French Literature Reviews - 2026

Veena Das, Life and Words (Preface by Stanley Cavell)
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

Translated from English by Yves Erard, Christian Indermühle, Emmanuelle Narjoux, and Danielle Robert.

Preface by Stanley Cavell

How does violence—that destructive force which seems as powerful as it is sudden—gradually insinuate itself into our everyday lives?

Drawing on her expertise, anthropologist Veena Das analyzes how extreme violence erupts into ordinary life, particularly the lives of women, taking as her examples the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan and the massacres of Sikhs following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984.

She thus uncovers the various mechanisms at work, combining collective violence, the influence of rumor, shifting family ties, and the role of authorities. Bridging ethnographic and philosophical reflections, in this masterly essay she outlines a new way of describing and interpreting violence in societies and cultures across the globe.

An essential work that transcends disciplinary boundaries, offering a deeper understanding of violence, especially that perpetrated against women.

Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Veena Das is one of the most prominent anthropologists of our time. She has authored a significant body of work dedicated to the questions of violence, social suffering, and ordinary life.

—

An article on this book can be read on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:

"Translating Veena Das", by Maëline Le Lay (published online October 23, 2023)

In 2006, with the University of California Press, anthropologist Veena Das published Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, her seminal work offering a philosophical reflection on the impact of political violence on everyday existence. She explored how violence embeds itself into daily life and into a specific temporality unique to an experience marked by the memory of such traumatic events. It took seventeen years for this major contribution—focusing on self-creation in contexts of political violence (particularly as experienced by women) and the perception of the State in postcolonial societies—to become available in French.

This French translation of the anthropologist's work engages with the intersections of ethnography, political violence, and the experience of ordinary life in postcolonial societies. By examining historical instances of collective trauma such as the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan and the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the study considers how traumatic events alter family structures, rumor dynamics, and the relationship between citizens and state authorities. Readers interested in contemporary political anthropology and the sociology of violence may find it a relevant contribution to these scholarly discussions.

The broader intellectual tradition surrounding the anthropology of suffering often investigates how communities rebuild and endure following large-scale conflicts. Within this field, researchers examine the ways in which memory, language, and everyday practices become sites for negotiating trauma, particularly for marginalized individuals. While focusing on specific historical contexts, the volume connects empirical anthropological observations with broader philosophical inquiries into human agency, the nature of suffering, and the subtle mechanisms through which destructive forces permeate domestic and social spaces over extended periods of time.