Wording the world : Veena Das and scenes of instruction / edited by Roma Chatterji.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Chatterji, Roma, editor.

Series:

Forms of living.

Forms of living

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Das, Veena.

Responsibility.

Social sciences.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (495 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Conversations, generations, genres : anthropological knowing as a form of life / Roma Chatterji

Ethnography in the time of martyrs : history and pain in current anthropological practice / Sylvain Perdigon

Pedagogies of the clinic : learning to live (again and again) / Aaron Goodfellow

Disembodied conjugality / Lotte Buch Segal

Word, image, and movement : translating pain / Ein Lall and Roma Chatterji

Conceptual vita / Bhrigupati Singh

The child bears witness : menace, despair, and hope in a courtroom / Pratiksha Baxi

Experiments with fate : Buddhist morality and human rights in Thailand / Don Selby

Communitas and recovered life : suffering and recovery in the Sikh carnage of 1984 / Yasmeen Arif

Sexual violence, law, and qualities of affiliation / Sameena Mulla

On feelings and finiteness in everyday life / Clara Han

"Listening to voices" : immigrants, settlers, and citizens at the ethnic margins of the state / Sangeeta Chattoo

Punjabi inscriptions of kinship and gender : sayings and songs / Rita Brara

In the event of an anthropological thought / Anand Pandian

The Ayodhya dispute : law's imagination and the functions of the status quo / Deepak Mehta

The death of nature in the era of global warming / Naveeda Khan

Triste Romantik : ruminations on an ethnographic encounter with philosophy / Andrew Brandel

Making claims to tradition : poetics and politics in the works of young Maithil painters / Mani Shekhar Singh

The mirror as frame : time and narrative in the folk art of Bengal / Roma Chatterji

Adjacent thinking : a postscript / Veena Das

Between words and lives. a thought on the coming together of margins, violence, and suffering : an interview with Veena Das.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 445-467) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed November 13, 2014).

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8232-6890-X

0-8232-6188-3

0-8232-6189-1

OCLC:

897431204