Wording the World

Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance

Roma Chatterji

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823261864, 9780823261857
• eBook ISBN: 9780823261871
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

ONE

Conversations, Generations, Genres: Anthropological Knowing as a Form of Life

Roma Chatterji

The love of anthropology may yet turn out to be an affair in which when I reach bedrock I do not break through the resistance of the other. But in this gesture of waiting, I allow the knowledge of the other to mark me.

—VEENA DAS, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Ethnography as a genre seems to me to be a form of knowledge in which I come to acknowledge my own experience within a scene of alterity.

—VEENA DAS, interview with Brazilian social scientists

Veena Das is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding anthropologists of our times, noted especially for the manner in which she brings the everyday and the ordinary to bear on questions of ethics, politics, and the making of anthropological knowledge. Das has been lauded for the ways she has sustained throughout her career a high degree of both patience and curiosity of a kind by no means common in prominent scholars. To this one might add that a special quality of Das’s writing is the tact with which she thinks and writes about the intimate lives of the widely diverse communities she studies. Although regarded as the most philosophical of anthropologists, Das does not look to philosophy as if it were anthropology’s theory—rather, she shows in her work that a philosophical puzzle is one that might arise anywhere in the weave of life. How have her ideas been incorporated in the thought and anthropological practice of another generation? This book is conceived as a critical examination of the leading themes of Das’s work—the ethical bases for writing and thinking about the pain and suffering of others; the question of what constitutes an event and its relation to the “everyday” of ordinary experience; and the question of the nature and ethics of anthropological knowledge—through the work of a younger generation of anthropologists strongly influenced by her work.

In this introductory essay, I hope to trace the threads of connection through the chapters that follow and show how these sets of questions are in some important ways profoundly related to one another, as they have been in Das’s own work. Yet I want to emphasize that the idea here is to examine how Das’s work has been critically assimilated in the writings of a younger generation, reflecting contradictory tendencies and even tensions that were perhaps implicit or explicit in her own work, rather than to assemble essays written in praise. Accordingly, the authors were asked to forefront their own ethnographies in their work but also to track how an idea or an insight from Das finds its way into their writing. Das has written a concluding essay that takes up the themes developed in the essays explicating her idea of what constitutes a conversation both as pedagogy and as ethnography. In any case, as she continues to open up new arenas of research, stimulated and also provoked by events that she feels invited to respond to, it would not be possible to celebrate Das’s work as something that is now part of an archive. There are many more surprises to come.

Although the contributors to this volume were not given any particular topic to write on, there are overlapping themes that emerge in the following essays. The first is the theme of pain, social suffering, and claims of the other as part of the ethics of responsibility. The second, related theme is that of the event and the everyday and their co-constitution with specific reference to violence. The third theme relates to the ethics and aesthetic of relations followed by a section on the nature of anthropological knowledge. The final theme explores the affinity between anthropology and art as ways of disclosing a particular world. These themes appear both separately and conjointly in several chapters, which is the reason why there is no neat division one can impose on the chapters as belonging to one or another theme. The authors also engage such issues as multiple and overlapping temporalities; the relation between a figure and its ground; and the way we might think of what work well-known classics in anthropology do in our present conceptual struggles in relation to the empirical. Moving in and out of the fabric of these essays like a needle that stitches together different parts of a garment are the concerns with subjectivity, temporality, and the making of the anthropological self. Das provides her own reflections on what it is to think with others responding to the themes in the these chapters, but also opening up the question of how one becomes a part of different conversational milieus and what is specific to the form of life in which anthropological becoming happens.

Pain, Social Suffering, and the Claims of the Other

In response to probing questions posed by Kim Turcot DiFruscia on her book Life and Words for an interview that appeared in the Canadian journal Alterité, Das says:

I am somewhat critical of the trauma model at least as it now functions as a too readily available concept. I try to think beyond the idea of scenes of trauma as pure scenes of repression and of the unspeakability of pain. I try to see how pain is written into everyday life. In fact I defined healing in a very strange way in these texts. The notion of healing carried two ideas: the idea of endurance, and the idea of establishing a particular relationship to death.… I was very struck by the way in which pain … writes itself enduringly in people’s lives. It was not about a thunderous voice of pain, but about the manner in which pain was woven into the patterns of life. So, for me, being attentive to acknowledgement in relationship to pain is not a question of locating broken lives and healed ones. It is about learning to recognize … the way that pain enduringly writes a person’s relationships, and yet, remains open to the possibility of an adjacent self, if you will, of a self coming into being. (DiFruscia 2010: 140)

There is a resonance that this formulation has with Sylvain Perdigon’s problematic in his chapter, “Ethnography in the Time of Martyrs” (Chapter 2), which puts pain at the center of our understanding of modern temporalities and knowledge practices. As Perdigon says, the scenes that anthropologists routinely encounter in their fieldwork now are marked with pain, suffering, violence, and death—whether this be the routine and corroding degradation of environments in which marginalized groups live, or the suffering created by spectacular acts of violence such as the public killings of war, executions, or militancy. Perdigon then suggests that Das’s work (along with that of Elizabeth Povinelli and Talal Asad) defines how our own regime of historicity, which is shaped by modern notions of time as linear and oriented, rests on certain scaffolding ideas about pain and suffering that make other ideas about historicity stick. Thus modern states make a distinction between those whose pain is considered worthy of attention and amelioration and those whose pain is seen to be trifling and dismissed. This question echoes Das’s work on the way that divisions are created between those whose lives are to be enhanced and those who are simply allowed to “let die” (Das and Das 2007), but Perdigon makes explicit the stakes for knowledge in these acts of recognition, misrecognition, and what he calls surplus of explanation. Thus, for instance, when certain kinds of attitudes to the body in pain do not fall within acceptable templates, they drop out of history and are seen as part of residues of a past that should have been left behind and then disciplinary expertise of anthropology or psychiatry is called for to explain how “they” can inflict this kind of bodily pain on themselves and others. What comes to the forefront in this formulation is the relation between discourse and carnal existence and the legitimacy of certain forms of life as appropriately belonging to the currents of history while others are seen as simply stuck in a past. How, otherwise, to explain why the suffering caused by cluster bombs is seen as regrettable but necessary collateral damage of a just war, while the suffering caused by suicide bombing that uses the only weapon that is available to those who do not have access to weapons of large-scale destruction (the suicide bomber’s body) causes such horror? In her own reflections on such issues Das’s point is not that the latter is morally justified but that such discrepancy stands in need of explanation (Das 2010f), and Perdigon too is more interested in asking how problems are constituted within modern forms of knowledge than in taking a moralistic stand on these issues.

Aaron Goodfellow’s chapter (Chapter 3) on the policing of sexual behavior in the interest of enhancing the health of the population takes the theme of pain and belonging in the direction of a reformulation of the classical theories of gift exchange. In a chapter devoted to the discussion of pain in her book Critical Events, Das (1995a) focused on Durkheim’s descriptions of rites of initiation to argue that beyond the double character of society as immanent in the individual and also transcendent to him (the masculine pronoun is intended here, for women did not fully belong to the social in Durkheim), we have a vision of society as creating future memory in the person through the infliction of pain. The totemic patterns inflicted on the body of the young initiate within a communal setting, she argued, establishes the notion internalized through the body that pain is the price that individuals must pay for the privilege of belonging (see also Das 1995a, 2007). Das has repeatedly argued that agreement within the social is not a cognitive, rationally chosen agreement in opinions, but rather that one’s allegiance to society is secured through the experience of pain and its memory that is inscribed on the body. We shall see later that the opposite pole of this relation between individual and society is that pain is also the point of resistance or interrogation of the social—but let us dwell a little longer on the idea of pain as the point of transaction between the individual and the collective through the remarkable ethnography presented by Goodfellow.

On the face of it, the scene of suffering presented by Goodfellow is far removed from the pain that young initiates undergo in the rituals of Australian aborigines. Goodfellow’s writing moves between different scales, incorporating overarching entities such as the State and the medical establishment not by direct observations on patient–doctor interactions, for instance, but by tracking how these entities appear in the narratives of his respondents. His ethnography moves from the cityscapes in which hoardings such as “a few minutes of pleasure, a lifetime of pain” confront the senses in a very ordinary manner, to the circulation of statistics gathered by State institutions on the prevalence of STDs in the city. His analysis also incorporates the criminal legal system that punishes certain forms of addiction but not others, as well as the narrations of those who seek out the clinic for the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases in the city of Baltimore. Linking these different forces at work into a single assemblage, Goodfellow is able to show that the marginalized individuals of his field site in Baltimore are incorporated into the State through a form of sexual citizenship in which having engaged in acts that departs from the normative sexual behavior, they are not so much punished as made to feel obliged to offer up their bodies to the medical establishment as a kind of gift. Medically administered forms of sexuality to which individuals have to consent—both because they seek cure from their disease but also because the compensation received through participation in the research projects of the two major universities in Baltimore is the only way they can economically survive—takes on the force of prescription for them. Das, too, has written extensively on the sexualization of the social contract and especially on the pathological parodying of this contract in scenes of rape and widespread sexual violence in communal riots in India (Das 2007, 2008). Goodfellow’s notions of the sexual contract, however, take us into an entirely new direction about the biopolitical State, along with scholars such as Lawrence Cohen (2004) who have characterized the sick body of the individual as “bioavailable”—offered up to the medical establishment for both cure and generation of knowledge through risky procedures.

Tracking how pain becomes the point of transaction between the State and the sexed citizen reveals the double nature of the State—its benevolence in offering the gift of free medical care but also its policing functions in bringing the individual into a regime of sexual surveillance. Yet Goodfellow (as distinct from Cohen and many others) does not stop at the point at which the individual body is made available, but shows how the individuals living under conditions of economic marginality, addiction, and frequent incarceration for drug use constitute their own understanding of the place of the clinic as one that embodies this double character of the State as they move in and out of the medical regimes. This has important implications for our picture of the biopolitical State since Goodfellow uses shifting scales—from the State as embodied in numbers to hoardings that visually carry the message of how you become beholden to the State and the clinic as the site of an exchange that has all the prescriptive elements of the gift (you must give) that was ideologically supposed to be freely given. Das’s idea that margins are not peripheral places in which the reach of the State is limited, but rather spaces in which the State is made and remade (Das and Poole 2004) is beautifully demonstrated here with regard to the clinic that works within the nexus of State discourses to treat and punish addiction.

What is it to know the pain of the other? In her justly famous essay “Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain,” Das (1996a) has written that even when the enormity of pain is not in question for her in the historical event of the massive sexual and reproductive violence inflicted on women during the Partition of India in 1947, the languages of pain often elude her. In his profound reflections on this essay, Cavell states, “If the scientific intellect is silent on the issue (of pain), she who speaks scientifically—committed to making herself intelligible to others similarly committed—is going to have to beg, borrow, steal, and invent words and tones of words with which to break this silence” (1996a: 93). It is to this particular region of thought in Das’s work that Lotte Buch Segal’s (Chapter 4) ethnography of the wives of prisoners in Palestine is devoted. The main thrust of Buch Segal’s argument is that unlike the figure of the martyr on which much has been written and whose death itself settles all doubts about his political and personal life, the prisoner seems to emerge in this ethnography as both a figure of heroic struggle and a figure of suspicion, for no one can be sure when prison life and prolonged experience of torture would become too much and the prisoner transformed into a collaborator (see also Talebi 2012 for the ubiquity of such affects among political prisoners).

Placed in such circumstances, the wife has to publicly display her complete faith in the prisoner–husband and suppress all signs of her own sexuality, for clandestine desires might be seen as a betrayal of not only a husband but also of the Palestinian cause. In her discussion on the way that nature is constructed within founding theories of the State, Das (2006) has argued that with the secularization of the State a pressing problem emerges—that of finding secular means for neutralizing the effects of time and mortality on the constitution of the State. She argued that the State continues to draw life from the family: “Within this scheme, women’s allegiance to the state is proved by bearing legitimate children (recall the remark about the crime of bringing illegitimate children in the world being not about infidelity but about treason), whereas men become good citizens by being prepared to die in order to give life to the sovereign” (Das 2006: 109). Buch Segal’s ethnography adds weight to Das’s retelling of a foundational story by showing not only how the public discourse puts pressure on individuals to perform their allegiance to the political projects of Palestinian Statehood, but also how protracted warfare and political struggles bring out the ambiguity of the political projects, which become palpable in individual lives and for which there are no standing languages. In conversation with Perdigon’s chapter we might ask if the problem of acknowledgment—namely, whose pain can be acknowledged—links the individual and the collective at many different scales of social formation. It is not only fully constituted States that demand the kind of sacrifice that makes for citizenship but also political struggles in which the lines between voluntary acceptance of suffering and the imposition of suffering become blurred.

The question of what it is to feel the pain of the other is also the defining question of the jointly authored chapter by Ein Lall and Roma Chatterji (Chapter 5). The chapter originated in an experiment on contemporary dance and video installations initiated by Ein Lall, who ask, how can a dancer use his or her body to both experience and portray the pain of the other? Lall took the defining parameter of her experiment to be constituted by two phrases in Das’s Life and Words. The first phrase is the intriguing phrase from Wittgenstein to which Das has repeatedly returned—“This would be pain felt in another’s body” (Das 2007: 40)—and the second is the subtitle of her book that privileges a descent into the ordinary. In Cavell’s commentary on Das’s inhabitation of the first phrase, he says that it is conceivable for Wittgenstein that I locate my pain in another’s body, and that this does not literally happen in our lives means that the fact of our separateness has to be conceived as an act of imagination: “To know your pain I cannot locate it as I locate mine, but I must let it happen to me” (Cavell 1996: 95). The act of imagination, however, as Lall and Chatterji show, requires certain techniques of the body through which the opening of the actor’s body to the pain of the other is made to happen. The chapter juxtaposes photographs of one of the dancers with words from two different times with overlapping instructions and descriptions (Enter the kitchen, put your right hand up, and switch on the light—His elbows are bent, his knees are bent) to which the dancer responds spontaneously with movements and gestures. We are thus able to see (not just read) what it is to experience the pain of the other in a scene that resonates with Das’s description of a descent into the ordinary. What does it say about Das’s work that it has inspired such artists as Nalini Malani, whose installation “Mother India” was based on the reading of the essay on pain, and Ein Lall, who show how a new language, both visual and tactile, emerges in relation to the phrases from the textual body of Das’s writing?

All three of the essays that address issues of pain take off from Das’s discussion of pain—yet none is simply an application of her ideas for they carry these ideas into new realms of description and analysis. And as we see in the concluding essay by Das, the question of suffering is encountered again as she shows how social scientists put up further defenses against the problematic of suffering by, for instance, the contempt that comes into their prose on the everyday and on those who cannot ascend to higher realms of self-reflection when faced with suffering.

Violence: The Everyday and the Event

In his astute reading of the conceptual features of the concept of the event Bhrigupati Singh (Chapter 6) argues in his chapter that the concept of event subtly shifts between Das’s first book (Structure and Cognition), in which it is paired primarily with structure, and the most recent book (Life and Words), in which it comes to be understood in relation to the everyday (Das 1977, 2007). Although Structure and Cognition was published in the seventies when structuralism provided an important conceptual vocabulary to Das, Singh notes that the place of the event was very differently configured in her text than the frequently understood hard opposition of structure and event, or the corresponding opposition of anthropology and history. After all, a major part of Structure and Cognition was based on a regional Sanskrit text that presented itself as a “history” of a specific caste group, and especially of the subdivisions that arose within the group. It was located in a particular region (Gujarat) and in a period of history when social upheavals led to the emergence of a regional literature modeled on the Puranas, which tried to provide stabilizing narratives to caste groups—not the usual scene in which structuralism was at home. Thus, rather than po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Half Title
• 1. Conversations, Generations, Genres: Anthropological Knowing as a Form of Life
• 2. Ethnography in the Time of Martyrs: History and Pain in Current Anthropological Practice
• 3. Pedagogies of the Clinic: Learning to Live (Again and Again)
• 4. Disembodied Conjugality
• 5. Word, Image, and Movement: Translating Pain
• 6. Conceptual Vita
• 7. The Child Bears Witness: Menace, Despair, and Hope in a Courtroom
• 8. Experiments with Fate: Buddhist Morality and Human Rights in Thailand
• 9. Communitas and Recovered Life: Suffering and Recovery in the Sikh Carnage of 1984
• 10. Sexual Violence, Law, and Qualities of Affiliation
• 11. On Feelings and Finiteness in Everyday Life
• 12. “Listening to Voices”: Immigrants, Settlers, and Citizens at the Ethnic Margins of the State
• 13. Punjabi Inscriptions of Kinship and Gender: Sayings and Songs
• 14. In the Event of an Anthropological Thought
• 15. The Ayodhya Dispute: Law’s Imagination and the Functions of the Status Quo
• 16. The Death of Nature in the Era of Global Warming
• 17. Triste Romantik: Ruminations on an Ethnographic Encounter with Philosophy
• 18. Making Claims to Tradition: Poetics and Politics in the Works of Young Maithil Painters
• 19. The Mirror as Frame: Time and Narrative in the Folk Art of Bengal
• 20. Adjacent Thinking: A Postscript
• 21. Between Words and Lives. A Thought on the Coming Together of Margins, Violence, and Suffering: An Interview with Veena Das
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series Page