Das Veena, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Extract

Anthropologist Veena Das here revisits two critical events in Indian history: the Partition riots of 1947, and the violence against Sikhs following the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Though Das has grappled with complex (and sometimes tortured) analyses of these same events in previous works, Life and Words represents an important departure from her more narrowly ethnographic essays. She readjusts her focus toward a theoretical/philosophical interrogation of the “ordinary” in an effort to complicate existing temporal and epistemological assumptions that have characterized studies of violence in India. The book is a two-part study: It first examines the way in which extraordinary violence (in this case that of Partition) gets “folded” into the everyday lives of those who have survived catastrophe. Second, she turns to how the violence of everyday life provides the necessary conditions for “eventful” eruptions of collective violence (in this case that against Sikhs in 1984). In blurring the boundaries between the ordinary and the eventful, Das is able to gain significant insights into the interface between the individual and the collective, the local and the supralocal, and the historical and the anthropological.