Textures of the Ordinary

Not just an elegant discourse on how to manage a conceptual life, this is an engagingly courageous one. Like the everyday that accompanies Das at every step, there is no stopping but in the middle. How refreshing her retellings; how illuminating the new hesitations and new certainties that emerge!-Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge A truly extraordinary work. Das allows the reader to see her thinking in action, as she introduces the reader to each key idea and problem, and then takes the reader ever deeper, layer by layer, into the complex implications that need to be explored. It is one of the most exciting and intellectually probing books I have read in a very, very long time.-Michael Puett, Harvard UniversityReading Textures of the Ordinary transforms our vision of life and ethics and reveals how anthropology can claim to become not only philosophical (it has always been that) but philosophy itself. -Sandra Laugier, University of Paris 1 Pantheon-SorbonneTextures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence.Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University.