensitive analysis of the way in which ordinarily the child is not considered capable of giving consent to sexual intercourse—yet when the child has been raped, she must learn to tell the experience by using words that are about adult experience (e.g., penile penetration), but which she must portray with the innocence of a child: He inserted his place of urination in my place of urination. Now consider Das’s remarks on the child in Life and Words: "Now the figure of the child is what I sense haunting Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It is not so much a matter of initiating the child into the world as sensing that children go about stealing bits of language that they try to fit with bits of the world. So in what way were they putting the world together when they played killers and victim? (2007: 199). And then a few pages later, she describes how Avatar, an eleven-year-old—deaf and mute—mimes the killing of his father, stating, In the mime, it seemed to me, the hands had become those of the murderers and the face that of the victim. His body was a repository of knowledge and memory that must have been beyond him, for what he had been initiated into was a mode of dying" (2007: 201). Baxi is giving us an account of a rape, building on some of the observations of Das on the way law positions men and women as bearers of desire even though rape is an act of violence (Das 2002a)—but since the rape is that of a child, we see how language itself becomes twisted, both wounded and wounding, as the child responds to the questions about her experience within an adversarial legal scene. Here, the toxicity of the violence spills into the everyday as the mother tries to use the legal system to prevent the stepfather’s access to her daughter—yet must also conceal this event from the wider kinship group and the community in order to secure the child’s future.

In some of her more recent essays, Das has begun to attend to another aspect of the everyday—one that Cavell (following Emerson) characterizes as the striving for moral perfectibility (see Das 2010a, 2010d). The idea of perfectibility is not so much a search for perfection as a striving to bring about what Das calls an eventual everyday from the actual everyday such as in her work on ordinary ethics within the scene of poverty, when making everyday life inhabitable becomes an achievement (see especially Das 2012a). Don Selby’s chapter on human rights in Thailand is attentive to this particular register of the everyday. Selby’s account of the emergence of human rights within a Buddhist ethos is remarkable for its originality and its achieved depth. Selby argues that the emergence of human rights in Thailand may be characterized as an event in so far as it occasions the discovery or recovery of an alternative voice within Buddhism that declines conformity with the prevalent view of social inequality based on karmic pasts. If Baxi has shown how the child has to use words for which there is yet no place in her world, and is thus forced into learning the violent nature of the everyday, Selby shows how words pertaining to human rights have the quality of something overheard that acquires meaning and weight as practices emerge around words which are at first only vaguely understood. The student demonstrations of 1992 in Bangkok in the course of the democracy movement in Thailand had been brutally suppressed by the government, and it was only the mediation of King Bhumibol that had stopped the wholesale massacre of students. For many Buddhists, there was the further trauma of remembering that the killings had been justified by powerful Buddhist monks such as Kulliiowattho Bhikku, who argued that it was meritorious to kill Communists since they were the personifications of Mara, the evil incarnation in Buddhism, whose purpose is to destroy Buddhism. Are the teachings of Buddha then capable of generating such brutal violence? The emergence of human rights and the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission in Thailand, Selby suggests, were not proximal events to this scene of violence. Yet their contiguity in discourse is hinted at in the discussions of human rights even if the violence is not openly acknowledged. With the recognition that the potential of violence lay within Buddhism itself (see also Jerryson and Jurgenmeyer 2010), the placing of human rights as a another potential contained within Buddhism (and not coming from the West) in the ordinary discussions of the NCHR, opens a way to counter this traumatic past. In Selby’s words, The event can occasion a turning back to the ordinary in novel ways, even without a proximal scene of devastation. Selby thus thickens the notion of the everyday, its eventedness, the relation between the actual and the eventual, and the manner in which it is the actual everyday that generates the eventual everyday. Selby’s chapter (along with that of Andrew Brandel) engages Das’s relation to Cavell most clearly and helps bring the relation between anthropology and philosophy in Das’s work to the center of attention.

With Yasmeen Arif we turn to a different region of discussion of the event and the everyday. Arif asks how the event of collective violence of 1984 against the Sikhs in Delhi, studied by Das over a long period, comes to fold into the relations between the individual and the community twenty years later. Like Das, Arif too thinks of the event not as simply having a beginning and an end, but also a dispersal in time over many different sites—she uses the concept of event-afterlife, joining the two terms by a hyphen to indicate the blurry boundaries between the end of an event and what happens after (see also Vogel 2009). Arif’s work is of great interest because she conducted her research in two Sikh neighborhoods in Delhi that were affected by the 1984 violence but in different ways. Her first field site is a neighborhood where most inhabitants are in the transport business and are reasonably prosperous by local standards. This neighborhood was targeted during the massive violence against the Sikhs in 1984, but because of their relative strength the violence was limited to the destruction of property. The second local community comprises families from the peripheral areas of Delhi, where violence was spatially concentrated in 1984 with a massive death toll (see Das 2007, especially Chapter 8). Survivors of the violence from some of these areas, primarily those from women-headed households, were relocated in a newly built area in West Delhi, which nestled with older settlements in the area. Arif finds that the experience of the 1984 violence folds into everyday lives in very different ways in the two localities. Esposito’s notion of community as that to which individual subjectivity is offered up, provides a very interesting point of entry for Arif to think of what is common in the two cases. So the issue of individual and community becomes for her, how is an individual’s suffering remade at the collective level? Arif cites Esposito: "The gift of community, so to say, is accomplished with the giving of subjectivity. The communitas is the invasion of the exterior into the interior, making belonging not an inter-subjective collective bond, but an acute confirmation of the pain of lacking subjectivity." She then goes on to show that in the case of Bhogal, the neighborhood where the affluent transporters live, the violence of 1984 is remembered as that which tested their manhood, and the people claim the pride of the community has been restored by the hard work and ability to recover that the men of the community demonstrate.

In the second locality, which came to be known as the widow’s colony and bore a stigmatized status in the large neighborhood, there is an inability to make the everyday without reference to the stigma of being widows and not having men to protect the growing children from the corrupting influences of gangs and drugs. Despite the poignant differences in the two cases, Arif argues that there is a stake in suppressing individual subjectivity to the narratives of community that proliferate from the neighborhood into other sites. Thus the second locality becomes an emblematic example of Sikh suffering evoked by the Sikh temples and in the political discourse of the Sikhs almost fixing the women as the bearers of this collective suffering. There is also a strong feeling among the survivors, primarily in the second locality, that their stories have simply become fodder for the media to establish its own credentials, thus creating a very ambiguous relation to their past suffering. Clearly there are very interesting tensions here in Das’s account of the everyday as a site of both trance, illusion, and violence on the one hand, and a potential for birthing another everyday on the other; and Arif’s formulation of the complete suppression of individual subjectivity in the remaking of community in the aftermath of violence. While Esposito’s work seems salutary for contesting nostalgic views of community, I suggest that the difference between the two conceptions of the everyday is also the result of different research methods used by Arif and Das. Arif’s chapter is based on interviews in which a story about the past is told, whereas Das tells us that with one exception, she never asked what happened, developing her narratives by the manner in which memory swells up in the course of other things that are happening. Thus time enters into the narratives in different ways that structure the different analytical frames that emerge. For Esposito, the community is what demands the giving over of individual subjectivity—not as gift, but as obligatory yielding—whereas for Das one’s culture is precisely that to which one cannot offer allegiance as it stands but rather is the ground from which individual voice is to be recovered even in relation to extreme violence (Das 2012a). This is surely indicated in the minor figures that appear in Das’s Life and Words, such as the thief whom she befriends unknowingly and who teaches her how to hold her handbag so as not to lose her possessions. Or consider the mechanic whose words are worth citing in full:

Another man, a truck builder, wondered about my past karmas that led me to be among them, hungry and thirsty, the whole day. I said jokingly that I was probably paying past debts, debts incurred in earlier lives, when he said, You are wasting your time. Nothing is to be gained by this involvement. After all, our deaths do not mean anything. Alive, we are useful to the government for we can be hostages against the lives of Hindus in Punjab. Dead, we are useful to the terrorists for we can become statistics in the list of Sikh grievances.

I know of no better words that would condense a whole philosophy in a drop, as it were. (Das 2007: 204)

Ethics and Aesthetics of Relationships

Relationships, one might argue, are the staple of anthropological analysis. As Marilyn Strathern (2004a) has observed, relationships are both the objects of study and the means through which anthropologists arrive at an understanding of both abstract reason and concrete patterns of sociality. In some of her recent essays, Das has brought the question of ordinary ethics as central to her understanding of how people living in conditions of poverty or with intimate violence create ethical lives—her understanding of ethics includes aesthetics of relationships expressed through style. In a recent essay on ordinary ethics, Das writes, In the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi in which much of my recent work is situated, I came to recognize the delicacy of maintaining regard for others through the minutest of gestures (Das 2012a: 135). The theme of what it is to be attentive to others surfaces in many of the chapters here but is particularly striking in the accounts given by Sameena Mulla (Chapter 10), Clara Han (Chapter 11), and Sangeeta Chattoo (Chapter 12), for in all these cases there is a scene of crisis, in which law or medicine are configured as standing in a complex relation to kinship—yet not only as institutions of surveillance or regulation. Kinship relations are the subject also of Rita Brara’s chapter (Chapter 13), in which the female register of voice emerges as the voice of loss. In all these cases, being immersed in everyday life is constituted along with standing apart and bringing reflection to bear on what is the texture of these relations. Thus judgment itself is saturated with affect.

As with Baxi’s essay, Mulla too is looking at rape, but instead of the court room as the site on which the story unfolds, we see how a grievous harm such as rape is navigated in the emergency room of a hospital, in negotiations with the forensic nurses, the police, or the detectives. In her role as patient advocate and anthropologist, Mulla encounters a range of affects that victims of sexual assault attach to the their experience. As she says, Shame, disruption, and alienation may form one side of the affective coin—but running along its other edge are descriptions of love, bonding, and cautious forays into new modes of intimacy, particularly in ties of kin beyond affinal or agnatic relations. How can a violent event create such contradictory emotions?

In the four case studies that Mulla offers we see the way a young generation of African Americans takes on responsibilities for maintaining relations, not because they are addicted to a degraded way of living or are so dependent that they cannot get out of the snare of family and kinship, but because they place the act of sexual abuse within the ongoing textures of their lives in which a single act of rape is not a discrete event but part of ongoing violence and practices of care (see also Das and Leonard 2006; Das, Ellen, and Leonard 2008). The complexities of African American kinship in North America has been documented in many recent studies, but Mulla’s work stands apart in being able to offer a way of conceptualizing relationships that turn on our understanding of law and violence as part of everyday life rather than events that are exceptional in the lives of these vulnerable families. In short, she writes, love, violence, and law sustain relatedness, even when formally recognized kinship ties cease to exist. In one of the cases of rape she describes, a young woman decides not to proceed with the prosecution of the man (her father’s younger brother, who had been recently released from prison) because it would lead to the disturbance of the fragile modes of care on another side of the family, bringing them to court as witnesses where other violations (such as violating the conditions of parole) might come to light. The corroding impact of State practices such as high rates of imprisonment of African Americans is important for Mulla—but where she shifts our habitual discourse of sexual victims and justice is to show how ideas of the good are made vastly more complicated when we take the perspective that victims bring to bear on their experience in the context of the whole fabric of relations in which they are embedded. In a second case, a group of siblings maintain silence for twenty years about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of their stepfather because they were scared of what such revelation might mean for the security of their mother, but decide to file a police complaint when as young adults they learn that the stepfather has remarried. Their recourse to the law after such a prolonged silence is enabled by the fact that there is no statute of limitation on prosecuting child abusers, but also because they feel a sense of siblinghood with the children of the new family. Here the ethical departs from its normal repertoire of words like judgment, principled reasoning, and application of rules. Instead, we find that attention is diverted to acts of care, attention, and the ability to use the law to offer protection to those with whom a relationship is sensed even if not actualized, such as the children of the abusive stepfather’s new family.

The chapters by Clara Han and Sangeeta Chattoo give us an account of kinship and relatedness under conditions where kinship itself becomes vulnerable, although we get a sense of far greater turmoil in the low-income neighborhood of Santiago (Chile) described by Han in her striking ethnography than the Muslim families living in the UK in Chattoo’s rendering. For Han, the precarious lives that her respondents live are marked by histories of past violence by a dictatorial State that slowly morphs into the routine violence of a transitional State. As she describes the mobility of emotions that mark everyday life we see kinship as made up of the imperatives to offer care in ways that the dignity of the person in need is maintained as well as the betrayals caused by the new desires for consumer goods, the devastations of illnesses that are themselves the result of the precarious conditions in which people are forced to live, and many other affects that have a volatile character. Han singles out the problem that people have in limiting the ever-expanding responsibilities to which they feel they should morally respond, but find that they do not have limitless affective resources to do so. The problem, as she says, is how to suffer separation, recalling Das’s description of how expanding medical technologies put more and more pressures on the poor to make more technological solutions for life-threatening illnesses available to their relatives as part of kin obligations, whereas the State pays little attention to improving risky conditions of life for the poor which lead to these illnesses in the first place (Das 2010b).

Chattoo’s ethnographic interviews were framed in the context of the State’s need to know the processes taking place in the interior of migrant families that constitute its margins, as conceived by Das and Poole (2004). Han is able to perceive the day-to-day shift of affects and the selves that are taken and discarded. In contrast, Chattoo is acutely aware that the methods she is able to deploy as a researcher on a government-funded project, designed to allow migrant families to access their entitlements better, can only show the official picture of a family’s reflection on itself. While narratives are the display tools of family talk as Chattoo sees them, she is also able to detect discordant voices in the very attempts of families to keep certain practices secret and hidden from the State. Stepping back for a moment to Perdigon’s essay, where he argues that no single form of life has a purchase over history, we see an opposite move as the paternalistic practices of the State try to instill correct parental practices through the agency of the school. Paradoxically this is what impinges on immigrant families and limits their ability to access State services as they are aware that their deeply cherished ethical values about parent–child relations now seem to stand in need of explanation. Chattoo neither offers a nostalgic view of family as the haven from outside conflicts, nor endorses the practices of the State with regard to its mode of surveillance of immigrant families. Yet in the accounts families give of themselves and the discordant moments that arise in the processes of narration, Chattoo shows us how slow shifts of subjectivity might happen that reconfigure the relations between family and State. This is also a remarkable narration, for Chattoo is giving a reflexive account of her own positioning in this difficult scenario—the ethnography is then simultaneously that of immigrant families, the paternalistic State, and anthropology produced under these conditions of possibility.

The concept of voice is central in Rita Brara’s lovely description of what is said and what is sung through the medium of proverbs and songs in Punjabi kinship. The tension between official kinship in its emphasis on honor and shame, and practical kinship that carries on the work of relatedness at less-visible levels, was an important theme in Das’s work on the Partition of India in 1947 (Das 2007). In Brara’s chapter we see how official kinship is weaved with affects of the non-official kinship that is made present through the voices of women. Women’s voices appear here as those of interrogation, of gentle criticism that belie the notion that the social arrangements through which relations between men and women are naturalized reflect some immutable facts of nature. Rather, as Brara puts it, there is a continuous dialogue between facts that are seen as natural (kudrat) and those that are seen as constructed (duniyadari). This is not the rather simple-minded formula of women are to men as nature is to culture, but rather a constant shifting and realigning of the boundaries of nature and culture as mapped on kinship. In Das’s terminology, the voices produced in Brara’s essay reflect the mutual absorption of nature and culture (Das 1976, 1998b, 2007) through which claims are made and also contested regarding the place of daughters and sons, wives and sisters, in the creation of kinship.

It might be useful here to summarize some of the important ideas that have appeared in the first three themes discussed in this and earlier sections before we move to the volume’s final sections.

The fundamental contributions of Das in redefining the place of pain in the creation of social relations as well as in the forms that anthropological knowledge takes is reflected in all the chapters in one way or another. Das had successfully shifted the focus from questions about how is pain to be represented or how can I know the pain of the other, to asking what is at stake in acknowledging or denying the pain of the other. How do social sciences become complicit in society’s silence toward the question of whose pain is to be acknowledged? The greatest provocation she offered was to ask if one could talk of the spirit or the soul in defining culture without the baggage of moral profundity. The chapters discussed above (and some in what follows) pick up different registers of this question. Thus we are asked to ponder on how pain creates certain regimes of historicity such that a surplus of explanation is required for the certain kinds of pain while readily available templates can normalize other kinds of pain.

The issue of pain is also at the heart of the question of how to conceptualize the relation between individual and community. Is the price of belonging a complete surrender of individual subjectivity in the guise of a gift? Does the falling away from normality compel individuals to offer up their bodies and their stories to the State? If so, are disciplinary knowledge forms (including anthropology) complicit in this appropriation of suffering? While Arif is on the side of Esposito’s claim that individuals are asked to surrender their subjectivity to the community even when they are producing narratives of resistance, and Goodfellow documents how race and addiction fold into each other so that the individual becomes available to the State, even obliged to offer his body for the production of medical knowledge while also receiving care, in all these cases there is reflecting back on one’s situation by those who are thus afflicted. In any case, none of the institutional sites—family, community, State—may be treated as given. The rich ethnographies document how it is in the transactions between these entities that each arrives at a form that stabilizes the contingencies and the flows through which experience comes to be articulated. Nor is the individual a starting stable point from which we can radiate outside, for selves are made and discarded even within a single lifetime.

The relation between time and temporality is addressed in the context of the discussions of the event and the everyday. Rather than one grand opposition between the critical event and the everyday, we see that event and everyday are both pluralized. Thus there are the large historical events such as the assassination of a political leader or the Partition of India or the fall of a dictatorial regime; but there are also certain events that surface in everyday life such as a critical illness or a death or an imprisonment. These two levels of events are not unrelated—some scholars such as Povinelli (2011) reserve the term quasi-event for the latter type of event, since Povinelli feels that the creation of a large critical event that seems to come from nowhere is a creation of other powerful entities such as States or corporate media who have the power to redefine what would otherwise be quasi-events absorbed in the everyday to catastrophic events that are intrinsic to the situation. The argument of the chapters here veers in a different direction for they are interested in the unfolding of these two types of events (large critical events and quasi-events) together, not quite over the longue durée but over the lifetime of individuals and of networks of relationships. Thus they do not offer linear narratives, since several layers of time seem to be crisscrossing one another in these descriptions. There is also the sheer passage of time, which drains certain issues of intensity so that what once caused passionate attachment might turn into mouthing of words drained of life. The public and the private are stitched here in many different ways as in the case of prisoner’s wives in Palestine in the account given by Buch Segal. In complicating the idea of event and everyday, the authors extend and critique the simple dichotomy of sudden ruptures marked by events and continuity of flows marked by the everyday.

In the next two sections we will ask what is the picture of thought in anthropology and how do certain strands in anthropology invite affinity with works of art?

Anthropology and the Picture of Thought

A theme that runs explicitly or implicitly through all the essays pertains to an overarching question: what is the picture of thought in anthropology? The chapters by Anand Pandian (Chapter 14), Bhrigupati Singh (Chapter 6), Naveeda Khan (Chapter 16), and Andrew Brandel (Chapter 17), along with that of Perdigon discussed earlier, engage this question by reading Das’s work through the prism of ethnography and philosophy. Mehta’s chapter engages issues of scale and complexity also at the heart of anthropological inquiry.

Das’s work has always been open to both philosophy and literature, though, until recently, she has not explicitly discussed how she sees anthropology as related to philosophy and literature. There are some unforgettable moments in her writing when she turns to certain writers and philosophers. Thus, in Life and Words, we get the image of pawning her voice to that of Tagore and Manto. More recently, she expresses her desire for philosophy in the following way:

Yet, as I sit in dark rooms without windows, or in the shadow and smells of heaps of waste collected from the neighborhood hospitals or factories, with discordant sounds pouring in from the street and listen to stories about what it took to get an official document, or the extent of effort a woman had to make to carry gallons of water perched on the back of a bicycle from a tube well or a water tanker and carry it up a hilly terrain—I hear the protests of a Beckett character—you’re on earth, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that. I feel that if a conversation between anthropology and philosophy is to have any meaning at all for me, it must learn to respond to the pressure of questions that I encounter in these settings. (Das, 2014)

We sense Anand Pandian’s attunement to the literary register of Das’s writing in the manner in which he takes one of Das’s less-known essays written in the mode of remembrance of her childhood (Das 2009). The essay by Das gives an account of her childhood through fleeting experiences of poverty, of possibility, of grief, of a child’s voice faltering, not quite knowing how to be in the world. Das had concluded her essay saying something to the effect that given such a history, what else could she have become but an anthropologist? Pandian takes this to mean not that the experience of such a world—one in which events that seemed to come from nowhere divest life of all certitude—would somehow orient Das to anthropology as a profession, but rather that Das sees anthropology itself as a mode of becoming.

What is then the event of thought in this open-ended indeterminate form of knowledge that we call anthropology? Pandian characterizes this event as an expression of concepts in our own work, … not as a layer of truth to be superimposed upon the worlds of which we write, but instead as an outgrowth of the life of thought already engaged with the events of these worlds. He then demonstrates through some extraordinary ethnographic moments that slide between myth and history, the story of a king who left the Kallar country and his subsequent return even if momentarily, and the anthropologist’s own agency that somehow came to lend itself to the desire of the villagers to see the king again. Woven as this story is with drought and rain, with gifts given and withheld, with the pain and suffering that is disclosed through myth and through the enactment of old stories, Pandian shows how concepts might be spun out of this texture of the ordinary. The anthropologist does not go armed with questions that can be answered in any straightforward way, for the work evolves as he or she is shaped by the field itself.

In the earlier section on the event and the everyday, we saw how each was braided with the other. It is astonishing to see how Pandian, Singh, Khan, and Brandel each uses this mutual braiding of event and the everyday to reflect on the event of thought itself. All four authors are interested in the play between structure and event, but with Singh, Khan, and Brandel there is a special sensitivity to the way Das brings in the philosophical problematic of skepticism within anthropological thought. Here Das’s affinity to Cavell is evident and has perhaps given a different turn to her later writing, though Pandian and Singh both point out that the thought of skepticism and of contingency is present in her earliest works. In his foreword to Life and Words, Cavell says of skepticism (as Singh cites him), It is a recurrent cause of wonder to me that in philosophy’s modern re-beginning, where philosophy finds the power to wipe clean the intellectual slate and ask for proof that we know anything exists—most poignantly expressed as wanting to know whether I am alone in the world—Descartes passes by, I have to say denies, the answer provided in the existence of the finite neighbor (Cavell 2007: xiv).

Could we then say that what Das makes evident in her work is a subtle criticism of philosophy as setting up defenses against the everyday, what Brandel calls a peeling away from the everyday? The picture of peeling as a metaphor of thought appears in Pandian with a different sensibility—as that of layers of thought produced from the body but without knowing the limit in advance. Singh makes clear that Das is not applying the ideas of the uncanny nature of the everyday to her work as a concept borrowed from psychoanalysis or philosophy—rather, she is making the point that when skepticism appears in anthropology, it appears as the sense that ethnography is about the indeterminacy of human communications and expressions as normal to the human. In this way, how we relate to the others in our field and how we place ourselves in our own ordinary worlds mirror or shadow each other. This is a picture of thought in which it is not the hand that grasps at knowledge but the textual body that allows itself to be marked by the pain of the other.

What then about the local (or for that matter, the global in relation to the local) that has been a topic of serious reflection in much of recent anthropological writing? I want to say that in Das’s work the genre of ethnography and the place of the local are central but they do not exclude other modes of inquiry, nor does the local become a self-contained world. Singh is again illuminating here, for he shows that even when Das has meticulously attended to the way in which the force of the local comes into play in the unfolding of an event, she is careful not to bind or circumscribe the event to a given locality or a given time. It is this capacity to move between different scales from individual biography to neighborhood relations to national-level events that together define the character of Das’s work. The local is pulsating with life, but this is not in isolation from events at other scales, as Arif shows and as is beautifully demonstrated in the lyrical writing of Naveeda Khan.

Before I come to the chapter by Khan, though, I want to take the discussion of scale and temporality further by way of Deepak Mehta’s chapter (Chapter 15) on the Ayodhya dispute. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in the controversy over sacred spaces is surely considered a critical event in Das’s sense that many would argue it had put the whole nature of the Indian nation as a secular nation into question. Mehta, in a meticulous investigation into the legal record, is able to carefully delineate the slow twists and turns in the dispute that far from arising from nowhere, prove to have a legal history that spans hundreds of years. Mehta marks out different stages in the legal history when sometimes the dispute takes a new turn and at other times lies quiescent for many decades. Rather than a linear unfolding, Mehta argues that the ability of contesting parties who incidentally are themselves redefined at crucial moments, to look for legal redress simultaneously affirms hope and fellowship with the nation and secretes poisonous knowledge with the potential to corrupt the very idea of law. Containing this long duration of the legal dispute is for Mehta not the idea of justice or restoration or rehabilitation, but the idea of status quo. In other words, just as the dispute on whether there was a Ram temple that was destroyed by the Muslim king Babar to build a mosque can only be made the subject of legal disputation by converting it into a question of religious property, so the question of whether such a dispute going back to regions where myth and history become indistinct can be settled by the application of legal technologies, is contained by the mechanism of status quo that in effect becomes a technique of deferral. Mehta does not move from the national to the local or vice versa, but what he does provide is a method for charting the movements between the potential and the actual as if the court decisions—themselves containing elements of fantasy—were the screens on which we can see the moving reflections of Hindu–Muslim relations being enacted elsewhere in the nation while the legal technology is trying to hold time still.

Time and catastrophic change indexed in the event of climate change defines Khan’s topic; she asks how such global discourses of apocalyptic futures might be understood in relation to the ordinary lives of the inhabitants of silt