Concepts Crisscrossing

This chapter takes up a reading of certain classic texts of British anthropology to ask how are anthropological concepts generated? Looking closely at the terms around which religious beliefs and practices are organized among the Dinka and the Nuer, as described by Lienhardt and Evans-Pritchard respectively, the chapter shows that the idea of God is transported from the Old Testament notions to decide which terms can qualify to be translated as God depending on what is taken to be real and what an illusion. As a thought experiment, the chapter draws on different notions of god(s) and of ritual practices (such as sacrifice) from Vedic texts in the Sanskritic tradition and asks what if gods were seen as entities produced through grammar, brought into existence only for the duration of a ritual, as some texts on ritual hermeneutics in India argued? Would we have thought of the Dinka and Nuer concepts of god or witches or spirits differently? The chapter also offers a way to think of what Cora Diamond called a “crisscross” philosophy as a tapestry of overlapping threads put together patiently and with many hands.

Wittgenstein and Anthropology

The main theme of this chapter is an understanding of culture not as a text to be interpreted through root symbols falling on the axes of nature and culture, nor simply as shared values, but instead as providing the ability to both forge a belonging and finding resources within one’s culture to contest it and find one’s voice in its singularity within it. The chapter explores the concept of counterculture and finds its alignments with skepticism that takes us in a direction that asks not how do we know that the external world exists but how do I know that I exist, that I can trust myself in relation to others? Skepticism is engaged in this chapter as lining the everyday—using the idea of lining not to suggest a border but to allude to the way a coat and its lining, the exterior and the interior, are joined to each other. Hence skepticism is not the kind of doubt that can be extinguished once for all. The idea of forms of life is introduced in its horizontal dimension as “form” and its vertical dimension as “life” showing how forms of life are both, particular to a milieu and as drawing from our common background as humans.

The Life of Concepts

This chapter is a reflection on how thinking and living an anthropological life are joined together. The discussion proceeds through an exegesis of two books on loss—one, a book of poems written by Renato Rosaldo, years after the death of his wife, Michelle Rosaldo; and the second, on the women raped and rehabilitated as bironganas (war heroines) in the national imagery in post-war Bangladesh. Rosaldo allows the searing grief at the death of his wife to find expression in different voices imagined as those of actual people from his earlier fieldwork. The refraction of his grief into these different voices reveals the omens and premonitions that convey the menace and dangers that lurk in everyday life. Nayanika Mookherjee finds a way of conveying the fine grains of experience in the extreme history (charam itihas) that the women said they were offering to her and in which they lived as khota—damaged, stained women. It is argued that the book itself might be regarded as written in an autobiographical voice though this voice is defined not through personal stories but through the self-knowledge that comes when writing from the impersonal region of the self.

Disorders of Desire or Moral Striving?

This chapter takes one case of the dangers posed by desire across religious divides—in this instance the small event of a Muslim girl and a Hindu boy in one of the low-income neighborhoods in Delhi having fallen in love with each other. The scene of desire that transcends religious differences and transgresses a given moral code is a significant motif in the poetic imaginary in South Asia, but it rarely asks how such desire is sustained within the social? Usually such love affairs are presented either in the form of cautionary tales or as allegories of the closeness of love and death. In the case examined, the motif shifts to that of inhabiting a life in this difference. The chapter shows that it is not only the couple but everyone in the family who is given an opportunity to make shifts, to learn how to inhabit a newness. The notion of an adjacent self, parallel to the idea of the neighborhood of the actual everyday and the eventual everyday, is taken up to show a moral sensibility that is not about escape from the everyday but an inhabitation of the everyday through a realization of new possibilities within it.

A Child Disappears

Focusing on a case in which an eight-year-old girl is abducted, forcibly confined, and raped, this chapter analyzes the judgment of the court sessions. Paying close attention to the grammatical structure of both written and oral statements, the chapter shows the different kinds of splits that happen within these statements. The judge’s pronouncements show a doubling of voice—one voice through which she converts the narrated events into objects recognizable to the law, and a second voice in which the law speaks through the voice of the judge. Similarly, the child witness is shown to be split into the witness, one who saw the various acts of horrifying violence done to her, and second, the victim who experienced these events on her body. Finally, the chapter reads the minor contradictions that were papered over in the court to take the reader to the life of the law outside the court into the neighborhood where the everyday harassment by police officers, the bribes and the scandals, are the stuff of everyday experiences. The notion of ordinary realism helps in the analysis to anchor the contradictory affects in which the law embodies both threat and promise.

Of Mistakes, Errors, and Superstition

This chapter analyzes Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer not as pertaining to a theory of religious belief and ritual but to his major preoccupation with pictures of the world produced through what he called “grammatical illusions.” It argues that Wittgenstein faults Frazer not so much for having made a mistake in interpreting rituals as expressions of an erroneous understanding of cause and effect, but rather for being in the grip of a superstition creating false excitement about primitive practices where none were warranted. Wittgenstein draws on our common background as humans—the natural history we might invent to show that had Frazer paid attention to our primitive reactions as humans, he might have found other routes to connect the practices of the so-called primitives to those commonly found in his own society. The chapter offers a sustained reading of some of the most intriguing comments of Wittgenstein to ask such questions as what it is to take the facts of one’s existence upon oneself? The chapter holds that such points of connection create a more meaningful interface between philosophy and anthropology than any grand foundational gestures could do.

Ethics, Self-Knowledge, and Words Not at Home

This chapter takes up a particular problematic in the depiction of the everyday—viz., that its very closeness makes it impossible to see it. The chapter pays particular attention to disorders of kinship, arguing that the fieldwork experience does not consist simply of collecting stories or coherent narratives with a clear plot and a delineation of characters. Rather, words and gestures swell up suddenly, often out of context, and provide a glimpse into the turbulent waters that often flow behind the seemingly peaceful and uneventful everyday. Tracking moments such as death-bed statements or moments in a ritual performance when something discordant happens, the chapter delineates how such moments signal the risks to which our actions and expressions are prone. Instead of privileging the psychological subject, the chapter considers the grammatical person with which to think of the self and its opacity. The chapter argues for the salience of the second person as the addressee of a speech event and the relevance of the other for giving life to words. The signature theme of finding one’s voice in one’s history finds ethnographic and literary affirmation in attentiveness to fleeting moments that, from another perspective, it is argued, might last forever.

Introduction

This chapter takes an important insight from Wittgenstein and Cavell that philosophical problems arise in the weave of life and argues that the anthropological tonality of their writing is an invitation for creating particular kinds of connections between philosophy, anthropology, and literature. The argument of the chapter is that the relation between anthropology and philosophy is not grounded in a search for better foundations for anthropology, achieved by launching an inquiry into the human as a general category, but rather by finding the human in engaging with the concrete in specific milieus. It is from within this perspective that ideas about the everyday, the ordinary, and the threats to the ordinary, whether in the form of large catastrophic events or in the form of recurring and repeated crises, are tracked in the neighborhoods in Delhi where the ethnographic work was located. One response to the threats to the everyday is shown to lie in the perfectionist ideas of generating an eventual everyday from the actual everyday rather than treating the skepticism that shadows everyday life as an extinguishable doubt.

Ordinary Ethics

This chapter makes a case for ordinary ethics as distinct from normative ethics. Rather than assigning a separate domain for ethics with its own specialized vocabulary for moral life deployed by experts, this chapter argues that we could think of ethics as a spirit that suffuses everyday life, somewhat like logic, as it permeates everyday activities. Much discussion on ethics accords a centrality to moments of breakdown and to principles for making choices in hard cases. While there is a place in social life for occasions that demand a muscular definition of the good, the bad, and the righteous, an exclusive emphasis on such moments eclipses those other moments when moral sensibilities are displayed in quotidian acts of care and sustenance. While recognizing the importance of habit as the fly-wheel of society, the chapter argues that sedimentation of experience is only one aspect of habit, the other being the innovations and improvisations through which the particularity of the concrete other is recognized

A Politics of the Ordinary

This chapter focuses on quotidian scenes through which the state is engaged over infrastructural projects, such as ensuring access to electricity and water in a locality in Delhi that has its origins in unauthorized occupations over land. One of the tasks in this chapter is to simply show the intensity and the kind of labor that goes into the task of getting electricity meters installed in a locality that falls outside the administrative category of a recognized colony. Apart from meeting the endless conditions setup by an inflexible bureaucracy and the mobilization of local support, the local leaders also work to ward off threats of violence from the mafia-like interests that develop around illegal supply of electricity in such localities. The chapter asks, does this work performed by the local leaders and their supporters count as politics? The chapter engages the theory of performative utterances and speech acts develop by of the philosopher J. L. Austin. Elucidating Cavell’s identification of passionate utterances as distinct from utterances with illocutionary force the chapter looks at the way emotion is laced into language putting into question the idea of stability of convention in the context of political work performed by the poor.