“IN YOUR WRITING I AM EXISTED”: READING THE HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY VIA TEXTURES OF THE ORDINARY

• Autor(a) principal: Singh,Bhrigupati
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Sociologia & Antropologia
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2238-38752021000401079
• topic: History of anthropology; Veena Das; tragedy and comedy; Cavell; Structure and event

Abstract In this essay I try to suggest a non-teleological way of reading the history of anthropology, by placing Veena Das’s Textures of the ordinary (2020) in relation to her previous books, beginning with Structure and cognition: aspects of Hindu caste and ritual (1977). Rather than a teleological movement from structuralism to “post-structuralism” or “self-reflexive” work, I point to the continuation and transfiguration of the concepts of structure and event across Das’s different books, as a way of also imagining movements within social theory more broadly, without each successive “paradigm” having to dialectically negate its predecessor. Further, I ask what it means to age or to “mature” within a body of scholarly work, and how we might take an author to be growing simultaneously older and younger, if we take aging in thought not necessarily to be solely a question of chronology or teleology.