Wording the World

"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 "In our world, in which many kinds of discourses of the suffering of others have become blunted from overuse, it is both heartening and stimulating to discover this volume of essays in which a number of distinguished colleagues of Veena Das's engage with her remarkable body of work in order to produce fresh models of thinking about the ethics of ethnography, the nature of events both ordinary and extraordinary, and the limited communicability of pain, whether collectively or individually embodied." -- -Michael Moon Emory University