{"title":"Books by Veena Das","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780520247451","title":"Life and Words – Violence and the Descent into the  Ordinary","description":"In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered 'the recesses of the ordinary' instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe.   The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56290292629877,"sku":"9780520247451","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780520247451_3b235616-9b65-49ea-ac06-4f4ce73418d0.jpg?v=1786014128"},{"product_id":"9780823287697","title":"Textures of the Ordinary","description":"\u003cp\u003eHow 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. \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eTextures of the Ordinary\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life, language games, or private language from Wittgenstein's philosophy. Instead, we must learn to see what eludes us in the everyday precisely because it is before our eyes. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eTextures of the Ordinary\u003c\/i\u003e offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. With questions returned to repeatedly throughout the text and over a lifetime, this book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294956859765,"sku":"9780823287697","price":35.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780823287697_0eae1c14-f2bb-4312-a22b-9e3da70bbf79.jpg?v=1786016013"},{"product_id":"9781509537860","title":"Slum Acts","description":"This book examines the ways in which knowledge that is inordinate, excessive, and overwhelming comes to mark everyday life in low-income, poor neighborhoods in Delhi with crumbling infrastructures and pervasive violence. Based on long-term ethnography in these spaces, this book provides a detailed analysis of the institutions of the state, particularly of policing and law in India. It argues that catastrophic events at the national level and the techniques of governance through which they are handled secrete forms of knowing that get embedded into the nooks and crannies of everyday life, eroding trust, sowing suspicions, and leading to an exhaustion of capacity for care. Yet the paths to survival honed within these spaces generate critique that compels us to ask how punishment and torture become routinized in democracies. Following the paths of those who struggle with these questions in these neighborhoods, the book finds that deep philosophical questions, such as the inhuman as a possibility of the human rather than its boundary, arise in the weaves of these lives and are experienced as a dimension of the social.    This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology and throughout the social sciences and humanities.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302528201077,"sku":"9781509537860","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781509537860_cd4db889-9124-486d-b8bb-d51f13007eda.jpg?v=1786021676"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-veena-das.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}