Search

Simulated standardized patients (SSP) have emerged as close to a ‘gold standard’ for measuring the quality of clinical care. This method resolves problems of patient mix across healthcare providers and allows care to be benchmarked against preexisting standards. Nevertheless, SSPs are not real patients. How, then, should data from SSPs be considered relative to clinical observations with ‘real’ patients in a given health system? Here, we reject the proposition that SSPs are direct substitutes for real patients and that the validity of SSP studies therefore relies on their ability to imitate real patients. Instead, we argue that the success of the SSP methodology lies in its counterfactual manipulations of the possibilities available to real careseekers – especially those paths not taken up by them – through which real responses can be elicited from real providers. Using results from a unique pilot study where SSPs returned to providers for follow-ups when asked, we demonstrate that the SSP method works well to elicit responses from the provider through conditional manipulations of SSP behavior. At the same time, observational methods are better suited to understand what choices real people make, and how these can affect the direction of diagnosis and treatment. A combination of SSP and observational methods can thus help parse out how quality of care emerges for the “patient” as a shared history between care-seeking individuals and care providers.

What does thinking of “world as a whole, life” entail for ethnography? Would the modification of life with the adjectival everyday—i.e. “everyday life”—provide a different lens with which to take f...

This chapter analyzes Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer not as pertaining to a theory of religious belief and ritual but to his major preoccupation with pictures of the world produced through what he called “grammatical illusions.” It argues that Wittgenstein faults Frazer not so much for having made a mistake in interpreting rituals as expressions of an erroneous understanding of cause and effect, but rather for being in the grip of a superstition creating false excitement about primitive practices where none were warranted. Wittgenstein draws on our common background as humans—the natural history we might invent to show that had Frazer paid attention to our primitive reactions as humans, he might have found other routes to connect the practices of the so-called primitives to those commonly found in his own society. The chapter offers a sustained reading of some of the most intriguing comments of Wittgenstein to ask such questions as what it is to take the facts of one’s existence upon oneself? The chapter holds that such points of connection create a more meaningful interface between philosophy and anthropology than any grand foundational gestures could do.

This chapter takes up a particular problematic in the depiction of the everyday—viz., that its very closeness makes it impossible to see it. The chapter pays particular attention to disorders of kinship, arguing that the fieldwork experience does not consist simply of collecting stories or coherent narratives with a clear plot and a delineation of characters. Rather, words and gestures swell up suddenly, often out of context, and provide a glimpse into the turbulent waters that often flow behind the seemingly peaceful and uneventful everyday. Tracking moments such as death-bed statements or moments in a ritual performance when something discordant happens, the chapter delineates how such moments signal the risks to which our actions and expressions are prone. Instead of privileging the psychological subject, the chapter considers the grammatical person with which to think of the self and its opacity. The chapter argues for the salience of the second person as the addressee of a speech event and the relevance of the other for giving life to words. The signature theme of finding one’s voice in one’s history finds ethnographic and literary affirmation in attentiveness to fleeting moments that, from another perspective, it is argued, might last forever.

Based on survey research and ethnographic interviews, we analyze struggles over housing and access to infrastructure in two low-income “unplanned settlements” in the National Capital Region of Delhi, India. We argue that political leadership in these two different areas cannot be regarded as a simple extension of traditional forms of authority from the village to the city. Rather, the local leaders emerge in the process of learning how to engage institutional processes of law and bureaucracy in an urban context to secure housing and infrastructure. The enfolding of structures of governance with democratic politics in these neighborhoods reveals the overlapping movements of law, bureaucracy, markets, and democratic mobilization through which social life is made durable for the urban poor. Instead of asking what democracy has done for the poor in India, we shift the focus to ask, How does the work that the poor perform through and with these institutions give form and substance to democracy in India?

Based on longitudinal ethnographic work, the authors of this special issue on the politics of the urban poor examine how regional events as well as scholarly traditions in these places have influenced the way the categories of the urban poor and of politics have emerged in both scholarly and public discourse. As the discussions that follow make clear, the relation between urban processes and city forms is a volatile one, and this volatility in turn has a decisive effect on how the poor emerge as political actors. Further, liberal forms of citizenship are but one form among others that become materialized through the claims that the poor make on the state. More importantly, the essays show that the socialities that undergird the lives of the poor are constantly being shaped by the experiences of precarity that go beyond material scarcity.

This article analyses how we might understand corruption as anchored in ordinary, everyday practices. Avoiding the double trap of condemnation and relativism, it shows how the urban poor see the aspiration for a purified polity as creating the conditions of possibility in which the political space of action closes down for those within what one might call a corruption complex. Moving between ethnography and literature, the article pays close attention to forms of talk as well as forms of action and demonstrates that the poor display much more nuanced understanding of the state as compared to the way it is represented in the work of public intellectuals and activists.

Comment on Laidlaw, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Das discusses region as a source of theory and raises concerns about the current state of scholarship, especially (1) the censorship of ideas made possible by government control over research along with a public culture that is increasingly intolerant of differences in interpretation in the name of a feeling ethics; (2) the production of knowledge at different institutional sites that might stand in a tense relation to authorized institutional discourses; and (3) dangerous developments in the rise of new subdisciplines such as global health, which have had serious consequences for freedom of inquiry as a false consensus is generated over what counts as “success” in policy interventions.

I want to take one paragraph from the second chapter (Social debt, silent gift) from Clara Han’s compelling account of the braiding of care and violence in postPinochet neoliberal Chile and work out its implications for anthropology with regard to questions of social suffering, poverty, and how we may understand the pursuit of the good. The paragraph that occurs on page seventy-nine goes as follows: Later, when I asked Paloma who her friends were in the poblacion, she said to me, “Friends? I don’t have any friends. Susana is my friend. We share our intimacies. Friends are few, neighbors are many.” Indeed, such a sentiment was echoed to me by many women in La Pincoya. Only upon meditation upon the boundary between neighbors and friends did I begin to realize that the crucial difference between inhabiting friendship and neighborliness lay not in the perceptive ability of catching those signs of critical moments, such as the cry of Paloma’s hungry child, but in how that catching would be or could be addressed. To follow Han’s thought here it is necessary to step into the streets and houses that she describes in such depth and ask, what does she mean by “critical moments”? Understanding the critical moments in the life of a family requires that we shift scales and ask how economic precariousness is produced in the lives of the poor through the transformations in economic policy. As Han argues, the successive democratic governments in Chile continued with the “growth with equity” model of the Pinochet regime that was consistent with a neoliberal vision. This economic model had particularly perilous effects on the poor with its flexible labor regimes, shifts from permanent to temporary labor contracts, and easy availability of credit cards with high interest rates and punishing schedules of repayment. Though various successive governments recognized a social debt to the poor, welfare programs were decentralized with technologies of verification by social workers

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.

This paper examines the dynamic, moving relationship between three concepts – those of life, law, and exception. Following a brief exposition of these concepts, this paper provides an ethnography of struggles over housing waged by the urban poor in a squatter colony in Noida that adjoins the city of Delhi, India. I argue that each concept in this triad exerts force on the other and is the dynamic relation that creates the conditions of possibility for the emergence of claims over citizenship for the urban poor. In suggesting that citizenship is a claim rather than a status, which one either has or does not have, the article shows the precariousness as well as the promise for the poor of ‘belonging’ to a polity. Joining the discussion on the politics of life, the paper argues that the notion of life allows the mutual absorption of the natural and the social, and thus illuminates aspects of citizenship forged through the struggles waged by the poor for their needs. These are aspects of citizenship which rem...

In what words might I speak of my delight and my gratitude for the life and work of Stanley Cavell? Beyond the attraction certain regions of philosophy hold for anthropology, I might ask what is it in this philosopher that invites me to his world? The publication of Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory is first and foremost (for me at any rate), an affirmation of the question Cavell once asked: Does the biblical injunction, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” (Exodus 20:16), include the injunction that you shall not bear false witness to yourself? The resonance of this idea with the words he recorded on July 4th 2003 is worth noting.

This article focuses on experiences of the domestic—of houses, of intimacy and privacy—and what relation these bear to the kinds of sentiments about life which are given expression as fragile, endangered or fleeting. We think of singularity as lying in the potential for multiple domesticities that emerge at different times and are neither coterminous with family nor indeed with household. Based on fieldwork with African-American and Caribbean families in Miami, Florida and Baltimore, MD, the article tracks how intimacy and alienation marks the constant moves from, to, and through households. This oscillation engenders an itinerant domesticity and life lived in the interstices of the house, the clinic, the prison, and the street. These spaces and places come to bear on what comes to be marked as so-called “African-American kinship.” Given the disproportionate incarceration of African-American men in US prisons, the article contemplates the permeable relation between carceral institutions and the ho...

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...

An important issue in considering violence at both the conceptual and empirical levels is the question of what counts as “violence” and how it is acknowledged. In many polities of the Middle East, including Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, there is no clear boundary between war and peace. Conflicts have lasted over a long period and even the project of securing a future in which the struggle for decolonization and political autonomy can be kept alive faces enormous hurdles as everyday life is corroded by betrayals, accusations, and the sheer exhaustion of keeping political energies from waning. Most acute observers of prolonged conflicts recognize the corrosive effects of these conflicts on everyday life. In this brief thought piece, I want to reflect on one aspect of the problem: that of the relation between sexual violence as an aspect of dramatic and spectacular violence—in wars (including modern ones), pogroms against ethnic or religious minorities, or episodes of lethal riots between sectarian groups—and everyday forms of sexual violence that could be both part of the public domain and constitutive of domestic intimacy. Said otherwise, I am interested in how experience of violence travels from one threshold of life to another.

My writing on the events of September 11th is on two registers-the public event of spectacular destruction in New York and the private events made up of countless stories of grief, fear, and anticipation. I hope I can speak responsibly to both, neither trivializing the suffering of the victims of the September 11 attack and those in mourning for them, as in the rhetoric of "deserved suffering" (as if nations and individuals were painlessly substitutable), nor obscuring the unspeakable suffering of wars and genocides in other parts of the world that framed these events. A recasting of these events into conflicting genealogies by the politics of mourning in the public sphere raises the issue of translation between different formulations through which these events were interpreted and, indeed, experienced. There are two opposed perspectives on cultural difference that we can discern today-one that emphasizes the antagonism of human cultures as in some version of the thesis on "clash of civilizations" and a second that underlines the production of identities through circulation and, hence, the blurring of boundaries. Both, however, are based on the assumption that human cultures are translatable. Indeed, without some power of self-translatability that makes it possible for one to imagine oneself using the categories of the other, human cultures would not be able to live on any register of the imaginary. The stark denial of this translatability on both sides of the present conflict concerns me most though I note that this is not to espouse a vision of justice that is somehow even-handed in distributing blame. My concern is of a different kind. I fear that classical concepts in anthropological and sociological theory provide scaffolding to this picture of untranslatability despite our commitment to the understanding of diversity. Obviously, there are specific issues at stake in this particular event of destruction, its time and its space, and the response casting it as a matter of war rather than, say, one concerning crime. But it seems to me that there is a deeper grammar at work here that invites us to investigate the conditions of possibility for this kind of declaration of war-as a genre of speech-to take place. One of the tenets of postmodern theorization is that the concrete and finite expressions of multiplicity cannot be referred back to a transcendental centerthe grounds for judgment cannot be located in either the faculty of reason or in common corporeal experience. Although postmodern theory does not suggest that diversity must be valued for itself-indeed, it is part of the struggle of postmodern theory to provide for conversation and recognition of otherness without any predetermined criteria for the evaluation of divergent claims-it does raise important questions about the withdrawal of recognition to the other. I have suggested elsewhere that difference, when it is cast as non-criterial, becomes untranslatable precisely because it ceases to allow for a mutual future in language? The shadowing of this into skepticism in which trust in categories is completely destroyed and our access to context is removed transforms forms of life into forms of death. Some such issue is at stake here in the Taliban's brutality against women on behalf of a pure Islam on the one hand, and a war waged on behalf of "Western civilization" on the other. After all it is the United States that spawned the very forces it is fighting as a defence against communism-the then enemy of freedom and values of Western democracy.3 There are no innocent collectivities in the present war, despite the powerful deployment of the figure of the "innocent" killed on both sides of the divide. Elsewhere I have questioned the purity of the concepts that are put in play when claims are made on behalf of tradition, religious autonomy, modernity, or human rights. The translation of these concepts is not a matter of something external to culture but something internal to it. …

▪ Abstract This essay explores the theme of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture. The primary text on which the essay is based is Philosophical Investigations; it treats Stanley Cavell's work as a major guide for the understanding and reception of Wittgenstein into anthropology. Some Wittgensteinian themes explored in the essay are the idea of culture as capability, horizontal and vertical limits to forms of life, concepts of everyday life in the face of skepticism, and the complexity of the inner in relation to questions of belief and pain. While an attempt has been made to relate these ideas to ethnographic descriptions, the emphasis in this essay is on the question of how anthropology may receive Wittgenstein.

This article examines the position of voice as standing beside culture in a manner similar to Wittgensteins notion of the soul standing beside the body and meaning standing next to the word. While the article takes off from the realm of the imaginary in which the figure of the woman standing between the zone of two deaths is privileged since it draws forceful attention to uniqueness of being, it dwells at length in the realm of everyday life. Here it is shown that it is for the patient work of the repair of relationships within which poisonous knowledge has entered. The weaving of voice into the everyday concerns of cultural meanings enables us to see a kind of healing that allows the ‘souling’ of culture.

O contexto é a Partição da Índia em 1949, que levou à criação do Paquistão, visto a partir da cultura punjabi (o Punjab era a província mais próxima da fronteira com o novo estado) e, particularmente, através dos olhos de Asha que, aos 21 anos, em 1941, ficara viúva e passara a viver com a família do falecido marido. As transformações impostas pela Partição alteraram essa situação e levaram Asha às seguintes reflexões. A comida de uma filha nunca é pesada para os pais. Mas quanto viverão nossos pais? Quando até dois pedaços de pão são sentidos como “pesados” por nosso próprio irmão... é melhor manter a honra ... e fazer sua paz... e viver onde se está destinada a viver. A exegese dessas reflexões constitui o núcleo analítico do texto. E, sobre a partição, a autora não se pergunta como os acontecimentos estavam presentes nas consciências como acontecimentos passados, mas como vieram a ser incorporados na estrutura temporal das relações.Abstract The context is the Partition of India in 1949, with the creation of Pakistan, as seen from the point of view of Punjabi culture (the Punjab was the province closer to the frontiers of the new state) and particularly through the eyes of Asha, a widow 21 years old in 1941, who lived with his deceased husband‟s family. The transformations derived from the Partition give rise to Asha‟s following reflections. A daughter’s food is never heavy on her parents. But how long will one’s parents live? When two pieces of bread are experienced as heavy by one’s own brother… then it is better to keep one’s honor… make one’s peace … and live where one was destined to live. The exegesis of this text is the analytical nucleus of the text. The author is not asking how the events of the Partition were present to consciousness as past events but how they came to be incorporated into the temporal structure of relationships.Key Words: Partition of India, Violence, Gender, Family History, Punjab

Forms of collective violence such as riots and ethnic cleansing pose an analytical challenge to social science for the political plenitude inherent in categories of collective violence makes it very difficult to separate facts and values. In political theory wars are distinguished from other forms of collective violence on the principle that states, which are recognized collective entities in international law, declare war on each other and are expected to conduct these wars under the rubric of contractual rules. This formulation reflects the privileged position that states apportion to themselves as entities that have control over legitimate violence. In the course of this chapter I will argue that there is a slippage between the various categories that we use to describe collective violence.2 However, instead of trying to delineate which kind of discrete reality each category corresponds to I suggest we shift our attention to the conditions under which one or the other term comes to signal a state of crisis. I argue that indeterminacy of reference is not incidental to the slippage between different terms such as riots, ethnic cleansing, or even genocide but is a result of the way that assemblages of actors, institutions and discursive forms are actualized. One important corollary of this formulation is that we need to pay close attention to all forms of collective violence and the related practices of the state since these carry the potential of being transformed into ethnic cleansing and into genocide. An alarmist perspective, as Lawrence Langer has argued, is better than ‘business as usual’ in addressing forms of violence that can acquire lethal forms if not addressed critically and in a timely fashion.3

Compte rendu de deux ouvrages de G. Obeyesekere, Medusa's Hair : An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1981| The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984. La femme, la sexualite feminine, la maternite et les contradictions du role de la femme au Sri Lanka vues dans une perspective symbolique et psychanalytique

Introduction - Veena Das Varieties of Life and Word Art and Theology in the Bhagavata Purana - D F Pocock Banaras - Diana L Eck Cosmos and Paradise in the Hindu Imagination Actors, Pilgrims, Kings, and Gods - Anuradha Kapur The Ramlila at Ramnagar Erotic Fantasy - Sudhir Kakar The Secret Passion of Radha and Krishna The Voyage of the Hero - Roma Chatterji The Self and the Other in One Narrative Tradition of Purulia Child and Childhood - Urvashi Misri A Conceptual Construction The Human Condition in Puran Bhagat - Harjeet Singh Gill An Essay in Existential Anthropology of a Punjabi Legend Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports - Richard Saumarez Smith Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law Violence, Victimhood, and the Language of Silence - Veena Das and Ashis Nandy