Description
Book SynopsisTextures of the Ordinary shows how life is marked not only by catastrophic events but also by the soft knife of economic deprivation and the repetitive corrosions and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence.
Table of ContentsPreface | xi
Introduction | 1
1 Wittgenstein and Anthropology: Anticipations | 29
2 A Politics of the Ordinary: Action, Expression, and Everyday Life | 58
3 Ordinary Ethics: Take One | 96
4 Ethics, Self-Knowledge, and Words Not at Home:
The Ephemeral and the Durable | 120
5 Disorders of Desire or Moral Striving? Engaging the Life of the Other | 148
6 Psychiatric Power, Mental Illness, and the Claim to the Real:
Foucault in the Slums of Delhi | 173
7 The Boundaries of the “We”: Cruelty, Responsibility, and Forms of Life | 198
8 A Child Disappears: Law in the Courts, Law in the Interstices of Everyday Life | 216
9 Of Mistakes, Errors, and Superstition:
Reading Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer | 246
10 Concepts Crisscrossing: Anthropology and Knowledge-Making | 275
11 The Life of Concepts: In the Vicinity of Dying | 307
Acknowledgments | 333
Notes | 337
References | 373
Index | 403
