Wording the World

Roma Chatterji is Professor at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. She has authored Speaking with Pictures: Folk Art and the Narrative Tradition in India (2012), Writing Identities: Folklore and the Performing Arts of Purulia, West Bengal (2009) and (with Deepak Mehta) Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (2007). She is currently working on folk art and new media.

• 1. Conversations, Generations, Genres: Anthropological Knowing as a Form of Life Roma Chatterji 2. Ethnography in the Time of Martyrs: History and Pain in Current Anthropological Practice Sylvain Perdigon 3. Pedagogies of the Clinic: Learning to Live (Again and Again) Aaron Goodfellow 4. Disembodied Conjugality Lotte Buch Segal 5. World, Image and Movement: Translating Pain Ein Lal and Roma Chatterji 6. Conceptual Vita Bhrigupati Singh 7. The Child Bears Witness: Menace, Despair and Hope in a Courtroom Pratiksha Baxi 8. Experiments with Fate: Buddhist Morality and Human Rights in Thailand Don Selby 9. Communities and Recovered Life: Suffering and Recovery in the Sikh Carnage of 1984 Yasmeen Arif 10. Sexual Violence, Law and Qualities of Affiliation Sameena Mulla 11. On Feelings and Finiteness in Everyday Life Clara Han 12. 'Listening to Voices': Immigrants, Settlers and Citizens at the Ethnic Margins of the State Sangeeta Chattoo 13. Punjabi Inscriptions of Kinship and Gender: Sayings and Songs Rita Brara 14. In the Event of an Anthropological Thought Anand Pandian 15. The Ayodhya Dispute: Law's Imagination and the Functions of the Status Quo Deepak Mehta 16. The Death of Nature in the Era of Global Warming Naveeda Khan 17. Triste Romantik: Ruminations on an Ethnographic Encounter with Philosophy Andrew Brandel 18. Making Claims to Tradition: Poetics and Politics in the Works of Young Maithil Painters Mani Shekhar Singh 19. The Mirror as Frame: Time and Narrative in the Folk Art of Bengal Roma Chatterji 20. Adjacent Thinking: A Postscript Veena Das 21. Between Words and Lives: A Thought of the Coming Together of Margins, Violence, and Suffering An Interview with Veena Das

"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