Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance (Forms of Living) - Softcover

In our world, in which many kinds of discourses of the suffering of others have become blunted from overuse, it is both heartening and stimulating to discover this volume of essays in which a number of distinguished colleagues of Veena Das's engage with her remarkable body of work in order to produce fresh models of thinking about the ethics of ethnography, the nature of events both ordinary and extraordinary, and the limited communicability of pain, whether collectively or individually embodied. -- -Michael Moon * Emory University * "Veena Das is one of the most deservedly celebrated and widely read anthropologists in the world today. Her work reaches across disciplinary lines, engaging the interests of philosophers, social scientists, cultural theorists, and scholars in gender studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, and crosscultural psychology. The essays in this volume testify both to her eclecticism and her ethic of responsiveness to others. In groundbreaking analyses of `critical events' (such as the Bhopal disaster of 1985) and of refugee `woundedness,' memory, and pain, and in theoretical arguments for an anthropology of `life itself' based on `the descent into the ordinary,' Veena Das has demonstrated how ethnographic praxis implies a demanding humanism in which one places one's own identity and security on the line in order to achieve a deep engagement with what is at stake for the other without, however, forfeiting one's own critical voice and vision." -- -Michael D. Jackson * author of The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Wellbeing *

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.