EMILY MARTINNew York University

Review essayViolence, language, and everyday life

LifeandWords:ViolenceandtheDescentintotheOrdinary.Veena Das. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 296pp., maps, tables, notes, acknowledgments, index.

Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Ev-eryday Life. Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta. London:Routledge, 2007. 204 pp., bibliography, index.

A B S T R A C TIn this review essay, I review two books about the social and cultural

context of violence in India and Pakistan. Veena Das’s Life and Words

provides a remarkable theorization of the anthropological significance

of the everyday, and Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta’s Living with

Violence provides a rich ethnographic treatment of violence and the

everyday. Together, these books produce new insights into how social

and cultural life can be re-created in the aftermath of violent events.

By focusing on mundane, ordinary events over the long duration in

contexts filled with conflict and uncertainty, the authors argue

convincingly that violent acts are not necessarily only witnessed and

remembered but also rewoven in the process of ordinary life into

newly imagined cultural worlds. These findings have crucial

implications for how anthropologists devise ethnographic studies of

large-scale violence. Both books make plain the relevance of Ludwig

Wittgenstein’s later thought for an ethically responsible ethnography.

[violence, language, nation-states, kinship, gender, memory]

Ordinary everyday life has important, but hithertounrecognized, theoretical significance for anthro-pological concepts and methodology. This claim,far more complex than it might seem at firstglance, is the compelling and powerful argument

that animates Veena Das’s Life and Words: Violence and theDescent into the Ordinary. The claim is nicely illustrated bythe fine ethnographic detail in Roma Chatterji and DeepakMehta’s Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events andEveryday Life.

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 741–745, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C© 2007 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s

Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.741.

Das’s argument was foreshadowed by an observationBronislaw Malinowski made in his second appendix to thefirst volume of Coral Gardens and Their Magic, entitled “Con-fessions of Ignorance and Failure: Gaps and Side-Steps”:

A general source of inadequacies in all my material,whether photographic or linguistic or descriptive, con-sists in the fact that, like every ethnographer, I was luredby the dramatic, exceptional and sensational . . . I havealso neglected much of the everyday, inconspicuous,drab and small-scale in my study of Trobriand life. Theonly comfort which I may derive is that . . . my mistakesmay be of use to others. [1935:462]

Even anthropologists who have the opportunity to live inthe same field site for years, as Malinowski did, can findthemselves “lured” by the “dramatic, exceptional and sensa-tional.” Anthropologists whose time in the field is limited byfunding or other circumstances would presumably be evenmore attracted to events that rose “above” the ordinary. Whatparticular social value lies, then, in the “everyday, inconspic-uous, drab and small-scale”?

The primary context in which Das answers this questionis her fieldwork among urban Punjabi families who migratedto India in the aftermath of the riots that followed the Par-tition in 1947. She situates herself and her interlocutors inthe midst of the long duration of social life since this catas-trophically violent event and in the long duration of sociallife since the 1984 riots against the Sikhs in Delhi, followingthe assassination of Indira Gandhi. Comparison of the vio-lence of the Partition with the violence after the assassinationof Gandhi allows Das to explore the gendered markings ofstate making. In local popular and literary representations,the Partition has generally been imagined as the violation ofwomen through mass rapes, mass abductions, the expulsionof women from homes, and efforts of both Pakistan and Indiato recover their women. Ignoring the violations of male bod-ies during the Partition allowed the nation-state to imagineits agency as masculine and the restoration of order as the

American Ethnologist � Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007

reassertion of masculine control over women. In contrast, inthe riots against the Sikhs in 1984, the humiliation of menrose to the forefront.

Counterintuitively, instead of tracing the subsequenteruptions of these violent events into people’s everyday lives,Das traces how these events enfold themselves into “the re-cesses of the ordinary,” attaching themselves as if with in-visible tentacles to everyday life (p. 1). The originality andimportance of Das’s account of this seemingly prosaic pro-cess lie in this: Events that wreak extreme violence on fami-lies and communities create a form of doubt about the socialworld. Like shadows of the more abstract philosophical skep-ticism that doubts the reality of the world, doubt about thesocial world throws the fabric of taken-for-granted everydaylife into jeopardy. People are placed into circumstances inwhich the givens of emotional and social connectedness arereplaced by an unknown void: Do my parents care for me;are my children loyal? Following the later thinking of LudwigWittgenstein, Das argues that subjectivity comes into beingand continually develops in connection with the way lan-guage organizes the world. Violence that pits the desire ofan abducted and raped mother, wife, or daughter for herfamily’s protection against the desire of her kin to maintainthe family’s purity literally places people beyond the bound-aries of the world as they have ever conceived it.

If the boundaries of the knowable world are thus ex-ceeded, how does the subjectivity of a person survive? Ordoes it? Das attempts the difficult task of locating the subjectthrough the experience of a world-shattering limit. When the“grammar of the ordinary” fails, what is put into question ishow people ever understood what kind of an experience itwas to feel “grief” or “love” (p. 7). The failure of grammarhere is the experience that the social world might be at anend: the prospect faced by a brother “not being able to deci-pher whether love consisted in killing one’s sister to save herfrom another kind of violence from the crowd, or handingher over for protection to someone whose motives one couldnot fully fathom” (p. 8).

What Das calls the “vertical sense of the form of life”is key here (p. 15). The vertical sense of the form of life isthe edge or limit of what can be recognized as human. Be-yond that edge lies the danger that human beings can rep-resent to each other: not just the danger of being killed atthe hands of another person but also the danger that a formof social life can be rendered unlivable. It is in the contem-plation of the possible end of a form of social life that thesignificance of the everyday takes shape in Das’s account.“Descending” into the ordinary, paying repeated attentionto the most mundane events and objects, is what social rela-tionships require. Therefore, the everyday is the site at whichone can understand what it is “to pick up the pieces and tolive in this very place of devastation” (p. 9). Picking up thepieces does not mean simply speaking about the traumaticevents of the past; picking up the pieces means the possibility

of finding a voice to animate one’s words and give them sociallife in a shattered environment. By voice, Das means speechwith life in it. By contrast, she heard people speak about theviolence and what they experienced with words that seemedghostly; or else their words seemed animated by the voice ofsome other person. It was as if they spoke words of Punjabior Hindi translated from some unknown language. Peoplecould tell stories about the Partition, but their words “hadthe frozen slide quality to them, which showed their burnedand numbed relation to life” (p. 11). Das makes her argumentin relation to the carnage caused by communal violence. Be-low, I consider whether her insights may also be applicableto a wider range of social contexts in which people reach thevertical edge of a form of life.

In the face of violence sufficient to make one questionwhat counts as human, how can simple everyday acts pro-vide a way forward? At this point, Das provides an ethno-graphic account of time and subjectivity that is specific toPunjabi conceptions. Time is seen as the destroyer of re-lationships; but the eventual way in which death will endany relationship shadows relationships from the beginning.The actual present, lived relationship is experienced in re-lation to the eventual, a future that has not yet arrived. Thismeans that people experience themselves as plural subjectswho live in one actual moment but simultaneously occupya time in the future, the eventual.

Consider the case of a woman called “Asha,” who waswidowed at a young age years before the Partition. She livedwith her husband’s elder brother’s family and was given achild in “adoption” by her husband’s younger sister. The pre-sumption was that the boy would take care of Asha as hegrew up and she grew older. Her female kin, in accord withdominant cultural paradigms, sought to fill the emptinessof Asha’s childlessness, encouraging her to satisfy herself inmaternal desires rather than in, say, sexuality.

The Partition opened a space in which poisonousknowledge about the treachery contained in kin relationswas revealed to Asha, and she sought different ways to con-struct her subjectivity. During the Partition, the family ofAsha’s husband lost everything. She fled with her “adopted”son to her natal family just inside the Indian border. There,inundated with the needs of others who had fled, Asha’sbrother’s family made it plain in subtle ways that they werereluctant to support her. This was a breach of the kinshipobligations owed a daughter, which, although usually latent,are ideally enduring. It was also a breach of the brother–sistertie, which has a special and sacred quality in Punjabi soci-ety. Asha was forced to experience her transformation froma beloved daughter and sister to someone who was a burdenon the family.

Asha then had to shuttle between her affines (whose cir-cumstances were now greatly reduced) and her natal fam-ily, all the while adopting the expressions of grief appropri-ate for a widow and willingly taking on the lowliest chores.

742

Review essay � American Ethnologist

To avoid inappropriate sexual advances from a widowedaffine, she entered into a second marriage, to a man fromanother town that she met through a friend of her husband’s.When they found out, both sides of her family refused to seeher again, saying Asha had sullied and disgraced them. Sheagreed.

Nonetheless, during the following years, she did what-ever she could to mend the broken ties with the family of herfirst husband. Through years of work and the passing of time,Asha and her first husband’s sister knit up a fabric of sociallife. Both Asha’s brother’s failure to support her in her des-titution and her own failure to be loyal to her first husbandwere social facts they accepted into their daily lives. The twowomen’s work took many years to unfold; their plural sub-jectivities stretching between the actual and the eventualcould incorporate many subject positions, including victim,culprit, witness, and bystander. Descending into the ordi-nary world of domestic tasks and daily events, each of thewomen reinhabited a frayed world; they engaged in an ongo-ing process of producing a new social world out of the debrisof the old.

The limits of the social world, the limits of what couldbe conceived within the domain of human life, were burstasunder by the events of the Partition. What Asha and her kintook as given before that upheaval was revealed to be shotthrough with schisms. Thus, a major political event broughtto light a side of kinship relationships that had been con-cealed, a side that contained the possibility of betrayal. Butwith the passage of time, in unpredictable ways, new formsof what could be imagined emerged as people experimentedwith the possibilities life presented. The multiple violationssuffered by victims of the Partition were reworked in thiscase: The subject position of victim was transformed intothe subject position of one who is able to actively rework thelimits of the social.

As if building on the insights in Life and Words, RomaChatterji and Deepak Mehta’s Living with Violence: An An-thropology of Events and Everyday Life is based on extendedfieldwork with residents of Dharavi, a shantytown in Bom-bay (Mumbai), and the authors’ analysis reaps all the benefitsDas promises from spending a long time in one place. The vi-olent events that are the focus of the book began on the day ofthe demolition of the Babri mosque (in Uttar Pradesh, 2,500km northeast from Dharavi) in December 1992 and contin-ued until January 1993. The destruction, instigated by Hindumilitants, sent shock waves throughout the country. Somesay the first phase of violence was the outcome of Muslimanger over demolition of the mosque and that the second wasthe outcome of a Hindu backlash aided by the police. Chat-terji and Mehta show in intricate ethnographic detail how thememory of these events is woven into the fabric of everydaylife. As the authors detail, far from being remembered as atraumatic insertion of the past into the present or regardedas something that must be obliterated for life to go on, the

violent events are enfolded into ongoing social life in mul-tiple ways. The ethnographic observations brought to bearon this process are extremely subtle. Spaces and boundariesin Dharavi invisible to an outsider are named for nationalborders or for a police line. The past is literally inscribed intothe present and relived on an everyday basis.

A particularly valuable contribution is the authors’ anal-ysis of NGOs and slum rehabilitation plans in juxtapositionand competition with state agendas. Chatterji and Mehtatrace the complex ways that forms of governmentality suchas numerical surveillance, rationing, mapping, and enu-meration ensnare Dharavi’s population in multiple formsof power. In times of violence, this documentation can beused to settle life or death questions of identity; simultane-ously, it can be a route to lifesaving resources through re-lief and rehabilitation agencies. Similarly, the authors shedlight on the interstitial position of the local NGOs, whoseeffort to constitute the “slum voice” sometimes falls on thetwin horns of a colonial past and a developmental present.For example, the local NGOs share the view that memoriesof communal violence must be set aside for normal life toresume. This constitutes a denial of the Other’s suffering—refusal to participate in the social life of the Other, whichdemands remembering unspeakable events.

Another of their critically important insights is that, incolonial history and in contemporary official documents atthe national and international levels, events involving large-scale violence in India are categorized as “communal riots.”The term connotes an outbreak of inevitable pathology thatis peculiar to India. “Communal violence” is seen as an infec-tious disease that spreads through contagion and must becontained by official control (p. 56). In contrast to the state’seffort to limit and contain the “disease” of rioting, those whowitnessed and suffered from the riots strive to find a way toembed the results of the riots in their everyday lives.

Each of these books makes a clear distinction betweenacting as a witness to violence and acting as an ethnog-rapher of violence. In the former stance, one occupies thesame moment of time as the violent events and then speaksabout them in the future. The events are stable and given,threatened only by the possibility they may be forgotten orconcealed. In the latter stance, one moves with those who ex-perienced the violence. The shape of past events in people’sexperience shifts and changes over time, never forgotten butfolded into the flow of everyday life. Only by following eventsas they transmute in experience of the ordinary can this pro-cess be documented.

Das writes of events that took an extreme form, eventsthat broke apart the givens of social life, the bedrock of so-cial existence, and the social facts of life that had never beenquestioned. Because of the extreme nature of the breach, thetask of rebuilding a new social order is one of monumen-tal proportions. Das chronicles not the survival of a formof social life but the remaking of a social world based on

743

American Ethnologist � Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007

new givens. These givens, she argues, can only be formedout of the small repetitive events of the domestic and every-day repeated endlessly over time. Through it all, the Punjabipenchant for occupying a subject position that incorporatesthe present and the future, the actual and the eventual, ismaintained, but in such a way that the eventual includesforms of living that could not have been imagined before-hand. Das has written a brilliant book, one that will materi-ally further understanding of how to study violence, conflict,kinship, and the state through her original understanding ofthe ethnography of everyday life. Together, Das’s book andChatterji and Mehta’s rich volume provide a treasure trove ofcompelling stories about how people remake social life outof events that throw the very idea of social life into question.

Are there other kinds of social contexts, not produced bycommunal violence, in which one could (without mislead-ing hyperbole) speak of hitherto unimaginable breaches ofthe taken-for-granted tenets of social life? I think that someforms of medical diagnosis, for example, could be fruitfullyregarded in such a light. A catastrophic finding of a genetictrait that has an impact on oneself and possibly all of one’sbiological kin might throw into question every assumptionone had made about life and its qualities, death and its mean-ing, family and its duration, and more. How do people “en-fold” such events into their lives? Das’s approach allows oneto see that the diagnosis is not likely to be a fixed “thing”that erupts unchanged into people’s thoughts and experi-ences but, rather, something malleable that is tucked andstitched into ongoing lives and deaths over the long dura-tion. Perhaps even more to the point, diagnosis of a majormental illness, by throwing the person who receives it intothe ranks of the irrational, disrupts assumptions about whatit means to be human. Is a brother still the same person oncehe is described as being outside the bounds of sense? Willthere be a failure of grammar in which those around him feelthey can no longer decipher his life? How can he continuehis relationships on such radically altered terms, when theformer criteria for relationships have ended? How, as ethno-graphers, would we be able to observe such issues takingshape?

There are important implications here for the ethno-graphic method, in general. Many anthropologists, myselfincluded, have used interviews to gather ethnographic datawhen working in complex urban settings. As Das makesclear, people she knew in her fieldwork could speak aboutpast events of communal violence perfectly well; what theirspeech alone could not capture was the presence or ab-sence of “life” animating their experience of past violence.Life, which here means social and natural life, could only begiven to words again from the long processes of daily living bywhich the past could potentially be enfolded into the presentand future. For the case of medical diagnosis, the interviewitself may assert a kind of rational frame over interactions inwhich only certain kinds of communication can take place. If

the question at stake is how one goes on when the taken-for-granted assumptions about going on have been sundered,the interview might not be the best way to reach an answer.

In Anthropology Today, a debate has recently focusedon whether Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has relevancefor a politically critical anthropology (Morris 2007; Myhre2006; Wilson 2004). Some worry that Wittgenstein’s thoughtencourages an antiempiricist and apolitical bias in anthro-pology, one that is afflicted by “embarrassment with the no-tion of truth” (Wilson 2004:14). Engaged in the long-standingcontention about Wittgenstein in the social sciences(Gellner 1998; Winch 1967), Das’s work (1998) has for manyyears asserted the relevance of Wittgenstein’s thought for acritical cultural anthropology. The great merit of the presentbook is that she shows how and why anthropologists mustmove beyond the worry about abandoning the Enlighten-ment concept of the truth when we produce ethnographicaccounts of fluid or unstable cultural meanings. As an ex-ample of this worry, Das quotes Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri, who argue in Empire why it is important to sustainrather than critique Enlightenment conceptions of truth, es-pecially when describing incidents of state terror:

In the context of state terror and mystification, clingingto the primacy of the concept of truth can be a power-ful and necessary form of resistance. Establishing andmaking public the truth of the recent past attributingresponsibility to state officials for specific acts and insome cases exacting retribution—appears here as in-eluctable precondition for any democratic future . . . theconcept of truth is not fluid or unstable-on the contrary!The truth is that this general ordered the torture and as-sassination of that union leader, and this colonel led themassacre of that village. Making public such truths is anexemplary Enlightenment project of modernist politics,and the critique of it in these contexts could serve onlyto aid the mystificatory and repressive powers of theregime under attack. [2000:xx]

Das acknowledges that, at times, anthropologists would dowell to provide evidence that could contest official efforts tomake traces of violence and its records disappear. But both ofthe books considered here speak to the messy complexitiesof how (over time) state oppressors and their victims maychange, or even exchange, places; how a state that at onetime was seen as the perpetrator of genocide can come to beseen (over time) as desirable for its beneficence; how ethnicgroups that set on each other violently can (over time) com-bine to pursue their common interests. To see these trans-formations, if they happen, requires ethnography of longduration. To ignore them ensures an impoverished under-standing of human capacities.

These arguments enable a return to Malinowski’s “gapsand side-steps” with renewed interest. Clifford Geertz re-ferred to the “half-formed, taken-for-granted, indifferently

744

Review essay � American Ethnologist

systematized notions that guide the normal activities of or-dinary men in everyday life” (1973:362). Das shows that be-cause of the open and indeterminate nature of everydaylife—it is inchoate, undefined, and unsystematic—it can be-come the site in which new meanings arise. “Victims andsurvivors [can] affirm the possibility of life” (p. 221) even inthe face of violence on such a scale that it threatens “the veryidea of life” and brings people to “the end of criteria” (p. 220).Carrying out fieldwork over the long duration and attendingto the humble acts of everyday life instead of more dramaticand spectacular events will provide a way for anthropologistsboth to produce ethnographic knowledge solidly groundedin empirical observations and to avoid the rigid dichotomiescharacteristic of the modernist frame of mind.

It is my hope that Das’s magisterial work, alongsideChatterji and Mehta’s important ethnography, will finallymake clear that Wittgenstein’s thought is nothing less thancrucial for an ethically and politically responsible anthro-pology in the contemporary world.

References cited

Das, Veena1998 Wittgenstein and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthro-

pology 27:171–195.Geertz, Clifford

1973 The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York:Basic Books.

Gellner, Ernest1998 Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the

Habsburg Dilemma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri

2000 Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Malinowski, Bronislaw

1935 Coral Gardens and Their Magic; a Study of the Methods ofTilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands.2 vols. New York: American Book.

Morris, Brian2007 Wittgenstein Revisited. Anthropology Today 23(1):28.

Myhre, Knut Christian2006 The Truth of Anthropology. Anthropology Today 22(6):3.

Wilson, Richard A.2004 The Trouble with Truth: Anthropology’s Epistemological

Hypochondria. Anthropology Today 20(5):14.Winch, Peter

1967 The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy.London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

accepted December May 16, 2007final version submitted January May 18, 2007

Emily MartinDepartment of AnthropologyInstitute of the History of Production of KnowledgeNew York University25 Waverly Pl.New York, NY 10003em81@nyu.edu

745