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This book inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, it stitches together three different sets of issues. First, it examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal. A second set of issues involves how different healers understand their own practices. The book asks: What is expert knowledge? What is it that the health practitioner knows and what does the patient know? How are these different forms of knowledge brought together in the clinical encounter, broadly defined? Finally, the book interrogates the models of disease prevalence and global programming that emphasize surveillance over care and deflect attention away from the specificities of local worlds. Yet the analysis offered retains an openness to different ways of conceptualizing “what is happening” and stimulates a conversation between different disciplinary orientations to health, disease, and poverty. Most studies of health and disease focus on the encounter between patient and practitioner within the space of the clinic. This book instead privileges the networks of relations, institutions, and knowledge over which the experience of illness is dispersed. It helps us see how illness is bound by the contexts in which it occurs, while also showing how illness transcends these contexts to say something about the nature of everyday life and the making of subjects.

Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic projection of postcolonial elites fearful of the popular sectors, but also as a symptom of a stubborn historical predicament: the cyclical insistence with which the subaltern populations return to the nation’s public spaces in the form of crowds. Focused on Venezuela but relevant to Latin America, Dancing Jacobins is a genealogical investigation of the populist “monumental governmentality” that in response to this predicament began to take shape in that nation at the time of independence. Informed by a Bolivarian political theology, the nation’s representatives, or “dancing Jacobins,” recursively draw on the repertoire of busts, portraits, and equestrian statues of national heroes scattered across Venezuela in a montage of monuments and dancing—or universal and particular. They monumentalize themselves on the stage of the polity as a ponderously statuesque yet occasionally riotous reflection of the nation’s general will. To this day, the nervous oscillation between crowds and peoplehood intrinsic to this form of government has inflected the republic’s institutions and constructs, from the sovereign “people” to the nation’s heroic imaginary, its constitutional texts, representative figures, parliamentary structures, and last, but not least, its army. Through this movement of collection and dispersion these institutions are at all times haunted and imbued from within by the crowds that they otherwise set out to mould, enframe, and address.

For many today politics is characterized above all else by disappointment. Inspired by years of ethnographic research with the global anti-drug war movement, Disappointment addresses this disappointment by offering a framework for a politics that rises to the demand of our radical finitude. A politics that rises to the demand of radical finitude is a politics that finds its problems, antagonists, motivations, strategies, tactics, in a word, its call to action, in a world grounded in nothing other than the situations and existents that constitute it. This book takes up the challenge of offering such a framework by showing how ontological starting points have real political implications. A central argument of World-Building is that what is normally called ontology, politics, and ethics are actually three aspects or modalities of the same tradition, and therefore a critical engagement with one necessitates a critical engagement with the other two; that is, with the ontological tradition as a whole. This realization allows us to see how an alternative ontological starting point may lead to alternative political and ethical possibilities. With this as its task, Disappointment offers a critical hermeneutics of the dominant ontological tradition of our time and does so by means of both deconstruction and conceptual creativity. The politics of world-building that results seeks to move beyond metaphysical humanism and its exhausted concepts such as rights, responsibility and dignity, and begin to enact an ontology of worlds by means of such concepts as situation, dwelling, and attunement.

The Indian Independence Act of 1947 granted India freedom from British rule, signaling the formal end of the British Raj in the subcontinent. This freedom, though, came at a price: Partition, the division of the country into India and Pakistan, and the communal riots that followed. These riots resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims and the displacement of about 20 million persons on both sides of the border. This watershed socioeconomic-geopolitical moment cast an enduring shadow on India’s relationship with neighboring Pakistan. Presenting a perspective of the middle-class refugees who were forced from their homes, jobs, and lives with the withdrawal of British rule in India, this book delves into the lives of forty-five Partition refugees and their descendants to show how this event continues to shape their lives. The book melds oral histories with current literature to unravel the emergent conceptual nexus of home, travel, and identity in the stories of the participants. The author argues that the ways in which the participants imagine, recollect, memorialize, or “abandon” home in their everyday narratives give us unique insights into how refugee identities are constituted. These stories reveal how migrations are enacted and what home can mean for displaced populations. Blending biography, autobiography, essay, and performative writing, the book includes field narratives with the author’s own family history. This compilation of stories offers an iteration of how diasporic migrations might be enacted and what “home” means to displaced populations.

For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the "wrong places"-sites and spaces in which no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law's constraints. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places brings together essays by leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric to look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture. Many essays look for law in the kinds of "wrong places" where there appears to be no law. They find in these places not only reflections and remains of law, but rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and law's meaning and function. Other essays do the opposite: rather than looking for law in places where law does not obviously appear, they look in statute books and courtrooms from perspectives that are presumed to have nothing to say about law. Looking at law sideways, upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can be gained when law is denied its proper domain.

In Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return, Napolitano shows the rendering of migration present at the heart of the twenty-first-century Roman Catholic Church and why this is a key battleground for a changing Europe. She shows how Catholic Latin American lay and religious migrants and their histories in Rome point to an Atlantic Return from the Americas that challenges a Euro-centric, Roman Catholic identity. The book queries national, municipal histories and Vatican pastoral teachings through documented and undocumented migrants’ experiences and devotions and shows how multiple forms of being Catholic inform gender, labor and sexuality at the heart of Catholicism in Europe. By studying present celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe and El Señor de los Milagros, Papal Encyclicals, the Latin American Catholic Mission, and the order of the Legionaries of Christ in Rome, Napolitano bridges the long-standing divide between the study of popular and institutional Catholicism. Doing so she connects current circulations of affects around migration in Italy and the Catholic Church’s historical anxieties and hopes of conversion since the early missionization of the Americas. Through an Atlantic and transnational perspective, Napolitano shows how the Roman Catholic Church is a passionate machine, an ethical and political subject that reignites a passion for Catholicism based, on one hand, on Papal liturgy and the importance of the moral truth, and on the other, on how diverse Catholic migrants can become an apostolic vessel for new blood in a Europe perceived as having cooled to the Catholic faith.

This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on the island of Lamu (Kenya) who live simultaneously “on the edge and in the center”: they are situated at the edge of the (inter)national economy and at the margins of Western notions of modernity; yet they are concurrently the focus of (inter)national campaigns against Islamic radicalization and are at the heart of Western (touristic) imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim in this context? And how are these denominators differently imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate different cultural, religious, political and economic pressures and expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. It thereby illustrates how seemingly mundane practices—from how young people greet others, to how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. A central concern of the book lies with the shifting meaning and ambiguity of such everyday signs and thus the dangers of semiotic misconstrual. By examining this uncertainty of interpretation in projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. Documenting how Lamu youth navigate this contested field in a fast-changing place with a fascinating history, this book offers a distinctly linguistic anthropological approach to discussions of ethical self-fashioning and everyday Islam.

People's Car explores one of the major movements for resisting the acquisition of land by the government in the interests of siting a Tata Motors car factory in Singur, India. The factory becomes the alibi for nuanced interrogations that are both material and theoretical on resistance, changing rural realities in globalizing India and the very nature and idea of land. It asks why such long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast paced industrialization. It argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is more than a simple agricultural plot to middle caste small and marginal landowners aspiring nonfarm futures. People's Car breaks new ground by ethnographically establishing the incommensurability between land and money. Such incommensurability or non-equivalence, the book shows, simultaneously drives protests against land acquisition and fuels the demands for non-farm jobs and industrialization, the crux of rural middle-caste aspirational politics. It questions the dominant trend of romanticizing rural life and associated anti-development protests that uses the clichéd dichotomous tropes—rural Bharat vs. urban India.

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein is an exploration of everyday life in which anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture allows her to align her ethnography with stunning anthropological moments in Wittgenstein and Cavell as well as in literary texts from India. Das poses a compelling question—how might we speak of a human form of life when the very idea of the human has been put into question? The response to this question, Das argues, does not lie in some foundational idea of the universal as that of human nature or the human condition but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other within overlapping forms of life. The book shows how reality as ordinary and domestic is impaired not only by catastrophic events but also by the repetitive and corrosive soft knife of everyday violence and deprivation. It advances a view of ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. The book also presents a picture of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable and ethnography is treated as intimately connected to autobiography as a form of reflection emanating from the impersonal regions of the self.

This is an intellectual biography of Gregory Bateson, one of the most important holistic writers of the twentieth century, whose qualitative approach to information and intelligence in living systems challenges modern science’s exclusive attachment to technical premises of cyber-information and Artificial Intelligence. Hesubstitutes ‘pattern’ and ‘meaning’ for the ‘thinginess’ of data and places his emphasis on ‘mapping’ and gestalt. His approach appears first in his anthropological studies of New Guinea culture and ‘body/mind’ interaction in Balinese which he undertook with his spouse, Margaret Mead. Later, he shows how patterns of relationship and communication exist at a ‘higher,’ or meta-level, to those of biophysical interaction. Perceptions of ‘difference’ and the ‘difference that makes a difference’ create contexts for interpersonal communication; these ‘mind-like’ characteristics are also apparent in the world of living systems, enabling species to co-evolve in a mutually supportive manner—unlike natural selection. One of his legacies is biosemiotics, which focuses on the ability of all organisms and all cells to respond to patterns, even in microorganisms like bacteria and viruses. All are semiotic, that is, they can interpret and develop meaningful preferences in their ordering of events. In ecology, his ‘post-genomic’ stance considers organism-plus-environment as the fundamental unit of life, and not the gene; in so doing he turns many notions of causality ‘upside-down.’ Bateson’s holism yields an ecological aesthetics, never achieved in any of the natural sciences, which underlines the moral divide between sustainable creativity and current biocide in planetary biodiversity.

The essays in this book explore how Veena Das’s work has been critically assimilated in the thinking and writing of a younger generation of anthropologists who have been deeply influenced by her work. Taking off from Das’s writing on pain as a call for acknowledgement, several essays explore how social sciences render pain, suffering and the claims of the other as part of an ethics of responsibility. The second theme of the volume is the co-constitution of the event and the everyday especially in the context of violence. Ethics as a form of attentiveness to the other, especially in the context of poverty, deprivation, and corrosion of everyday life appears in several of the essays. An important question that animates this volume is, What is the picture of thought in anthropological knowledge? Das’s concerns with the philosophy of the everyday and her efforts to make philosophical reasoning responsive to those for whom everyday life must be secured against the precarious conditions of their existence, resonate in several essays. The affinity between anthropology, philosophy, romanticism, and the literary is evident not only in the themes but also in the forms of writing. These affinities are reflected in a final set of essays that show how forms of knowing in art and in anthropology are related through the work these authors have done with painters, performance artists, and writers. The uniqueness of this book lies in the concept of intellectual inheritance as itself a form of thinking ethnographically.