Description: The essays in this book examine how important themes in Veena Das's work have been critically assimilated in the work of a younger generation. Looking at the relation between the event and the everyday, the essays ask how we might trace the picture of thinking in anthropology through ethnography and through artistic, literary and philosophical practice.
Review Quotes: "Veena Das is one of the most deservedly celebrated and widely read anthropologists in the world today. Her work reaches across disciplinary lines, engaging the interests of philosophers, social scientists, cultural theorists, and scholars in gender studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, and crosscultural psychology. The essays in this volume testify both to her eclecticism and her ethic of responsiveness to others. In groundbreaking analyses of 'critical events' (such as the Bhopal disaster of 1985) and of refugee 'woundedness, ' memory, and pain, and in theoretical arguments for an anthropology of 'life itself' based on 'the descent into the ordinary, ' Veena Das has demonstrated how ethnographic praxis implies a demanding humanism in which one places one's own identity and security on the line in order to achieve a deep engagement with what is at stake for the other without, however, forfeiting one's own critical voice and vision."-----Michael D. Jackson, author of The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Wellbeing