Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance

The essays in this book explore the critical possibilities that have been opened out by Veena Das’s work. Taking off from her writing on pain as a call for acknowledgement, several essays explore how social sciences render pain, suffering, and the claims of the other as part of an ethics of responsibility. They seach 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 author 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. An important question animating the volume is: What is the picture of thought in anthropological knowledge? Das’s concerns with the philosophy of the everyday and her efforts to make philosophical reasoning responsive to those for whom everyday life must be secured against the precarious conditions of their existence, resonate in several essays. 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.