Suchergebnisse

Textures 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.

Affliction inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues.First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal—putting resources, relationships, and even one's world into jeopardy?A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The astonishing range of practitioners found in the local markets in the poor neighborhoods of Delhi shows how the magical and the technical are knotted together in the therapeutic experience of healers and patients. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? How does this event of everyday life bear the traces of larger policies at the national and global levels?Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing "what is happening" and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty.Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. Instead of thinking of illness as an event set apart from everyday life, it shows the texture of everyday life, the political economy of neighborhoods, as well as the dark side of care. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects

Sociological analysis of Hindu caste & ritual has primarily been confined to the empirical study of local communities. In this work the author adds a new dimension by basing her data on an examination of selected myths in Puranic & Sutra literature, in particular the Dharmaranya Purana & the Grihya Sutra.

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 ord

In this article, I provide a detailed analysis of a case in which an eight-year-old girl was abducted, tortured and raped. She was recovered under somewhat mysterious circumstances. In my analysis, I knit together events inside the court as reflected the judgment and related events outside the court. I try to show, first, how legal technology produced 'facts' in court. I then take up what seemed like minor contradictions within the documents and oral testimonies, navigate the processes through which these discrepancies were ironed out in court, resulting in a narrative that could lead to successful prosecution of the case and justice for the victim within the limits of legal proceedings. However, the same minor contradictions are later shown to have a different life in the neighbourhood from which the case originated. I argue that once we undo the solidity of the narrative that the court is obliged to fix and look at each micro-event that makes up the case, we see that truth and falsity, fact and fiction, certainty and scepticism, are mutually implicated. The stable conceptual furniture that many feminist scholars have come to expect in rape cases then begins to disperse into the finer grains of what makes up the texture of the law.

Este artigo analisa como podemos entender a corrupção como algo ancorado em práticas comuns e cotidianas. Evitando a dupla armadilha da condenação e do relativismo, ele mostra como os pobres urbanos consideram que a aspiração a uma comunidade política purificada cria as condições de possibilidade nas quais o espaço político de ação se fecha para aqueles que estão dentro do que se poderia chamar de complexo da corrupção. Movendo-se entre a etnografia e a literatura, o texto presta muita atenção a formas de fala, bem como a formas de ação, e demonstra que os pobres têm uma compreensão muito mais matizada do Estado do que a maneira como ele é representado no trabalho de intelectuais e ativistas públicos.