Veena Das,FBA (born 1945) inIndia is the Krieger-EisenhowerProfessor ofAnthropology at theJohns Hopkins University.[1] Her areas of theoretical specialisation include the anthropology of violence,[2] social suffering,[3] and the state.[4] Das has received multiple international awards including the Ander Retzius Gold Medal, delivered the prestigiousLewis Henry Morgan Lecture and was named a foreign honorary member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences.[5]
Das studied at theIndraprastha College for Women and theDelhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi and taught there from 1967 to 2000. She completed herPhD in 1970 under the supervision ofM. N. Srinivas from the Delhi School of Economics. She was professor of anthropology at theNew School for Social Research from 1997 to 2000, before moving toJohns Hopkins University, where she served as chair of the Department of Anthropology between 2001 and 2008.[6]
Her first bookStructure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1977) brought the textual practices of 13th to 17th century in relation to self representation of caste groups in focus. Her identification of the structure of Hindu thought in terms of the tripartite division between priesthood, kinship and renunciation proved to be an extremely important structuralist interpretation of the important poles within which innovations and claims to new status by caste groups took place.
Veena Das's recent works areSlum Acts (John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2020),Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham University Press, 2014) andLife and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (California University Press, 2006). Das sees violence not as an interruption of ordinary life but as something that is implicated in the ordinary. The philosopherStanley Cavell has written a memorable foreword to the book in which he says that one way of reading it is as a companion toWittgenstein'sPhilosophical Investigations. One of the chapters inLife and Words deals with the state of abducted women in the post-independence time period and has been the interest of various legal historians.
Life and Words is heavily influenced by Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, but it also deals with particular moments in history such as thePartition of India and the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984.
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The book 'narrates the lives of particular persons and communities who were deeply embedded in these events, and it describes the way that the event attaches itself with its tentacles into everyday life and folds itself into the recesses of the ordinary.'
Since the eighties she became engrossed in the study of violence and social suffering. Her edited book,Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia published by Oxford University Press in 1990 was one of the first to bring issues of violence within anthropology of South Asia. A trilogy on these subjects that she edited withArthur Kleinman and others in the late nineties and early twenties gave a new direction to these fields. The volumes are titledSocial Suffering;Violence and Subjectivity; andRemaking a World.
She received the Anders Retzius Gold Medal from theSwedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 1995,[7] and anhonorary doctorate from theUniversity of Chicago in 2000.[8] She is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[9] and a fellow of theThird World Academy of Sciences. In 2007, Das delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at theUniversity of Rochester,[citation needed] considered by many to be the most important annual lecture series in the field of Anthropology.[10] Prof. Das was elected as Fellow to the British Academy in 2019.[11]
..the University of Rochester's Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture series, which he called "the most important lectures in anthropology."
