Description
Book SynopsisHow might we speak of human life amid violence, deprivation, or disease so intrusive as to put the idea of the human into question? How can scholarship and advocacy address new forms of war or the slow, corrosive violence that belie democracy''s promise to mitigate human suffering? To Veena Das, the answers to these question lie not in foundational ideas about human nature but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other on a daily basis.
Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts.
Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life,
Table of Contents
Preface | 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
