Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology After Wittgenstein

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Either we are able to rethink a thought that comes our way, to own and access it as it occurs, or we must let it pass, it is not ours. -RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

This book is composed in the nature of a collection, not only in the sense that it is a collection of essays, many of which had earlier incarnations, but also because it involved a task best described as raking the leaves of memory: collecting pieces of an ethnographic past, recollecting a life lived with texts- literary and philosophical and in the process allowing myself to be educated, as it were, in public. I dared myself to return to questions that had baffled me or on which I had settled too quickly. In the following essays, readers familiar with my earlier work will see how new aspects of a biography, or of a relation- ship, or of a neighborhood, dawn upon me as I go back to earlier accounts, or they will see how the passage of time has made certain figures reappear, made to carry a different kind of weight in my thinking now. Readers encountering my work for the first time will, I hope, see that the persons, scenes, events seem to have had past lives to which some may be attracted and some may even feel like befriending them. There are some relations I made with people, places, and texts that are marked by a much greater intensity than others-but there were also those with whom I did not have the mental fortitude to stay with or who faded from my life and work because of accidents of fate.

It is not easy to retell something. In the famous play, Uttararamacharita (Rama's Last Act) the eighth-century playwright, Bhava-bhuti (2007), builds the entire action as a story that is not unfolding before us but that is being created in the retelling. In some ways, this is the fate of epic stories in India as they are constantly retold, reinterpreted, reinvented-the past never dies. As Girish Karnad, in his foreword to Sheldon Pollock's excellent translation, describes the play:

In the "Final chapter" (Uttarakanda) of the "Ramayana," however-a later addition to Valmiki's poem-a single act of Rama's sets the entire action rolling, and it is an act the ethical justification of which has al- ways been ambiguous. Rama here is responsible for inflicting humiliation and pain on the queen he knows to be innocent.... Bhava-bhuti in "Rama's Last Act" exploits the enormous potential and ethical complexity of this situation but instead of a straightforward dramatization of a fairly simple original narrative, he takes breath-taking risks with his material by refracting the narrative and projecting it from different and often conflicting angles. (Karnad 2007, 19-20)

An early thought in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations comes in the form of a warning, by pointing to examples that show thought to be some- times conceived in a gaseous medium. Wittgenstein then declares. "The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (Wittgenstein [1953] 1968, 5109). This book, the one before you, comes not from any desire to establish or con tribute to something like a field of study called "philosophical anthropology" but from the desire for an education (call it an education for grownups) by working with texts of Wittgenstein and their iteration in the writings of Stanley Cavell, on the one hand, and learning through a deep immersion in the lives of families and neighborhoods in Delhi with whom I have worked for more than three decades, on the other. I call my mode of reading Wittgenstein and Cavell a striving for an education, an apprenticeship, in part to show the work I did to quieten somewhat the fear of my thought becoming gaseous and in part to acknowledge that I read these texts not as a Wittgenstein scholar in philosophy but as one for whom the problems these philosophers discern in their work arise equally in the weave of actual lives in which I have participated as an anthropologist. I hope that as the following chapters unfold they will reveal that the axis of need on which my thinking revolves is the sense of puzzlement arising in my ethnographic work and the concern that I will fall into the trap of covering up what I do not understand by using a lattice of terms that I understand even less.

Because I have imagined my reader in this book as a "you" and not as part of an anonymous third-person public, I have allowed autobiographical moments to seep into the scenes I construct out of my ethnography and out of my life. This means that I am not presenting this book as an authoritative account of how philosophy enters anthropological discussions, not even as an authoritative account of the social institutions, interpersonal relations, or modes of thought revealed through fieldwork in a bounded community. Yet, as I said, I have immersed myself resolutely in the books from which I draw in the discussions that follow. I have also spent decades with families in low-income neighborhoods in Delhi just as I spent years when I was young, researching family and kinship matters among those displaced by the Partition of India, and later, in communities made destitute by the horrendous violence perpetrated against Sikhs living in the peripheral areas of Delhi (Das 2007). I have eschewed neither method nor the attraction of the concrete-indeed, I contend that the ethnographic impulse to render the texture of the ordinary depends upon close attention to detail. But how much detail and what kind of detail?