EMILY MARTIN New York University

Review essay
Violence, language, and everyday life
LifeandWords:ViolenceandtheDescentintotheOrdinary. Veena Das. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 296 pp., maps, tables, notes, acknowledgments, index. Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life. Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta. London: Routledge, 2007. 204 pp., bibliography, index. Dass argument was foreshadowed by an observation Bronislaw Malinowski made in his second appendix to the rst volume of Coral Gardens and Their Magic, entitled Confessions of Ignorance and Failure: Gaps and Side-Steps: A general source of inadequacies in all my material, whether photographic or linguistic or descriptive, consists in the fact that, like every ethnographer, I was lured by the dramatic, exceptional and sensational . . . I have also neglected much of the everyday, inconspicuous, drab and small-scale in my study of Trobriand life. The only comfort which I may derive is that . . . my mistakes may be of use to others. [1935:462] Even anthropologists who have the opportunity to live in the same eld site for years, as Malinowski did, can nd themselves lured by the dramatic, exceptional and sensational. Anthropologists whose time in the eld is limited by funding or other circumstances would presumably be even more attracted to events that rose above the ordinary. What particular social value lies, then, in the everyday, inconspicuous, drab and small-scale? The primary context in which Das answers this question is her eldwork among urban Punjabi families who migrated to India in the aftermath of the riots that followed the Partition in 1947. She situates herself and her interlocutors in the midst of the long duration of social life since this catastrophically violent event and in the long duration of social life since the 1984 riots against the Sikhs in Delhi, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Comparison of the violence of the Partition with the violence after the assassination of Gandhi allows Das to explore the gendered markings of state making. In local popular and literary representations, the Partition has generally been imagined as the violation of women through mass rapes, mass abductions, the expulsion of women from homes, and efforts of both Pakistan and India to recover their women. Ignoring the violations of male bodies during the Partition allowed the nation-state to imagine its agency as masculine and the restoration of order as the

A B S T R A C T
In this review essay, I review two books about the social and cultural context of violence in India and Pakistan. Veena Dass Life and Words provides a remarkable theorization of the anthropological signicance of the everyday, and Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehtas 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 lled with conict 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 ndings have crucial implications for how anthropologists devise ethnographic studies of large-scale violence. Both books make plain the relevance of Ludwig Wittgensteins later thought for an ethically responsible ethnography. [violence, language, nation-states, kinship, gender, memory]

rdinary everyday life has important, but hitherto unrecognized, theoretical signicance for anthropological concepts and methodology. This claim, far more complex than it might seem at rst glance, is the compelling and powerful argument that animates Veena Dass Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. The claim is nicely illustrated by the ne ethnographic detail in Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehtas Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life.

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 741745, 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 Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.741.

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reassertion of masculine control over women. In contrast, in the riots against the Sikhs in 1984, the humiliation of men rose to the forefront. Counterintuitively, instead of tracing the subsequent eruptions of these violent events into peoples everyday lives, Das traces how these events enfold themselves into the recesses of the ordinary, attaching themselves as if with invisible tentacles to everyday life (p. 1). The originality and importance of Dass account of this seemingly prosaic process lie in this: Events that wreak extreme violence on families and communities create a form of doubt about the social world. Like shadows of the more abstract philosophical skepticism that doubts the reality of the world, doubt about the social world throws the fabric of taken-for-granted everyday life into jeopardy. People are placed into circumstances in which the givens of emotional and social connectedness are replaced by an unknown void: Do my parents care for me; are my children loyal? Following the later thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Das argues that subjectivity comes into being and continually develops in connection with the way language organizes the world. Violence that pits the desire of an abducted and raped mother, wife, or daughter for her familys protection against the desire of her kin to maintain the familys purity literally places people beyond the boundaries of the world as they have ever conceived it. If the boundaries of the knowable world are thus exceeded, how does the subjectivity of a person survive? Or does it? Das attempts the difcult task of locating the subject through the experience of a world-shattering limit. When the grammar of the ordinary fails, what is put into question is how people ever understood what kind of an experience it was to feel grief or love (p. 7). The failure of grammar here is the experience that the social world might be at an end: the prospect faced by a brother not being able to decipher whether love consisted in killing ones sister to save her from another kind of violence from the crowd, or handing her over for protection to someone whose motives one could not 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 is the edge or limit of what can be recognized as human. Beyond that edge lies the danger that human beings can represent to each other: not just the danger of being killed at the hands of another person but also the danger that a form of social life can be rendered unlivable. It is in the contemplation of the possible end of a form of social life that the signicance of the everyday takes shape in Dass account. Descending into the ordinary, paying repeated attention to the most mundane events and objects, is what social relationships require. Therefore, the everyday is the site at which one can understand what it is to pick up the pieces and to live in this very place of devastation (p. 9). Picking up the pieces does not mean simply speaking about the traumatic events of the past; picking up the pieces means the possibility

of nding a voice to animate ones words and give them social life in a shattered environment. By voice, Das means speech with life in it. By contrast, she heard people speak about the violence and what they experienced with words that seemed ghostly; or else their words seemed animated by the voice of some other person. It was as if they spoke words of Punjabi or Hindi translated from some unknown language. People could tell stories about the Partition, but their words had the frozen slide quality to them, which showed their burned and numbed relation to life (p. 11). Das makes her argument in relation to the carnage caused by communal violence. Below, I consider whether her insights may also be applicable to a wider range of social contexts in which people reach the vertical edge of a form of life. In the face of violence sufcient to make one question what counts as human, how can simple everyday acts provide a way forward? At this point, Das provides an ethnographic account of time and subjectivity that is specic to Punjabi conceptions. Time is seen as the destroyer of relationships; but the eventual way in which death will end any relationship shadows relationships from the beginning. The actual present, lived relationship is experienced in relation to the eventual, a future that has not yet arrived. This means that people experience themselves as plural subjects who live in one actual moment but simultaneously occupy a time in the future, the eventual. Consider the case of a woman called Asha, who was widowed at a young age years before the Partition. She lived with her husbands elder brothers family and was given a child in adoption by her husbands younger sister. The presumption was that the boy would take care of Asha as he grew up and she grew older. Her female kin, in accord with dominant cultural paradigms, sought to ll the emptiness of Ashas childlessness, encouraging her to satisfy herself in maternal desires rather than in, say, sexuality. The Partition opened a space in which poisonous knowledge about the treachery contained in kin relations was revealed to Asha, and she sought different ways to construct her subjectivity. During the Partition, the family of Ashas husband lost everything. She ed with her adopted son to her natal family just inside the Indian border. There, inundated with the needs of others who had ed, Ashas brothers family made it plain in subtle ways that they were reluctant to support her. This was a breach of the kinship obligations owed a daughter, which, although usually latent, are ideally enduring. It was also a breach of the brothersister tie, which has a special and sacred quality in Punjabi society. Asha was forced to experience her transformation from a beloved daughter and sister to someone who was a burden on the family. Asha then had to shuttle between her afnes (whose circumstances were now greatly reduced) and her natal family, all the while adopting the expressions of grief appropriate for a widow and willingly taking on the lowliest chores.

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To avoid inappropriate sexual advances from a widowed afne, she entered into a second marriage, to a man from another town that she met through a friend of her husbands. When they found out, both sides of her family refused to see her again, saying Asha had sullied and disgraced them. She agreed. Nonetheless, during the following years, she did whatever she could to mend the broken ties with the family of her rst husband. Through years of work and the passing of time, Asha and her rst husbands sister knit up a fabric of social life. Both Ashas brothers failure to support her in her destitution and her own failure to be loyal to her rst husband were social facts they accepted into their daily lives. The two womens work took many years to unfold; their plural subjectivities stretching between the actual and the eventual could incorporate many subject positions, including victim, culprit, witness, and bystander. Descending into the ordinary world of domestic tasks and daily events, each of the women reinhabited a frayed world; they engaged in an ongoing process of producing a new social world out of the debris of the old. The limits of the social world, the limits of what could be conceived within the domain of human life, were burst asunder by the events of the Partition. What Asha and her kin took as given before that upheaval was revealed to be shot through with schisms. Thus, a major political event brought to light a side of kinship relationships that had been concealed, a side that contained the possibility of betrayal. But with the passage of time, in unpredictable ways, new forms of what could be imagined emerged as people experimented with the possibilities life presented. The multiple violations suffered by victims of the Partition were reworked in this case: The subject position of victim was transformed into the subject position of one who is able to actively rework the limits of the social. As if building on the insights in Life and Words, Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehtas Living with Violence: An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life is based on extended eldwork with residents of Dharavi, a shantytown in Bombay (Mumbai), and the authors analysis reaps all the benets Das promises from spending a long time in one place. The violent events that are the focus of the book began on the day of the demolition of the Babri mosque (in Uttar Pradesh, 2,500 km northeast from Dharavi) in December 1992 and continued until January 1993. The destruction, instigated by Hindu militants, sent shock waves throughout the country. Some say the rst phase of violence was the outcome of Muslim anger over demolition of the mosque and that the second was the outcome of a Hindu backlash aided by the police. Chatterji and Mehta show in intricate ethnographic detail how the memory of these events is woven into the fabric of everyday life. As the authors detail, far from being remembered as a traumatic insertion of the past into the present or regarded as something that must be obliterated for life to go on, the

violent events are enfolded into ongoing social life in multiple ways. The ethnographic observations brought to bear on this process are extremely subtle. Spaces and boundaries in Dharavi invisible to an outsider are named for national borders or for a police line. The past is literally inscribed into the present and relived on an everyday basis. A particularly valuable contribution is the authors analysis of NGOs and slum rehabilitation plans in juxtaposition and competition with state agendas. Chatterji and Mehta trace the complex ways that forms of governmentality such as numerical surveillance, rationing, mapping, and enumeration ensnare Dharavis population in multiple forms of power. In times of violence, this documentation can be used to settle life or death questions of identity; simultaneously, it can be a route to lifesaving resources through relief and rehabilitation agencies. Similarly, the authors shed light on the interstitial position of the local NGOs, whose effort to constitute the slum voice sometimes falls on the twin horns of a colonial past and a developmental present. For example, the local NGOs share the view that memories of communal violence must be set aside for normal life to resume. This constitutes a denial of the Others suffering refusal to participate in the social life of the Other, which demands remembering unspeakable events. Another of their critically important insights is that, in colonial history and in contemporary ofcial documents at the national and international levels, events involving largescale violence in India are categorized as communal riots. The term connotes an outbreak of inevitable pathology that is peculiar to India. Communal violence is seen as an infectious disease that spreads through contagion and must be contained by ofcial control (p. 56). In contrast to the states effort to limit and contain the disease of rioting, those who witnessed and suffered from the riots strive to nd a way to embed the results of the riots in their everyday lives. Each of these books makes a clear distinction between acting as a witness to violence and acting as an ethnographer of violence. In the former stance, one occupies the same moment of time as the violent events and then speaks about them in the future. The events are stable and given, threatened only by the possibility they may be forgotten or concealed. In the latter stance, one moves with those who experienced the violence. The shape of past events in peoples experience shifts and changes over time, never forgotten but folded into the ow of everyday life. Only by following events as they transmute in experience of the ordinary can this process be documented. Das writes of events that took an extreme form, events that broke apart the givens of social life, the bedrock of social existence, and the social facts of life that had never been questioned. Because of the extreme nature of the breach, the task of rebuilding a new social order is one of monumental proportions. Das chronicles not the survival of a form of social life but the remaking of a social world based on

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new givens. These givens, she argues, can only be formed out of the small repetitive events of the domestic and everyday repeated endlessly over time. Through it all, the Punjabi penchant for occupying a subject position that incorporates the present and the future, the actual and the eventual, is maintained, but in such a way that the eventual includes forms of living that could not have been imagined beforehand. Das has written a brilliant book, one that will materially further understanding of how to study violence, conict, kinship, and the state through her original understanding of the ethnography of everyday life. Together, Dass book and Chatterji and Mehtas rich volume provide a treasure trove of compelling stories about how people remake social life out of events that throw the very idea of social life into question. Are there other kinds of social contexts, not produced by communal violence, in which one could (without misleading hyperbole) speak of hitherto unimaginable breaches of the taken-for-granted tenets of social life? I think that some forms of medical diagnosis, for example, could be fruitfully regarded in such a light. A catastrophic nding of a genetic trait that has an impact on oneself and possibly all of ones biological kin might throw into question every assumption one had made about life and its qualities, death and its meaning, family and its duration, and more. How do people enfold such events into their lives? Dass approach allows one to see that the diagnosis is not likely to be a xed thing that erupts unchanged into peoples thoughts and experiences but, rather, something malleable that is tucked and stitched into ongoing lives and deaths over the long duration. Perhaps even more to the point, diagnosis of a major mental illness, by throwing the person who receives it into the ranks of the irrational, disrupts assumptions about what it means to be human. Is a brother still the same person once he is described as being outside the bounds of sense? Will there be a failure of grammar in which those around him feel they can no longer decipher his life? How can he continue his relationships on such radically altered terms, when the former criteria for relationships have ended? How, as ethnographers, would we be able to observe such issues taking shape? There are important implications here for the ethnographic method, in general. Many anthropologists, myself included, have used interviews to gather ethnographic data when working in complex urban settings. As Das makes clear, people she knew in her eldwork could speak about past events of communal violence perfectly well; what their speech alone could not capture was the presence or absence of life animating their experience of past violence. Life, which here means social and natural life, could only be given to words again from the long processes of daily living by which the past could potentially be enfolded into the present and future. For the case of medical diagnosis, the interview itself may assert a kind of rational frame over interactions in which only certain kinds of communication can take place. If

the question at stake is how one goes on when the taken-forgranted 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 focused on whether Wittgensteins later philosophy has relevance for a politically critical anthropology (Morris 2007; Myhre 2006; Wilson 2004). Some worry that Wittgensteins thought encourages an antiempiricist and apolitical bias in anthropology, one that is aficted by embarrassment with the notion of truth (Wilson 2004:14). Engaged in the long-standing contention about Wittgenstein in the social sciences (Gellner 1998; Winch 1967), Dass work (1998) has for many years asserted the relevance of Wittgensteins thought for a critical cultural anthropology. The great merit of the present book is that she shows how and why anthropologists must move beyond the worry about abandoning the Enlightenment concept of the truth when we produce ethnographic accounts of uid or unstable cultural meanings. As an example of this worry, Das quotes Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who argue in Empire why it is important to sustain rather than critique Enlightenment conceptions of truth, especially when describing incidents of state terror: In the context of state terror and mystication, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. Establishing and making public the truth of the recent past attributing responsibility to state ofcials for specic acts and in some cases exacting retributionappears here as ineluctable precondition for any democratic future . . . the concept of truth is not uid or unstable-on the contrary! The truth is that this general ordered the torture and assassination of that union leader, and this colonel led the massacre of that village. Making public such truths is an exemplary Enlightenment project of modernist politics, and the critique of it in these contexts could serve only to aid the mysticatory and repressive powers of the regime under attack. [2000:xx] Das acknowledges that, at times, anthropologists would do well to provide evidence that could contest ofcial efforts to make traces of violence and its records disappear. But both of the books considered here speak to the messy complexities of how (over time) state oppressors and their victims may change, or even exchange, places; how a state that at one time was seen as the perpetrator of genocide can come to be seen (over time) as desirable for its benecence; how ethnic groups that set on each other violently can (over time) combine to pursue their common interests. To see these transformations, if they happen, requires ethnography of long duration. To ignore them ensures an impoverished understanding of human capacities. These arguments enable a return to Malinowskis gaps and side-steps with renewed interest. Clifford Geertz referred to the half-formed, taken-for-granted, indifferently

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systematized notions that guide the normal activities of ordinary men in everyday life (1973:362). Das shows that because of the open and indeterminate nature of everyday lifeit is inchoate, undened, and unsystematicit can become the site in which new meanings arise. Victims and survivors [can] afrm the possibility of life (p. 221) even in the face of violence on such a scale that it threatens the very idea of life and brings people to the end of criteria (p. 220). Carrying out eldwork over the long duration and attending to the humble acts of everyday life instead of more dramatic and spectacular events will provide a way for anthropologists both to produce ethnographic knowledge solidly grounded in empirical observations and to avoid the rigid dichotomies characteristic of the modernist frame of mind. It is my hope that Dass magisterial work, alongside Chatterji and Mehtas important ethnography, will nally make clear that Wittgensteins thought is nothing less than crucial for an ethically and politically responsible anthropology in the contemporary world.

Gellner, Ernest 1998 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 of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. 2 vols. New York: American Book. Morris, Brian 2007 Wittgenstein Revisited. Anthropology Today 23(1):28. Myhre, Knut Christian 2006 The Truth of Anthropology. Anthropology Today 22(6):3. Wilson, Richard A. 2004 The Trouble with Truth: Anthropologys 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.

References cited
Das, Veena 1998 Wittgenstein and Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:171195. Geertz, Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.

accepted December May 16, 2007 nal version submitted January May 18, 2007 Emily Martin Department of Anthropology Institute of the History of Production of Knowledge New York University 25 Waverly Pl. New York, NY 10003 em81@nyu.edu

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