Veena das biography

Veena Das Curriculum Vitae (2018) Krieger-Eisenhower Professor Department of Anthropology The Johns Hopkins University 3400 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218 Phone: 410-­‐516-­‐0630 Email: veenadas@jhu.1977 Visiting Associate Professor, University of Chicago ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS 2011 (Fall) Member Academic Council, Johns Hopkins University 2001-2007 Member Academic Council, Johns Hopkins University 2001-2008 Chair, Department of Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University 1994-1997 Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Delhi 1995-1997 Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Delhi AWARDS AND HONORS 2018 Honorary Doctorate, Durham University, UK 2017 Distinguished Alumna Award, Delhi School of Economics. 2016. Honorary Doctorate, University of Bern 2014 Nessim Habif World Prize , University of Geneva 2014 Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship 2007 Fellow, Academy of Scientists of Developing countries (TWAS) 2001 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA. 2000 Honorary Doctorate in Letters Humaine, University of Chicago 1995 Anders Retzius Gold Medal of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography, the highest award of the Society 1991 University Grants Commission, Government of India National Lecturer, India. 1986 VKRA Rao Award for Outstanding Research in Social Sciences, ICSSR, Delhi 1975 G.S. Ghurye Award for Best Book in Sociology, University of Bombay NAMED LECTURES/ KEYNOTE ADDRESSES (selected since 1982) 2018 Invited Keynote Address, Swedish and Finnish Society of Anthropologists“ , Uppsala, March 20, “It is not that …”: Skepticism, Moral Insight, and Ordinary Realism 2018 “Keynote Address and Public Lecture, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, January 29 The Character of the Possible: Modality and Mood in the Genre of Ethnography 2017 Radhakamal Mukherjee Lecture, Indian Sociological Society, Lucknow India, November 12, “ The

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author or editor of ten books. Her latest book is entitled Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, 2007. Dr. Das has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the prestigious Andrez Retzius Award of the Swedish Society for Geography and Anthropology. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academy for Scientists of Developing Countries and has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2000, she taught at the New School University and for more than thirty years at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. Veena Das’s research covers a range of fields. She is passionately interested in the question of how ethnography generates concepts; how we might treat philosophical and literary traditions from India and other regions as generative of theoretical and practical understanding of the world; how to render the texture and contours of everyday life; and the way everyday and the event are joined together in the making of the normal and the critical. Her work on collective violence and urban transformations has appeared in many anthologies. 

Indian anthropologist

Veena Das,FBA (born 1945) in India is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her areas of theoretical specialisation include the anthropology of violence, social suffering, and the state. Das has received multiple international awards including the Ander Retzius Gold Medal, delivered the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture and was named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Education

Das studied at the Indraprastha College for Women and the Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi and taught there from 1967 to 2000. She completed her PhD in 1970 under the supervision of M. N. Srinivas from the Delhi School of Economics. She was professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research from 1997 to 2000, before moving to Johns Hopkins University, where she served as chair of the Department of Anthropology between 2001 and 2008.

Books

Her first book Structure 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 most recent book is Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (California University Press, 2006). As the title implies, Das sees violence not as an interruption of ordinary life but as something that is implicated in the ordinary. The philosopher Stanley Cavell has written a memorable foreword to the book in which he says that one way of reading it is as a compani

Sandra Laugier

Veena Das is an anthropologist of exceptional reputation, but for more than a decade she has also been a crucial commentator on Wittgenstein, especially as he is read in Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) and by philosophers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. She is in fact the most important scholar to inherit Stanley Cavell’s thought, whose variety of interests and themes covered the whole of human life, and it is only suitable that an anthropologist should be the one to do so. Das’s interest in language, in the life of words, in what makes them alive, is what connects her work most deeply to a tradition she is reviving in the most powerful and innovative way.

Starting with “Wittgenstein and Anthropology,” Das offers an original reading of Wittgenstein (and Austin), anchored in the concept of the ordinary and the “descent” into it. Das’s use of Cavell’s essay on passionate and performative utterances is significant for its analysis of human expressiveness throughout the book. Das writes that Austin offers us a way to think of the fragility of human action and that the categories of misfire and abuse (used by Austin in connection with the felicity/infelicity of performative utterances) work to qualify action and its failures. As Austin says elsewhere, “you cannot abuse ordinary language without paying for it.”[1] And early on, Cavell too insisted on the abuse inflicted on language by philosophers.[2]

The relation of use to abuse (a word absent in Wittgenstein) is an important connection between OLP and anthropology. How can language itself be abused (our words and expressions) – who is the abuser? OLP turns out to be a philosophy of non-violence in/to language. Cavell opposes awareness and attention (care) to abuse of language.

Connecting these thoughts to her ethnography, Das offers original analyses of Wittgenstein, by finding their articulation in ordinary situations and storie