Beyond trauma, beyond humanitarianism, beyond empathy

The authors of this Special Section invite us to consider what it means to go beyond the common trope of ‘trauma’ in conceptualizing events in the Middle East. Considering the question in relation to these contributions, I ask: is trauma a concept with sharp edges or a word at hand saturated with context that grows out of the experience of life and its many dissolutions? Together, this collection challenges the reader to think further about a family of concepts that might be honed out of the experience of survivors. It also calls for rethinking the idea of the Middle East itself as a region from which we could get an opening into different ways of showing what it is to be a chronicler of how life is being remade

Poverty and the Imagination of a Future: The Story of Urban Slums in Delhi, India

How do the poor see themselves? In their daily struggles, how do they use creative imaginings to withstand various stresses and their seemingly never- ending effort at subsistence? In this paper, Veena Das explores the many revealed ways the poor exercise creativity, boldness and enterprise in their attempts to cope and transcend, even for brief moments, daunting states of deprivation and the destitute roles that both experts and society seemed to have consigned them to. In this lecture, delivered as part of York University’s 50th anniversary celebration, Dr. Das shares with her audience insights from her ongoing multi-year research on the residents of New Delhi slums including the not often assumed ability of the poor to think, feel and act in ways that are all-too-human – both spontaneous and rational. Equally insightful responses are provided by Vanessa Rosa and Mark Ayyash, PhD Candidates in the Graduate Program in Sociology at York University

State and its margins: Comparative ethnographies

La Teoría Política occidental ha concebido el estado como forma administrativa racional de organización y orden político. Uno de los efectos resultantes de pensar el estado en términos de sus funciones de producción de orden es que los márgenes espaciales y sociales, que tan a menudo constituyen el terreno del trabajo de campo etnográfico, son contemplados como lugares de desorden en los que el estado ha sido incapaz de imponer su orden. No obstante es posible invertir el interrogante y preguntarse acerca de qué es el estado cuando se lo contempla insertado en prácticas, lugares y lenguajes que se consideran situados en los márgenes del estado-nación. Desde la perspectiva antropológica, los márgenes proporcionan una perspectiva excepcional para comprender el estado, no porque capten las prácticas exóticas de los considerados “estados fallidos”, sino porque insinúan que los márgenes son implicaciones necesarias del estado e invitan a repensar los límites entre centro y periferia, público y privado, legal e ilegalAnthropology offers a radical rethinking of the state when it interrogates itself about what would constitute an Ethnography of the state. Western Political Theory has conceived the state as a rational administrative form of political organization and order. One of the effects of thinking the state in terms of ordermaking functions is that the spatial and social margins that so often constitute the terrain of ethnographic fieldwork are seen as sites of disorder, where the state has been unable to impose its order. However, reversing the question is also possible, therefore interrogating what is the state when it is seen as embedded in practices, places and languages considered to be at the margins of the nation-state. From the anthropological point of view, margins provides an unique perspective to the understanding of the state, not because it captures the exotic practices of the so considered "failed states", but because it suggests that such margins are a necessary entailment of the state, and in so doing, invites us to rethink the boundaries between center and periphery, public and private, legal and illega

Introduction:On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation

Do names require a context in order to determine who a name refers to or are names the example par excellence for words that do not require a non-linguistic context to be specified? Since Russell’s (1911) classical paper on this theme, proper names have been treated as a test case for theories of reference in philosophical debates. Whereas those in favour of contextualism insist that names are a species of indexicals, the proponents of anti-contextualism squarely place the discussion of prope..

Naming Beyond Pointing: Singularity, Relatedness and the Foreshadowing of Death

This paper argues for a theory of naming beyond the philosophical concerns with proper names as the test case for theories of reference. Moving forward from anthropological concerns of naming practices as forms of convention, I argue that names in the Indian tradition participate in a wider problematic in which the name opens the person to the world as it also makes her vulnerable to the world. Taking examples from my long time ethnographic engagement with families in Delhi and juxtaposing these examples with iconic moments of naming in stories from two Indian epics, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata (including their vernacular versions) the paper shows that attention to how names are used alerts us to such existential questions as whether one remains the same person to oneself and to another over the course of a life time

A corrupção e a possibilidade da vida

Este artigo analisa como podemos entender a corrupção como algo ancorado em práticas comuns e cotidianas. Evitando a dupla armadilha da condenação e do relativismo, ele mostra como os pobres urbanos consideram que a aspiração a uma comunidade política purificada cria as condições de possibilidade nas quais o espaço político de ação se fecha para aqueles que estão dentro do que se poderia chamar de complexo da corrupção. Movendo-se entre a etnografia e a literatura, o texto presta muita atenção a formas de fala, bem como a formas de ação, e demonstra que os pobres têm uma compreensão muito mais matizada do Estado do que a maneira como ele é representado no trabalho de intelectuais e ativistas públicos