Anthropologist Discusses Everyday Violence at Mellon Seminar

Veena Das, a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, addressed harmful relationships, rape in India, and the violence embedded in societal structures during a talk entitled “Fleeting Moments That Last Forever: Violence Of and Against the Everyday” in Sever Hall Monday night.

Das also serves on the executive board of the Institute of Socio-Economic Research on Development and Democracy in India. She is an ethnographer of India and has published numerous books.

Veena Das, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, speaks on violence and non-violence during a Mahindra Humanities Center seminar on Monday. By Melanie Y. Fu

Das was chosen as a speaker for this lecture, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Seminar on Violence and Non-Violence, by professor Homi K. Bhabha, director of the Mahindra Humanities Center. Before the event, Bhabha said that he has known Das “for years, and she does work, which is very much in keeping with the theme of the Mellon Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center so...she was an obvious person.”

Das started by questioning what people perceive as “the ordinary,” asking about what forms the ordinary might take.

She then continued to frame her lecture around a paper she wrote about everyday violence, and presented a series of questions to help conceptualize this kind of culturally embedded violence. The first was, “How is ordinary life made poisonous?” Referencing texts by herself and others, she discussed the culture surrounding rape in India.

“Rape remains a public secret,” she said.

Another question dealt with the challenge of dealing with the “poisonous knowledge” possessed by individuals and groups of people, specifically in the context of strained family relations.

Das went on to address the challenge of standing up to destruction. She offered a metaphor of an “army walking through a garden of flowers,” destroying them. The army does not look back at the carnage it caused, she said, but in most cases, the everyday is remade with what is left behind in the rubble.

In the last part of her lecture, she pointed out the significance of names and words, especially in Indian Sanskrit.

“[Words] remain as threads throughout the durable structures of life,” said Das.

After the lecture, Das and Bhabha held a question-and-answer session. Professor of medical anthropology Arthur M. Kleinman delivered the closing address, describing Das as “one of the most important social theorists of our time.”