Bøger af Roma Chatterji

The papers in this special issue of Domains deal with the category of the communal riot in India, specifically the anti-Sikh riot of 1984 in Delhi, the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai and the Hindu-Muslim riots of Gujarat in 2002. The literature, both academic and in the print and visual media, on each of these riots is vast, but as yet we do not find a sustained effort to put together these events of violence, much less reflect on their common modalities. The papers in this issue mark an ethnographic attempt to come to terms with what in India (and perhaps the Subcontinent, at large) has been a ubiquitous phenomenon since at least the mid-1980s - a pervasive repetition and visibility of intra-religious warfare. The papers show that the communal riot is both a practice and a discursive condition, anchored in documentary, pictorial, ethnographic, narrative, and judicial accounts. In the process the papers shed light on different dimensions of the riot, while also revealing regularities and diversity in its discursive formation. Domains is the Journal of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo.

Gives an account of the communal riots between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai in 1992-93. This book presents narrative accounts of the residents of Dharavi on the violence and the procedures of rehabilitation that accompanied the violence. It explores the role language, housing and rehabilitation have on the life of people living with violence.

The essays in this book explore the critical possibilities that have been opened by Veena Das's work. Taking off from her writing on pain as a call for acknowledgment, several essays explore how social sciences render pain, suffering, and the claims of the other as part of an ethics of responsibility. They search for disciplinary resources to contest the implicit division between those whose pain receives attention and those whose pain is seen as out of sync with the times and hence written out of the historical record.Another theme is the co-constitution of the event and the everyday, especially in the context of violence. Das's groundbreaking formulation of the everyday provides a frame for understanding how both violence and healing might grow out of it. Drawing on notions of life and voice and the struggle to write one's own narrative, the contributors provide rich ethnographies of what it is to inhabit a devastated world.Ethics as a form of attentiveness to the other, especially in the context of poverty, deprivation, and the corrosion of everyday life, appears in several of the essays. They take up the classic themes of kinship and obligation but give them entirely new meaning.Finally, anthropology's affinities with the literary are reflected in a final set of essays that show how forms of knowing in art and in anthropology are related through work with painters, performance artists, and writers.