“in Your Writing I Am Existed”: Reading the History of Anthropology Via Textures of the Ordinary
Year: 2021
Type: article
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.
Source: Sociologia & Antropologia
Author: Bhrigupati Singh
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4285325181