Ethics as the Expression of Life as a Whole

Veena Das

This essay is an attempt to think how we might inherit a

particular thought present among a lineage of philosophers

among whom I count Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Cora

Diamond, Sandra Laugier, and Paola Marratti1. The thought is

as simple as it is terrifying and it is that we cannot

separate any particular domain of life as corresponding to

something like the pursuit of the good, or of freedom, or of

justice Instead of separating these named virtues as ideals

that we pursue through ethical acts, we might think of

ethics as embedded in the most ordinary of actions which

might also as easily be transfigured into a negation of

ethics. It is the way the ethical and unethical might be

knotted together that asks for a different kind of

1 I am indebted to Paola Marratti and Sandra Laugier for their inspiring conversations on the ordinary. I have learntmuch form my engagements on the question of life from Bhrigupati Singh, Sidharthan Maunaguru, Michael Jackson, Marco Motta, Andrew Brandel, Nayanika Mookherjee, Clara Han, and Michael Puett The paper is dedicated to ma and baba – Rajrajeswari Das and Samarendra Kumar Das -in lovingmemory.

description of forms of life than either by enumeration of

virtues or evaluations of particular actions. What might

such a description entail?

There is a healthy and vigorous debate in anthropology as to

whether ethics is best seen at the moments when the ordinary

routines of life break down thus making ethical dilemmas

visible, or whether ethics are woven into forms of life and

anthropology’s task is to make this weave of life visible –

to disclose what it looks like. There is a palpable anxiety

among many anthropologists that if we cannot produce

external agreed upon criteria through which we might be able

to distinguish and judge what is ethical and what is

unethical, moral life and anthropological itself will fall

into a limbo. There is particular picture of the

anthropologist as akin to the judge in a court of law that

makes many anthropologists privilege the moments when their

informants can stand outside the flux of life and pronounce

judgments on the conduct of their fellow beings. However, as

Sainsbury (1996) argues persuasively, the assumption that

concepts, like sets, have sharp boundaries fails us

precisely at the moment when moral issues are at stake. For

instance, in some debates on abortion, he says, one can feel

a real sense of shock at the realization that there is no

set of persons with close boundaries: the concept person is

vague at just that relevant point. Let us take a different

way of thinking of ethics, as an expression of our “being-

with”. 2

Take Cora Diamond’s idea of ethics:

We may then think that there is thought and talk that

has as its subject matter what the good life is for

human beings, or what principles or actions we should

accept; so then philosophical ethics will be

philosophy of that area of thought and talk. But you

do not have to think that; and Wittgenstein rejects

that conception of ethics. Just as logic is not, for

Wittgenstein, a particular subject with its own body

of truths, but penetrates all thought, so ethics has

2 In its simplest formulation, being- with might be seen in Heidegger’s (1967) terms as “dwelling alongside”. For an anthropological formulation of how we might think of ethics as a mode of being-with, see al-Mohammad ( 2010 ).

no particular subject matter; rather, an ethical

sprit, an attitude to the world and life, can

penetrate any world and thought. So the contrast I

want is between ethics conceived as a sphere of

discourse among others in contrast with ethics tied to

everything there is or can be, the world as a whole, life.

(Diamond 2000 ; 153, emphasis added).

In this essay, I want to render ethnographically what it

means to think of “world as a whole, life” - and if the

modification of life with the adjectival everyday – i.e.

“everyday life”, might provide an important lens with which

to take forward our notions of ethics, or rather, ethical

life, in anthropology. There has been considerable debate on

the feasibility of such a concept as “ordinary ethics” and I

engage some of this debate elsewhere (Das forthcoming) –

here my task is to ask what kind of imagination is needed to

make everyday life visible against the default position that

everyday is purely the site of routine and repetition. It is

not that I think that routine and repetition are unimportant

but I contest the idea that everyday life is made up simply

as the residue of these routines.

Imagining the Ordinary

In his essay on “Being Odd, Getting Even”, where he tries to

work out Descartes’ inheritance by the literary, as in

Emerson and Poe’s rendering of the question of self-

knowledge (hence of skepticism), Stanley Cavell( 1998)

makes explicit the task of imagining what picture of

intimacy, closeness, ordinariness we might conjure to think

of the everyday or the diurnal.

If some image of human intimacy, call it marriage, or

domestication, is [or has become available as] the

fictional equivalent of what the philosophers of

ordinary language understand as the ordinary, call

this the image of the everyday as the domestic, then

it stands to reason that the threat to the ordinary

that philosophy names skepticism should show up in

fiction’s favorite threats to forms of marriage,

namely in forms of melodrama and of tragedy . (Cavell

1998: 176)

Cavell goes on to explain that in his book, Pursuits of

Happiness (Cavell 1981)he is posing a question with regard to

this picture of human intimacy as to whether a pair in

romantic marriage who outside the idyllic world of Eden are

likely to accumulate hurts, pains, disappointments, can

nevertheless remain friends. In the case of Pursuits of

Happiness, Cavell’s answer was a “yes”, expressed in their

willingness to be remarried – that is, turn the

disappointments into a commitment to a future together

through mutual education in which the course of this

togetherness or the end in not given in advance. In the case

of his second book on film , Contesting Tears, the answer was a

“no” since the women in these melodramas prefer a life of

solitude and sometimes even touch madness in the attempt to

overcome the arrogation of their voice by a dominant male

figure (Cavell 1996).

The problem of what cannot show itself or shows itself

through forms other than that of revelation is a complex

one. For instance, Heidegger’s (1967 [1027]) notion of

appearance pairs showing with announcing – thus disease

cannot be seen but it announces itself through symptoms; or

time can never show itself except through its positive

emissaries through which one can track its work on bodies

or landscapes. While appearance seems a very important

concept for tracking how a particular modality – say that of

living as refugees – might be rendered anthropologically

(see especially Perdigon 2015) – the idea that everyday

life as modality has to be imagined (rather than logically

inferred) and that different images of the everyday will

render different ways in which being-together might be

described is central to the idea that everyday life is both

closest to us and the most distant from us.

If everyday life is a modality of living, as I claim, then

Cavell’s formulation provides a very good guide to the

perplexed as to what image of everyday might we conjure in

order to make explicit what the labour of the achievement of

everyday involves and what is it to fail in this

achievement? I take two ways of imagining the everyday – one

as a willing acceptance of repetition, everyday as

habituation; and the second as a mode of re-inhabitation3.

In both, one’s ethnography and one’s life- it often happens

that the significance of certain moments, or events, or

gestures, or expressions dawns on one only after a long

period. It is especially true for a project such as this one

that one learns to focus on details and if a larger story

emerges it does so only in relation to the details.

Habituation, Repetition, and Its Undercurrents

Traditional views of habit saw it is a flywheel of society –

its most precious conservative agent, as William James

(1890) put it. While one aspect of habit is certainly that

it is seen to fix our tastes and aptitudes, narrowing the

range of the possible (Ricouer 1966: 283), the emphasis on3 Since I have recently completed a fairly comprehensive paper on ordinary ethics in which I tried to plough through the ethnographic record in conjunction with my reading of the philosophers I mention here (Das forthcoming) – this paper might be seen as a companion piece in which I think again of some of my interlocutors and aspects of their livesin conjunction with these issues.

this aspect is not unrelated to the value we place on

durability. But durability implies some flexibility and

capacity for evolution – thus Ghassan Hage (2014) argues

that habit has a double aspect – that of the sedimentation

of experience on the one hand, and a generative capacity for

responsiveness to a particular milieu, on the other. I have

shown in an earlier essay on ordinary ethics that the

ability to counter the automation or mechanization of action

by attentiveness to small details within what looks like the

sameness of habit marks the ethical relation to the concrete

other within the everyday (Das 2012a). I showed how this

attentiveness was expressed in what looked like unremarkable

acts such as noticing the specificity of someone’s need, or

taste, or disposition and modifying a habitual action just a

little, or cultivating the small disciplines through which

care is dispersed within habitual actions. Similarly, Clara

Han (2012) showed how simple acts of kindness by neighbors

that might not even be sustained for long, might help a

family to cross a critical threshold in situations of

economic precarity (see Das 2013). Important as these

points are to contest the notion that habit is a sediment of

repeated actions as if humans were machines performing the

same actions without thought or will – I think I did not go

far enough in thinking that the creativity of everyday life

might lie not only in the small changes and forms of

attentiveness – but also in the volatility that might lie

just below the surface of habits. Cavell called the

combination of familiarity and strangeness of the domestic

as the uncanny of everyday life (Cavell 1998). In Poe’s

inheritance of Descartes, a sense of dread can overcome us

in the mere recounting of household events. Habit then

might be the form of human action in which we might

experience life as deeply familiar and at the same time find

it deeply strange, distant, and impersonal. Though I have

argued for many years now that everyday life is shadowed by

skepticism and that belief and doubt are aspects of each

other (Das 1998, 2007, 2012a), I have perhaps not

emphasized enough that the challenge is not to find a

solution to this problem of skepticism but to learn to

maintain it as part of everyday life, of habituation. I hope

the opportunity provided by the invitation to think of life

and the forces it exerts on us will help me to take these

thoughts further4.

A rotating fan, a hot summer afternoon, and a sister’s complaint

4 While I take from the expression “forms of life” the idea that form and life are two related dimensions – corresponding to the idea that the social and the natural constantly absorb each other, much of classical anthropologyconsidered life to be the mysterious force that can be tamedby rendering it under the rubric of the social (Das 1998, 2007). A classic discussion might be found in Durkheim: “I do indeed take  it to be obvious that social life depends onand bears the mark of its material base, just as the mental life of the individual depends on the brain and indeed on the whole body. But collective consciousness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological base, just as individual consciousness is something other than a mere product of the nervous system. If collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousnesses must occur. The product of this synthesis is a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that follow their own laws once they are born . They mutually attract one another, repel one another, fuse together, subdivide, and proliferate; and none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality. Indeed, the life thus unleashed enjoys such great independence that it sometimes plays about in forms that have no aim or utility of any kind, but only for the pleasure of affirming itself. I have shown that precisely this is often true of ritual activity and mythological thought (Durkheim 1965 [1912]:. 426). However notice that the “life unleashed” announces its independence from an “underlying reality” and has none other aim than affirming itself. These are precious moments in the text but are tamed through an overbearing sense that

An episode that makes a very brief appearance in Life and Words:

Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Das 2007) is of a woman

who on her deathbed had said to no one in particular, “do

not cover me in a shroud sent from my brother’s house.” I

described how such moments when an injunction come unbidden

and unanticipated by anyone, throw the relatives of the

dying person in a terrible bind. Should they respect the

last wishes of the person? But then dying people are known

to be vulnerable to the mischief of spirits and ghosts – was

it the woman’s own voice that spoke? It is a terrible insult

to the natal family of a woman to refuse this last gift that

proclaims the conclusion of a long gift-giving relationship

between the natal family of a woman and her, and its

inheritance by the next generation. Indeed, the mourning

rituals assign a central place to the brother, or the

mother’s brother of someone who has died. According to Hindu

notions of marriage a girl is gifted by her father to her

husband and the gift-giving relation continues even beyond

her death in the special obligations a mother’s brother

ultimately the social is itself the ground of all being.

inherits toward his sister’s children (Das 1976a; Trautman

1990). The contamination of this “pure” relation between

brother and sister either through greed or through the

corrosion of all relations with the passage of time is a

cultural theme that finds expression in everyday talk, in

soap operas and at least till the last decade, in many Hindi

films (see for instance Das 1976; Trawick 1990, Bennett

1983). Yet a dying wish to deny the brother the right to

provide a shroud was so dramatic that it stunned everyone

but no one was inclined to talk about it.

I cannot therefore construct this story through an archive

of lengthy narrative interviews – but because I had

interacted with Sita’s (the woman’s) family for many years,

I remember many instances of small talk in which an

underlying current of grudges she bore against her brother

and his family would surface and disappear . One day in a

hot summer afternoon, in 1972, as we sat in a small room in

her brother’s house fanning ourselves despite the slow

rotating ceiling fan that was dispersing the hot air all

over the room , she said, – your uncle ji ( ji is an

honorific word (referring to her brother) has never ever

acknowledged that we (her husband and she) had gifted that

fan when your uncle ji first moved to Delhi. I had heard

similar complaints often about various relatives since this

topic was a staple of conversations among women. In this

case after a few years of her brother moving to Delhi from a

small town, her own husband (an army officer) had died of a

heart attack. So my sense was that she had lost the sheen

of a privileged relative and resented the fact that she was

always on the verge of an economic breakdown. It was only

after years of hardship that her two sons were finally able

to complete their education and get paying jobs – even then

she never got the respect that she thought was her due from

her sons’ respective wives.

Sita did not ever let herself get into open fights with her

brother or, later her sons. She maintained a stance of self-

sufficiency slowly spending more and more time as she grew

older in an ashram in Vrindavan – the holy town of Krishna

and Radha. There were many stories of resentments that were

that were woven into the texture of these relations that

were on the surface marked by civility, adherence to the

rhythms and routines of everyday life. Only inert objects –

the fan, an elaborately embroidered phulkari ( a heavy,

colorful, scarf) she had crafted “with her own hands” , a

set of cushion covers, were allowed to be brought into

conversations with sense of something wrong, or rather

something not being quite right – within Sita’s

relationships. Thus for instance, do you think this cushion

cover is too bright for the Delhi heat? Do you feel these

days children do not like to eat home made biscuits? It was

in these general third person utterances that one was

invited to identify which second person was being addressed

– may be my brother’s wife tucks away the cushion behind

other cushions because it is too bright (the overt

explanation though tinged with irony) but the message to be

inferred was that no one in her brother’s house wanted to

acknowledge her gifts properly – hence acknowledge her . I

have called these kinds of exchanges as the aesthetics of

kinship (Das 2012a) – they maintain the equanimity of a

willing acceptance of everyday life while also gnawing away

at the hinges on which it moves.

In fact there is a name in Punjabi for such emotions,

expressing a combination of hurt and feelings of neglect and

the genre of complaint that I have described – it is known

as “gila” and could be translated in the first instance as

reproach. Often coupled with two other Urdu terms – shikwa

(reproach) and shikayat, (complaint) - these terms mark

different circles of intimacy. Thus one might express gila

and shikwa against one’s close relatives, one’s lover and on

occasion against one’s own heart – shikayat has a more

formal connotation. Thus I might say that the child

complained to the teacher (shikayat ki) , one would not say gila

kiya, , unless close intimacy had developed between the two.

A cursory look at frequently cited Urdu couplets or Punjabi

and Hindi songs reveal usages such as the following.

Nahin shikwa mujhe koi bewafai ka hargiz

Gila to tab ho jo tune kisi se bhi nibhai ho

I complain not, ever, against your faithlessness

Reproaches there would be if you had kept faith with anyone

In lover’s talk one might express gila – reproach, against

the eyes of the beloved for turning away from the lover’s

face, or against one’s own heart for falling in love with a

cruel beloved.

The literary uses capture the rhythms of intimacy, in which

to express a reproach is also to express love, rather, the

reproach is a particular moment in the give and take of love.

In one of the families I know, in which a close relative had

complained to another relative that when she was sick, her

sister-in-law had not come to visit her in the hospital, a

fight developed when the sister-in-law refused to come out

of her room to greet the said relative on a subsequent

occasion. Matters escalated till the two women stopped

speaking to each other ( bol chaal band ho gayi). Explaining her

action of having complained about her sister-in-law, which

set the turbulence in their relation and in time came to

implicate a whole segment of the kinship group, the woman

said – apne samajh ke hi ta gila kitta si na – regarding her as my own

did I express the reproach – no? In her eyes, the sister-

in-law had betrayed the intimacy twice over – firstly by not

visiting her in hospital, and secondly, by not even

recognizing that her reproach was an expression of

disappointment in love – not an impersonal complaint or a

complaint born of enmity.

Sita was not as close to me as some other women – so I was

only allowed to register these small signs of how close

relations were being corroded though there were no large

villains – only the sadness of a fate that had made a once

proud sister and mother into the relative who came close to

receiving charity from her close kin. I had thought that

kinship moved here on the established grids of mutual

visits, gifts on the appropriate occasions, gossip, a

gathering of news about all the dispersed kin – in other

words life as usual. If I had sensed the undercurrent of

disappointment in the substance of the relationships in

Sita’s life, I did not fathom the extent of her anger

against her brother till the words denying him his right to

offer her a shroud were uttered. I too felt a disappointment

with myself. I had thought that I was almost a family

member but the apparent routines and habits of this family

had hidden from me the sadness and the slow growing apart

that was going to shred the delicate weave of their

relations. In retrospect Sita had died when I was in my

thirties and perhaps it was only with the passage of time

that I would become someone to whom women would trust their

stories much more. At least I learnt that familiarity could

dull you toward the strangeness that is happening right

before your eyes.

Many years later, my mother-in-law was dying in the ICU of a

hospital in Kolkatta. I became panic stricken when she

suddenly began to demand cigarettes and a bottle of wine –

putting a closed fist on her mouth as she said – phoo phoo

korbo – blowing imaginary smoke and taking an imaginary

bottle to her mouth. Theoretically I knew about the ICU

produced psychosis – but I did not want any relative to be

in the vicinity of my mother-in –law in case, I told myself,

they infer all kinds of wrong things about her. My mother-

in-law was a very pious person – rules about purity and

pollution were second nature to her. We were never allowed

to touch eggs and then touch milk without first washing our

hands to prevent the transmission of pollution. I consulted

a priest who advised me to take a small piece of fruit, have

her touch it, and then feed it to a cow. I smuggled a small

apple in the folds of my sari, I touched her hand to the

fruit and then in our street in Kolkatta we approached a

neighbor who kept a milch cow in the backyard. The cow ate

the fruit; we offered prayers to the nearby Kali temple; my

mother-in-law lost her cravings and died as much of a

peaceful death as is possible in an ICU.

I talked to the priest later and asked him why had she

expressed such desires – she who had not stepped out of the

house since my father-in-law died, she who had said that

with his death all color had gone out of her life when urged

by us to wear, not the stark white of a widow’s sari, but

one with a slight dark border. The priest was very hesitant

to say much but he indicated that one must be very careful

that at the time of death a dark force might enter the body

and thus one becomes the bearer of that entity’s desires –

bound to it, rather than to one’s own karmas and one’s one

own samskaras (dispositions) 5. It is the ritual work

performed by the mourners that assures a safe passage to the

dying (Das 1976, Parry 1994). Throughout the liminal period

when the dead person takes on the form of a preta (ghost) we

were enjoined to observe many taboos to protect her and to

protect ourselves. Even then, till the mourning period was

over, the rituals in which she was named referred to her by

adding the modifier preta (ghost) to her name and I felt

crushed by the sound of the word preta added to her name. A

kindly relative tried to reassure me that the preta was like

the holy ghost – not a bad spirit for he saw how I shrunk

every time the word was pronounced. I have seen many deaths

but unlike the sanitized versions in the reformed rituals of

the Arya Samaj, which are the favored rituals of my side of5 How to render the vocabulary used in discussions of the occult (outside the specialized vocabulary of tantra) is difficult because naming the entities risks bringing them being. I have used the generic term “dark forces” because the emphasis in defining such terms is on verbs rather than nouns. Verbs of forcible possession, dispossession, actions performed in trance – describe better what it is to be in the grip of a ghostly existence than nouns – corresponding to the idea that words have force (not just meaning) as in Austin (1962)

the family, the rituals conducted according to orthodox

Hindu custom were brutal. Not all one’s studies of texts on

the rituals of death, the Garuda Purana or the Antyeshti

Samskara – can protect one from the feeling of the brutality

and the cruelty with which one is made to face death when it

comes to the singularity of the life that has been

extinguished. But worse perhaps is the idea that a single

sentence on your deathbed, or a single gesture could negate

what your life was about and it is only the subtle

understandings with others – the work of a life time – that

could protect you from these kinds of unforeseen, unbidden,

expressions that might come out of your mouth but you would

want to think, are not yours. This was the first meaning of

the volatility of routines and habits that far from making

you into mechanized automations can lay bare the fragility

of the accord you might have had with the sense of your life

as a whole.

In her insightful commentary on Cavell’s (2010)

philosophical autobiography, Little Did I Know , Paola Marratti

(2011) makes the following observation:

What I would like to call attention to is [the] idea

that our need for prophecy does not come from the

hidden nature of the future, but from our natural,

others would say existential, incapacity to know what

is plainly in front of us: that we live in time, that

we live in the world, that we live with others—in

peace and on blood. What is truly mysterious, then, is

not the content of such truths, but why they are and

remain surprising to us; the problem of knowledge they

raise, therefore, is not how knowledge can

successfully explore, conceptualize, or categorize the

world and its objects (humans included), but how

knowledge eludes us, how we manage not to know what in

a sense we cannot fail to know. (Marratti 2011: 954)

One aspect of this denial of what is before our eyes is a

failure of acknowledgement (to use Cavell’s vocabulary)– the

simple acceptance of the flesh and blood character of the

concrete other with whom everyday life is lived. My

reflections on terms such as gila and shikwa and the way

they are used in kinship relations points to the

acknowledgement of the pains and hurts (outside of Eden or

in the purer times than that of the present degenerate age

of kaliyuga in Hindu notions of time) that engaging with the

concrete other entail. Our sense of life as a whole as

ethical, involves us in finding ways of containing these

disappointments and not allowing them to be converted into a

curse on the world. A life with the other as Michael

Jackson (1998) notes, consists of a myriad of a minor

moments of shared happiness and sympathetic sorrow, of

affection and disaffection, of coming together and moving

apart, so that what emerged is not a synthesis to which one

can assign a name or pin down as something one can know.

There is no single key that will open the secret of what

inhibiting a life together has meant in terms of habits,

routines, repetitions, and their undercurrents which are

continuously addressed and contained through such work as

that of minor repairs – the way women darn tears in garments

with the delicate placing of one thread on another.

The other aspect of opaqueness as revealed by the dying

statements of the two women is that what one learns about

oneself surprises one. Is the placement of habit and

routines at the heart of everyday life also a way of

concealment of the way in which we cannot bring ourselves to

actually experience that which is unfolding in our own

story? How is this opacity of experience tied to the opacity

of the self?

The Opacity of the Self: Life and its Accords

In a justly famous paragraph on his inability to mourn the

death of his son, Waldo, Emerson wrote:

There are moods in which we court suffering, in the

hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp

peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be

scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief

has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That,

like all the rest, it plays about the surface, and

never, introduces me into the reality, for contact

with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons

and lovers… In the death of my son, now more than two

years old, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, no

more. It cannot get it nearer to me (Emerson 1969

[1844]: 472-473)

It appears astonishing that Emerson is mourning here the

loss of his ability to experience reality rather than the

loss of the son. If, however, the first half of the essay is

about the vertigo the author feels as if grief is to be

suffered without feeling it, the rest of the essay is about

the various losses he enumerates – most of all our inability

to be certain that we stand on sure ground, that we touch

experience (Cameron 2007). Cameron argues in her insightful

essay on this topic that grief occasioned by the death of

the author’s first child begets the other losses enumerated

in the essay. Mourning seems to do its work here, according

to Cameron, in the manner in which grief initially attached

to a single experience comes to pervade all experience in an

impersonal manner. She also reads Emerson’s references to

the body as macerating, as wasting away, as signifying the

inability to speak of the death of the child, as the

experience of the death of the self.

In a different reading of the same essay, Stanley Cavell

argues that accompanying the sense of alienation from his

own experience, there is also the pervasive sense of the

essay as steeped in the imagery of birth. Cavell then

detects an even darker shade of grief when he wonders if the

analogies to sacrifice – say in Isaac’s promised death to

Abraham’s mission – might raise for Emerson the question –

“Must I take Waldo’s death as a sacrifice (a “martyrdom” he

says thinking of Osiris?) to my transformation?” When

Emerson says that grief has nothing to teach me, he is

overcoming an illusion that any publicly available

institutions such as religion could offer consolation.

“Nothing is left now but death” – the issue is not that he

does not know how to go on but to make sense of the fact

that he does go on. In this reengagement or rather re-

inhabitation of life, experience slips away from hands that

cannot clutch at it (as if language has difficulty reaching

phenomena , leave aside clutching it. “ (Cavell 2003: 118).

I will not take up the philosophical register of this essay

– especially Cavell’s argument that out of this inability to

touch experience is born the philosopher father’s birth into

philosophy – but instead, ask, what does it mean that we

might be fenced off from our own experience of loss?

One of the most compelling accounts of suffering and

responsiveness I have read in recent years is an ethnography

of African American families by Cheryl Mattingly ( 2014).

These are families living and caring for their terminally

ill children, facing their deaths, and taking on

responsibilities for their care in the face of formidable

obstacles. Mattingly characterizes the theoretical frame of

her book as that of a first person virtue ethics. She

explains that by a first person virtue ethics she means that

the aspirations of the families for a good life are not

something that these care takers know in a “third person

sort of way” as moral truths that are out in the world but

that these are commitments and perspectives they have come

to give themselves (cf. Mahmood 2004). In the accounts of

her interviews with parents we become witness to how a woman

or a family will keep alive a hope for a child against all

odds and how the singularity of a child’s life, even if the

child has become in medical parlance, “a vegetable”, is

cherished through other metaphors ( if she is a vegetable,

we will be her garden) and other stories of their life

together. The descriptions are contrasted with a third

person perspective, such as that of a health worker who

might have a different take on the situation of a terminally

ill child on the basis of say, clinical prognosis. Between

the objective knowledge of the health care worker and her

mode of speaking and the way families strive to give

expression to the value of this life for them, Mattingly

finds that ethics is not only a matter of obligations that

the families inherit but also of experiments that they

conduct in the face of tremendous uncertainty and sorrow –

an image evoked by the term “moral laboratories” in the

title.

Yet I suggest that there are two ‘background conditions”

that inform Mattingly’s theorization of what she frames as

“virtue ethics” and that cannot be characterized in a

straight forward way as constituting a first-person

perspective. First, the stories she chooses to elaborate on

are those in which a redemptive story seems to be providing

a dominant frame. Thus parents who recreate themselves from

a state of moral depravity (addiction, aimless violence,

indifference) to a state of moral plenitude, are given a

voice in the text because they are understandingly the ones

she admires and whom she befriended. There are others within

the family who are not “up to the task” as Mattingly puts it

and for whom she seems to have less sympathy. I wonder how

making their stories appear in the text in whatever manner

might have complicated the picture. Second, the plot lines

as Mattingly convincingly shows seem to resonate with

Christian narratives of the conversion of the sinner as does

the figure of Jesus as the redeemer How do these

individual stories then get molded through the available

genres? Put differently, how are third person perspectives

absorbed in the first person perspectives? What is the

struggle of identifying what is my voice among the various

voices that might live within me? My point is not that a

first person perspective would have expunged all voices that

come from the outside – but perhaps we need to dwell more

explicitly on how I, the singular person, finds herself in

the dominant storeis of her culture; equally important is

the question of how do some voices retain the signs of

their otherness? For Emerson, the consolations that his

culture provided were no consolations at all – why do third

person stories that we might absorb simply by being part of

that culture sometimes fail us?

I might recall here the story of Billu, one of he persons

who figures in my book on affliction (see Das 2015). I

describe there how availability of new medical technologies

with a mixture of state patronage and the clientelism of

social relations expands kinship obligations for the poor.

Billu responded to his brother’s dire condition of kidney

failure by putting enormous resources into his survival.

Even then, as the facts of what a transplant entailed in

terms of post surgery care and cost of immunosuppressant

drugs began to slowly dawn on him, he was caught into a

terrible swirl of emotions on how to balance the obligations

to his young children and the demands of the brother to whom

he felt obligated to respond. I describe how the moral is

made occult (so to say) in the appearance of a goddess whose

identity is never clear and who seems like a displaced

goddess from the village. It is the commands that the

goddess puts on him that make him withdraw somewhat,

narrowing his circle of obligations – his brother died

before he could receive a kidney but for Billu he had

already failed his brother in choosing to put his resources

into the survival of his elder son although under the

command of the goddess. Eclipsed in his story was also the

death of a newborn son as he could not pay much attention to

his wife and the event of birth – the complicated strands of

the story reflect the complicated strands of these lives.

In contrast to the parents who could receive sustenance from

aligning their moral projects with those of the Church and

the love of Jesus that Mattingly describes, in this case

we might say that the moral is made occult – it reflects the

fact that no redeeming story becomes available. A first

person perspective, if it implies that Billu is in command

over his story, is belied by his confusing statements and

the unstable, unknowable character of the goddess. If I

might loop back to my words:

The events that cause his life to become a question to

him [Billu] include human and nonhuman forces, both

the potentiality of organ transplants and the commands

of the deity in white [the goddess]… In his visions,

Billu was confronted with two different modalities in

which the occult world made its presence felt in the

world of the living. In one modality, the dead seem to

have entailments in the actual world. They had a

history that connected them with the living in which

love, betrayal, failed promises, and unrealized hopes

provide some guidance to the living on how to

interpret the sightings or hearings with which the

living are confronted. Error and doubt are as much a

part of this experience as belief, a reminder of the

vulnerability to which all human action is subject …

The modality of the lady in white was different …

[she] could not be fully assimilated with gods,

goddesses, or spirits, whose mythologies, forms of

rituals, or character were fully known. In this sense

these emergent beings were like the emergent

technologies whose form was transfigured, as they were

detached from the places in which they properly

belong. (Das 2015: 130-31)

Even though the families in Mattingly’s book who were

struggling with new technologies of “keeping alive” were

faced with as much uncertainty as Billu and other

protagonists of my fieldwork were – I suspect that there is

a subtle difference in the conceptualization of the everyday

in Mattingly and my work that makes us end at different

places. I have an acute sense of the “unhomely ” within the

scene of the domestic – even though I also think of the

everyday as the space of re-inhabitation and second chances.

At one point in her discussion, Mattingly states that in the

funeral orations on the occasion of the violent death of a

young man, a gang member and friend of the youth , says

repeatedly , the world is a cold, cruel place. Mattingly

goes on to say that, ‘Even the praise hymns sounded

anguished. Yet, the response of families like Leroy’s does

not reflect the resigned despair that Daniel Valentine

(1996) documents among the Sri Lankans, or that Scheper-

Hughes (1993) observes among destitute Brazilian mothers who

have come to accept the inevitable deaths of children

“without weeping”’ (Mattingly 2014:192). Perhaps Mattingly

might have leant more of her ear to such resigned despair

among family members who were “not up to the task”? Perhaps

the braiding of the stories of those who achieve some moral

satisfaction and those like Billu, who could not sustain a

desire to care well for the sick and the dying, might find

that numbing and absenting of the self that Emerson

describes

It seems to me that what is distinctive in the stories of

parents Mattingly describes with such compassion and tact,

who found the resources within the Christian tradition to

let themselves experience the tragedies that were unfolding

in their lives, was the presence of the second person – the

child toward whom the stories are oriented – a fact that

Mattingly never loses sight of ethnographically – but

passes over in her theoretical discussion since the first

person and third person perspectives are brought into

conversation but not the mediation of the second person in

her theoretical structure6.

The First Person or the Self as Opaque

It might be helpful here to consider the classic paper by

Elizabeth Anscombe (1981 [1975]) on the first person and its

opacity. While we are used to thinking of the triadic

structure of personal pronouns as if the three terms were

symmetrical and indeed, while “I” functions syntactically

like a proper name, Anscombe contends that it is not easy to

know what “I” stands for - the argument is deeper than the6 It is not that Mattingly does not touch on these complexities. Thus, in a crucial passage, she writes, ‘ Thisis not to suggest that that our experiences are in any simple sense clearly available to us or give us an unquestioned understanding of what presents itself…What’s more, Lear comments, we have what he calls an “ethical fantasy life,” an ‘”inchoate sense that there is a remainderto life, something that is not captured in life as it is so far experienced”. .. This experiential givenness, in all itsshadowy complexity, can be contrasted with a “third person perspective” that begins with the categories themselves.’ (Mattingly 2014:13) But the issue is more difficult than that of the contrast between a shadowy experiential complexity of the first person and the categorical clarity of the third person – for missing in this account is the second person.

idea that I is a shifter – i.e. depending on context it can

stand for one or the other person. Anscombe offers a thought

experiment - the import of the thought experiment as I

understand it is that I know myself in a third person kind

of way – i.e. I know that I have this name, I can give you

the name of my school, or many other facts of this kind.

However, if it comes to reporting if I am in pain, or how I

feel about the beggar in the street to which I referred

earlier, or to the testimony I give about myself, I do not

observe myself and then infer that this is how I feel. If I

characterize these activities as self-reporting then what

kind of self is the self on which I am reporting– it is

after all not one object among others – for instance, I

cannot envisage the possibility of laying aside my self

somewhere and then searching here and there to find it. So

what does it mean that in staging the doubts on how do I

know that I exist – Descartes used the first person – i.e.

not how do I know that the world exists but how do I know I

exist? Famously, Descartes did not find the proof of his

existence in the fact that he has a body but in something

like a mind or a soul. I must postpone for another occasion

a detailed discussion of how such perplexities about the

existence of the self are dramatized in Buddhist and Hindu

texts but I do wish to point out that these matters are not

simply matters of cultural differences but arise in the

perplexities of human life. Just as Locke (1995 [1690] )

asked if the I remains the same at the inception of an act

(I am doing it) and when the act was done – these texts are

full of examples about the continuity and stability of the

self, the place of the you in defining me, not just a

someone who has these publicly recognizable characteristics

but as challenging me to get a deeper sense of who I am.

As Anscombe puts is: “Thus we find that if I is a referring

expression, then Descartes was right in what the referent

was. His position has, however, the intolerable difficulty

of requiring an identification of the same referent in

different “I” thoughts. (This led Russell to speak of ‘short

term selves’) (Anscombe 1962: 31)

Of-course short-term selves would not be acceptable as a

defense in a court of law but even in a court of law there

is some recognition that the expressions and actions that

come out of me might not be strictly mine on certain

occasions as in passion crimes or in the case of serious

mental illness when we are sometimes moved to say – it is

not the person who is speaking but the disease which is

speaking. The same thought might be applied in ritual

contexts when I might be dispossessed of myself by a spirit

(Lambek) or I might give myself on lease to another (the

hotri priest in the vedic sacrifice) for the duration of the

ritual (Das 1983) . In the famous dice scene in the

Mahabharata that Hiletebeitel (2001) has examined in detail,

when Yudhishtihira, the protagonist stakes his wife, the

princess Druapadi, in a final desperate bid and loses her,

she is dragged to the court in a disheveled condition. The

question she has for the assembly is – had the king staked

himself before he staked me – in other words, was he in

possession of himself? I have elsewhere examined how her

question silences the most profound proponents of the dharma

(dharma becomes mute, as I put it ) and thus her question

looms over the entire text making the text itself into an

argument with the gods (Das 2012b).

Would it make a difference to the narration of individual

lives that the pressure of the cosmological or mythical in a

world that inherits these kinds of sensitivities focuses on

the impossibility of dharma, rather than on redemption

narratives through the grace of a Jesus like figure or

through aligning oneself through a leap of fate to a figure

like Saint Paul (Badiou ; Robbins). I do not wish to suggest

that there is only one possibility of self-formation in any

particular cultural milieu - stories about saints, gurus,

and divine grace abound in the Hindu texts and in lives -

but perhaps we need to develop and sharpen these differences

as heuristic exercises (if nothing else) in order to see how

something like a triadic structure of personal pronouns that

seems like a morally neutral grammatical form might be

embedded in a cosmology that in turn give a different moral

coloring to our ideas of what is the self in relation to the

world, or how life grows and dismantles our selves.

I offer one example of this thought experiment on the

grammatical structure of personhood, though I cannot

elaborate it in more detail here. Based on his studies of

Indo-European, Benveniste (1971a and 1971b) famously argued

that that the first and second person stand respectively for

the speaker of the discourse and his or her addressee. The

dialogical context was central for Benveniste for an

understanding of the grammatical person – thus he was able

to argue that the so-called third person, one who was spoken

about was in certain respects a non-person since he or she

was not indexed as a participant in the dialogical scene7.

The terms first person, second person, and third person,

seem to indicate relative distance from the speaker or

enunciator of discourse – so it is intriguing to see that in

Sanskrit the terms are utttam purusha (the supreme person –

though sometimes translated as the last person), madhyam

purusha ( the intermediary – or one who is in-between) and

pratham purusha ( first person) – these designate

respectively, the agent of speech, the listener and the one7 Greg Urban (1989) offers a modification of Benveniste, with regard to his theory of referential indexicality arguing that in narrative discourse, I is the relation between the reported “I” and the referential “I”. However, Urban seems to have missed the deeper existential issues in the discussion of the first person.

spoken about who has the quality of being “first” because he

or she can be brought into sentience through being

addressed. Are these terms arbitrary designations or do

they express a structure of aspirations?

Bettina Bäumer (2008) explains that in the canonical text,

Paratrisika, that Abhinavagupta, the great Kashmiri scholar

of tantra and of aesthetic theory (12th century) comments

on, the aspiration is to overcome the trichotomy of the

three persons. The exegetical context is the explanation of

the address of Bhairava (Shiva) to the Devi (the goddess) –

in the expression – srnu devi – listen devi. For my purpose

the most interesting aspect of the discussion is on the

reliance on the vocative - Shiva addresses devi as thou –

the second person (or the medium). An important point I want

to flag is that even in the dominant scheme of Panian

grammar in which the dialogical context of the grammatical

persons is not evident , the prathama purusha (the English

third person) has the nature of a remainder - that which is

left to be supplied after the supreme person (I)and the

intermediary or middle person (you) have been given their

grammatical specifications.8 Since the prathama purusha

(English third person) is nara or man – who is also

insentient within this cosmology unless addressed, we get

two conceptions of the English first person – the concrete I

that is enmeshed in ego (ahamkara) and hence is like the

insentient object and the “I” that becomes the enunciator of

discourse when incorporated in the fluid transactions of the

personal pronouns as they intersect and flow into each

8 Panini assigns the first and second person (designations according to English usage) on the basis of their co-occurrence with the pronouns asmad and yushmad, the abstractforms respectively of I and you , regardless of whether theyare mentioned or omitted in the utterance. The third personis assigned by default to the remaining cases – sheshe prathamah. Ishwar Kaul, the great Kashmiri grammarian who was the first person to provide a systematic treatise of the grammar of a vernacular language, used a dominant Panianframework but made brilliant innovations to render the specificity of Kashmiri not in terms of deviations but as aset of rules diagonal to the Panian rules (see Del Bon amd Vergiani 2008). In the case of the triadic structure of grammatical persons, he was probably influenced by Abhinavgupta for in his definition – the first (pratham), middle (madhyam) and the last (uttam) are determined by one who is not the person addressed, the person addressed, and the speaker – asrotr, srotr, vaktr bhedat (li. due to the difference between non-hearer, hearer, and speaker) the tantric frame of the dialogue between Shiva (the speaker) and Shakti ( the goddess who is addressed) is implicit.

other9.

Consider this passage: ‘That which appears even as “this”,

when addressed, becomes completely enveloped with the I-

feeling of the addressor. The “this” which is different from

the addressor, when addressed as ‘you” becomes shakti”

(cited in Bäumer 2008). Other examples of the fluidity of

the three persons are Kalidasa’s addressing of the mountains

in Meghaduta, - “listen, oh mountains” which when thus

addressed become a “you”. Conversely the “you” when

addressed in the reverential form – bhavan gauravah – the

honored one, becomes the third person. Finally in creating

the plural of the uttam purush (English first person) in co-

operative activity in which you and I are engaged – the you

is assimilated in the uttam pursuha as “we”. “You and I are

cooking” becomes “we are cooking”- showing the preeminence

of the “I”. This signals the thorny issue of the conditions

under which “we” is allowed to subsume the “you” – a point I9 I realize that taking the Sanskrit terminology for the grammatical persons appears confusing to the English reader but I do want to press on the point that there is a physiognomy to the words – so we feel disconcerted that the first person is actually the third person in English – but this might be an interesting experience for the reader.

will briefly return to in the final concluding section.

The last point I want to make about the fluidity of the

three persons in the process of exchange is that the

discussion of grammar connects with the discussion on

aesthetic theory where the puzzle was to think how it is

that poetry can move me (as listener or reader) to

experience the emotions portrayed in a literary text as if

they were my emotions? Similarly in the texts on ritual the

puzzle was that one could interpret a third person way of

expressing an injunction as applying to oneself. Thus the

person of the sacrificer in the mimamsa texts is indicated

by the optative mood – svargakamah yajet – let one who is

desirous of heaven perform sacrifice (see Das 1983). How

does the one who is performing sacrifice recognize his

desire in this general injunction?

My purpose here is not to give a detailed analysis of these

texts on which there is already a formidable scholarship

(Bäumer 2008; Lawrence 2008; Haag-Bernede 2001) – but to

show that for all our exhortations in anthropology to be

open to alternate traditions of thought, we anthropologists,

have simply not cultivated the apparatus to engage these

alternate conceptions that might give thought a different

direction. An important question that might arise at this

point might be to ask if such discussions are now consigned

to textual traditions without much relevance to people’s

lives or if they were ever relevant to anyone except the

scholars? I could give considerable evidence from

literature that such a theoretical apparatus could

illuminate important moments in various texts but I will

give just one examples of the flow between the first person,

second person, and the third person (English terms) from my

fieldwork.

One of the minor local leaders in low-income neighborhood

that I have studied is a Muslim, living in a primarily Hindu

neighborhood who is considered adept in dealing with the

police and mediating with other officials in settling petty

crimes or infringements of law. Explaining how he came to

enjoy this position of influence, he said “I am their mama

(MB) Shakuni”. Shakuni is an interesting character in the

epic Mahabharata. The mother’s brother of the Duryodhana,

who refuses to yield the rightful share of the kingdom to

his cousins, the Pandavas – a refusal that ultimately leads

to the war of Kurukshetra and the annihilation of the

warrior lineages. Now it is clear from the text that

Duryodhana was constantly instigated to enlarge the theatre

of war by Shakuni – but it is not clear if this was because

Shakuni loved Duryodhana and his brothers and hence wanted

him to be the supreme king or if he hated the lineage of the

Kauravas from which Duryodhana hailed because Duryodhana’s

father, King Dhritrashtra, had imprisoned all of Shakuni’s

brothers in the past because of a misunderstanding, where

they all died of starvation. Shakuni survived because they

gave their meager rations to him to eat so that, he, the

cleverest of all of them, could survive and avenge the

injustice done to them.

In the utterance, “I am their mama Sakuni” – the Muslim

leader is the enunciator, the first person but we can see

the presence of the second person in the same way that the

honorific address to the second person was expressed through

the third person (their Shakuni mama) and Shakuni is the

distant figure of the myth – the third person in whom the

local leader recognizes himself from the angle of vision of

his neighbors. This complex sentence – a self disclosure –

also shows how the leader left me to comprehend as best as I

could , whether he loved his neighbors or hated them and

wanted their annihilation! I do not say that such modes of

speaking could not be analyzed by the application of more

familiar (in anthropology) forms of semiotic analyses but

unless we begin to actively deploy other frameworks of

thought we will not know in advance what forms of resonances

and differences we might detect.

A second example in which the vocative plays a crucial role

is the imaginary dialogue that my respondents often

performed when explaining a particular situation. I have

given a detailed exposition of Sanjeev Gupta’s (a local

leader) imaginary dialogue with an elected representative

when he was explaining to me why they did not invite any

elected representative on the occasion of the inauguration

of the new transformers in their locality. His point was

that electricity was legally sanctioned for their area

which was an “unauthorized colony” in legal parlance and

hence fell in the grey zone where the law was not clear

about their entitlements to basic services but the elected

representative had not offered any help to expedite the

process (see Das 2014). Gupta said “ aji sahib aap hote kaun hain

– oh sahib, who are you? “ with a string of further

admonishments, as if the elected representative was present

right before him. Similar use of the vocative in relation to

oneself is a very important literary device to express self-

criticism (see an example of Rama addressing his own right

arm with the contemptuous re re – as he prepares to kill the

learned Shudra sage who was to be punished for daring to

study the Vedas from the dramatist Bhavabhuti’s

Uttarramacharita in Das 2012b). Gupta is no grammarian but

I found that my attentiveness to these forms of speech was

guided by my familiarity with the discussions in such texts

as that of aesthetic or ritual theory. Such attention was in

turn vital for me to disclose the work done in everyday life

within which people could sometimes receive the place their

culture had made for them as a gift and sometimes as a

rebuke (cf. Feveret Saada 2015).

A further corollary of this discussion on the triadic

structure of grammatical persons and its grounding notions

of responsiveness, is that it makes evident or is seen to

disclose what is the natural dimension of life – this is a

point I will take up in the conclusion because it bears on

my understanding that what corresponds to life in the

expression – forms of life – is not simply the biological as

the given but the “natural” as both given and invented (see

Han and Das 2015). The modifier everyday allows us to see

this mutual imbrications of form and life. It also allows me

a different picture of theory and trace the resonances

between Emerson, Anscombe, Abhinvagupta and Ishwar Kaul,

placing them side by side as those from whom one could draw

equal inspiration.

Gifs and Rebukes

One of the lessons from the discussion in the last section I

learnt was that given the fact that experience is not

transparent to me – it is not always in the act of solitary

reflection that it becomes evident what I had experienced

but in the act of being addressed – I lose my insentience,

my numbness, because someone finds it worthwhile to address

me and to receive my words10. In an opposite move, though,

it may well be the case that my words are not so much

received as overwritten by another. How might we think of

the idea of life, if we thought of our culture as giving us

the gift of words through which I might find my voice; but

I might also turn against the collectivity to which I belong

as a sign of rebuke for having denied me my voice. Recall

the earlier discussion that even if I tell of my life in

first person it does not mean that the “I” is transparent to

itself 11.10 It should be evident to the reader that in this essay, the “I” who was speaking through the words of the grammarians was constituted through a responsiveness to them- the I who is speaking of the lessons learnt is an emergent self of the writer. 11 We might find interesting clues in the grammarians if we were able to see how the deeper structure of the divisions between the agents in terms of a hierarchy of sovereignty isexpressed in rules of declension of verbs. Beyond the dominant division of parasmaipada – action oriented to the other; and atmanaipada – action oriented to oneself – the rules on declension and augmentation of words through addition of grammatical particles show a complex understanding of persons and actions. I hope to be able to

One of the most insightful books on the slow shifts in

subjectivity through which one is “remade” into a member of

one’s society, often against one’s “natural” disposition, is

Jeanne Favret-Saada’s book, the Anti-Witch, that describes the

order of witchcraft and of the therapeutic process of

dewitching in the Bocage. One strand of Favret Saada’s

argument is that forms of bewitching and dewitching she

encountered are rooted in the property relations of farm

families and the lines of fissure these created. It is also

the case, though, that when some of her work became

available to a larger public, many people identified with

the diffused anxieties of having to deal with multiple

misfortunes in their lives and asked for guidance as to

where they could seek cure. Thus, what Favret-Saada

identifies in the therapeutic process is both bound to the

context of farm families in the Bocage but also goes beyond

this context to provide insights into the nature of everyday

life itself.12

attend to these issues in subsequent work. 12 Below, I reproduce my discussion of the book from a Foreword I wrote on the occasion of its English translation (Das 2015) but my interest in this author go back to nearly

In the Bocage, bewitching is a diagnosis, arrived at by

an expert (a dewitcher) through careful consideration of a

client’s description of a set of diffused anxieties that

result from a series of misfortunes affecting the productive

and reproductive capacities of the head of a farm family. It

is usually a friend or a neighbor who advises such a family

to seek help from a dewitcher. In some cases the dewitcher

might deduce that the misfortunes are not related to the

actions of a witch. In others he or she might diagnose the

problem as that of a spell cast by a witch and offer a

series of techniques to get rid of the spell on the affected

person, his family, and his farm. The bewitched is

inevitably the male head of the farm, for bewitching

primarily affects the legal person (in possession of those

capabilities proper to an owner) and only secondarily, the

twenty years when I began to teach her work and its profoundimplications for understanding everyday life. I benefitted particularly from discussions in a course on “Wittgenstein and Anthropology” that I taught at the New School Universityin 1997. I take this opportunity to thank the students for their insightful term papers and the discussion in class. I want to express my gratitude to Feveret Saada for not only the brilliance of her work but also for her grace in giving me confidence that my understanding of her book was on the right course.

psychological person as the private individual with

biographical particulars. The witch, then, is someone who

wants to take away the vital force necessary for survival

from the owner as head of the farm family.

Interestingly, when one finally reaches the dewitcher

(who could be using several techniques, including reading

tarot cards) for diagnosing what misfortunes await the farm

and how to mitigate these by turning the spell back, the

dewitcher uses techniques of speech to elicit the name of

the suspect from the head of the farm and his wife. There

is, however, much obfuscation present in the process. The

names of family members are blocked the moment anyone comes

close to mentioning them and suspicion slowly settles on a

neighbor (defined broadly). With masterly precision Favret-

Saada shows how the dewitcher uses a combination of

strategies ranging from the readings of the tarot cards to

the rapid deployment of her (the dewitcher’s) voice that

rises to a crescendo, bringing images before the mind that

flash with the speed of advertisements. Through this work

performed in the presence of the dewitcher to other work

performed in the house under her instructions, a shift in

subjectivities is attempted that will ultimately make the

head of the farm able to overcome the resistances that he

has built toward doing the psychic work necessary to make

him a proper head of the farm—not only legally, but in terms

of his own psychic reality. What is it that is required of

the head to truly embody his legal position—to come to terms

with the psychic realization that this is the kind of person

he must become? The legal regime of property requires that

one becomes an individual producer, autonomous and with full

rights of ownership, by “despoiling, eliminating, and

expropriating one’s immediate forebears, collateral kin, and

even one’s wife”—for claims of other men over the farm must

be extinguished and women must be placed within a position

of dependence within the farm economy. This violence, says

Favret-Saada, is legal and culturally acceptable. Yet, not

everyone has the psychological wherewithal to accomplish

this task. Dewitching then becomes a form of therapy in

which the dewitcher and the wife of the bewitched couple

come to establish a subtle cooperation in altering the

psychic reality of the reluctant farm head. There are

surprises that come one’s way when reading the precise

manner in which this is accomplished. However some features

are worth mentioning outright: there is, for example, the

“violence shifter,” a subtle play with the reading of the

tarot cards through which a channel is opened between the

bewitched couple’s wife and the imagination of evil that is

sucking away the vital force of the farm; there is the

pronouncement of the formula—“it worked”—that carries

illocutionary force; the changes that come about in forms of

sociality in which the farm head and his wife were initially

enmeshed with regard to the person suspected of doing the

witchcraft; and the many small acts of protection that must

be undertaken that are akin to housework and shift the

balance between husband and wife in the play of power. In

other words, there is a whole complex of techniques,

material objects, the tenor of the voice, etc. that are

brought together in the dewitching process that produce real

effects. In the shifting of the psychic reality the person

becomes more than himself, as Mme. Flora—the tarot card

reader with whom Favret-Saada worked—brings about a

distinction between the client as the person he is and what

he must become as he begins to embody the great principles

of law, justice, and truth. Dewitching, as she puts it, is

not just another technique of self-assertiveness; a certain

legal, but very real, violence is necessary to produce a

happy farmer.

Given that concepts are grounded in specific forms of

life, we might ask: how far are the practices of bewitching

and dewitching tied to the farm family alone; how much are

they expressions of the character of everyday life itself? ?

There are several moments in the text at which Favret-Saada

is unequivocal that these practices are grounded in the

legal realities of the farm family, and that once the

ubiquity of family farms as a unique mode of organizing

production and reproduction disappeared, these practices too

disappeared. Yet, it seems to me that braided in this voice

is a related claim in which we could, perhaps, detect a

profound depiction of the nature of social life, or the life

that the social takes. and its relation to anthropological

knowledge.

Consider that Favret-Saada’s own psychic reality did

not remain untouched by her fieldwork—there was no

possibility of her being able to live in the Bocage, show an

interest in witchcraft, and remain outside the order of

witchcraft. Unlike, let us say, Evans-Pritchard’s basic

axiom—viz. that we know witchcraft does not exist, hence

converting a supposed ontological error into a semiotic

truth (material causation substituted by efficient

causation)—Favret-Saada is not so sure of the ontological

status of the whole complex. This uncertainty is not unlike

the shadow of skepticism that falls on all such experiences

in everyday life. She thus deepens our understanding of what

“participation” means in the production of anthropological

knowledge and how our own certainties are staked in the

process of getting to know an other as a concrete being.

Favret-Saada’s analysis resonates deeply with my own

understanding of a common “family drama” I encountered in my

fieldwork wherein, upon the death of a father, the ascension

of the brother to the position of the head of a household

incites a melancholic sense of the inevitable unfolding of a

lethal conflict between brothers over property, succession,

and to even the right to propitiate ancestral deities. The

two great epics of the Hindus, the Ramayana and the

Mahabharata, attest to the power of this originary conflict

as a story enshrined in kinship, that is tragic but

inevitable; it provides a powerful commentary on the

conditions under which the social is produced. Mme. Flora’s

tarot cards are, indeed, far removed from Krishna’s chariot

on the eve of the battle of Kurukshetra in the Bhagvad Gita,

but Krishna’s lesson to Arjuna—who hesitates to be the one

who will kill his cousins and elders for the sake of the

righteousness of his cause—resonates (despite the great

difference in techniques) with the necessity of opening a

channel to the experience of evil in Bocagite dewitching.

The specific events through which we encounter the kinds of

risks that could drive us to madness are different, to be

sure, but Favret Saada forcefully reveals our common

vulnerability—not only to an external world of powerful

institutions that can and do inflict violence, but also to

the terrifying realization that therapy itself might be a

means for making us the instruments of that violence. This

is perhaps why the people she worked with insisted on a

distinction between dewitching and cure from both physical

and psychic ailments.

Perhaps it is the character of the everyday that such doubts

about who one is might be staged through a dramatization of

the unknown character of the other – or perhaps they surface

in relation to doubts I might entertain about who I am. The

occult is certainly an important arena in which such doubts

can be theatrically disclosed but the occult also

interrogates a narrow or restricted sense of what o

experience is mine. Let me illustrate this with the story of

Hafiz Mian, the reluctant healer I had befriended (see Das

2015).

Haiz Mian’s grandfather, a great amil (Muslim healer) who

could command the friendship of two pious jinn was

nevertheless stuck with a mischievous (if not evil) spirit

that by her name (Padmini) was clearly a Hindu. The stories

Hafiz Mian had heard about his grandfather, mainly from his

paternal aunt, seemed to suggest that his grandfather had

developed some affection toward this spirit who wanted to

apprentice herself to him and from this infatuation grew the

many hardships his family had to endure after his death.

What interests me in this story for present purposes is that

Hafiz Mian managed to tell much of his own story on the

burdens of inheriting amiliyat (the power to heal) in the

process of telling the story of his grandfather. But even

more, there was a social commentary built into the story of

the spirit that went back centuries on the complexities of

Hindu Muslim relations. Was the spirit then a product of a

social or collective imaginary? Or was there a sense that

the ethical imagination here went beyond what roles society

had prepared for him? Even if at the end it seemed that

Hafiz Mian had inherited the power to heal as part of his

social position and kinship connections, the struggle that

he related and his sense of foreboding that those close to

him were implicated in making precisely that terrible

history that the spirit of Padmini gave expression to ,

showed that we cannot interpret his life as a seamless

inheritance of social obligations. So how are forms and life

to be put together?

Concluding Thoughts: A Place to Rest

In his remarks on certainty Wittgenstein says :

“You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say

something unpredictable. I mean it is not based on grounds.

It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there – like

our life” (Wittgenstein 1969).

A form of life then rests on nothing more than that we

agree, or find ourselves agreeing, on the way that we size

up things or respond to what we encounter. In Stanley

Cavell’s perceptive remarks – nothing is deeper than the

fact or the extent of our agreement. But given that Cavell

also says that I cannot know in advance as to what I am in

accord with – we might say that agreement in a form of

life is not a matter settled once and for all but has to be

secured by the work that is done on the everyday in the

rhythms of its unraveling and its repair. (Wittgenstein

1969: Paragraph 559)

What makes it possible for agreements that make our mutual

life possible together is the fact that we share criteria.

In one of the most cited paragraphs of Cavell, he writes,

“We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we

are expected and expect others to project them in further

contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take

place( in particular not the grasping of universals, nor the

grasping of rules) … it is a vision a simple as it is

difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is)

terrifying. (Cavell 1962: 52)

I have tried to show that the terror that our agreements

will fail arises not only because our trust in others might

become frayed but because we too might become unknowable to

ourselves. In this sense the two dimensions of the

expressions forms of life are not simply the social as

agreed conventions (forms) and the natural as the given or

the biological (life) – rather there is also tussle and a

creativity in how we may invent a history “natural” to us –

Sandra Laugier (2005) calls it, after Cavell, the importance

of what is important to us. The dark side of this tussle is

that we might find ourselves withdrawing from the world as

the world withdraws from us.

No one writes with as much commitment to the idea of

“ordinary ethics” as Michael Lambek and yet on this point I

find that he too tames the darkness of the fact that our

shared criteria, our judgments, if you will, are not based

on rules or customs derived from conventions alone but must

grow from our forms of life and our fragile, tacit

agreements arrived through the fact of living together. But

first, let us listen to his words.

Examining action close up it is evident that how

things matter (that they can matter) is dependent on

(or can be described by) the criteria assigned and

applied to them. Each act and utterance is subject to

criteria that ascertain whether it is distinctive,

clear, complete, consistent, appropriate, etc.? John

Austin listed a series of felicity conditions that

must be met for any speech act to be successful. Each

of these conditions is subject to criteria. Thus, in

the UK, criteria for marriage include that bride and

groom have each reached the age of consent, are not

already married, appear together, utter their consent,

before a licenced official, etc. Moreover, each act

puts new criteria into place. Once you and I have been

introduced we should remember each other’s names and

continue to greet each time we encounter each other.

Not to do so could then be judged (discerned,

interpreted) as a fault. (Perhaps you do not matter to

me or perhaps being courteous or being thought

courteous does not matter to me—or perhaps I was

simply distracted or wasn’t sure it was you.) The

immediate judgment, to make eye contact, to speak, is

subject to subsequent judgment with respect to

courtesy, tact, sincerity, and so forth. (Lambek

forthcoming )

There are two different ideas that seem to me to be mixed

here. The first, that there are explicit legal (or

customary) criteria that must be met if a marriage is to be

successful or if the words of the priest – I declare you man

and wife – are to carry illocutionary force. The second is

the criteria that emerge not put of social conventions but

from our life as a human form of life. Thus what it is to

recognize another as human, and not just a circumstance

comes about in something as simple as an exchange of glances

– as in moments when I might exchange glances with a beggar

who is displaying a leprosy eaten limb to shame me into

giving something. . Cora Diamond( 1988), thus, puts

forward the simple but profound idea that it is part of the

concept of a human being that an immense amount of what

being human is, for us humans, can be present in a look that

passes between two people; it is also part of the concept

of the human that one’s humanity can equally be denied in a

look. As ethnographers we are not always able to discern

the significance of such moments when one’s humanity is

negated in a second person way, except in exceptional

circumstances - e.g., in the gaze of the Nazi official who

is sorting out which of the prisoners were ready to be sent

to the gas chamber. But everyday life throws such challenges

at us – for instance, in the example of the beggar I gave I

am repeatedly confronted by the realization that I do not

know how to look at him whether I end up giving money or

not. Something in his glance – that this is what a human

could become shames me in ways that I cannot describe. But

such feelings are not an evidence that the human is given –

they are evidence that these are forms human lives can take.

Much of anthropological writing beginning with Emile

Durkheim (1995[1912]) tried to tame the turbulence of life

by making it fit into the notion of society – thus he

defines his project studying life in elementary forms in

which it is reduced to its essential truths (p.7).

Wittgenstein teaches us that while form is essential for

making visible the notion of life, it is not the ground of

all being. My attempt has been to make of the last statement

not a metaphysical truth but something to be investigated

and imagined through my work on lives and texts. “ What we

do”, said Wittgenstein, is to bring words back from their

metaphysical to their everyday use.( Wittgenstein 1968;

paragraph number 116). The labor of actually doing that

perhaps belongs as much to anthropology as to the kind of

philosophy that Cavell inherits from Wittgenstein.

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