The Ground Between The Ground Between ANTHROPOLOGISTS ENGAGE PHILOSOPHY VEENA DAS, MICHAEL JACKSON, ARTHUR KLEINMAN, BHRIGUPATI SINGH, EDITORS Duke University Press ■ Durham and London ■ 2014 © 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞ Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Westchester Book Group “Ethnography in the Way of Th eory” © João Biehl. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Th e ground between : anthropologists engage philosophy / edited by Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, and Bhrigupati Singh. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5707-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-5718-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Anthropology—Philosophy. I. Das, Veena. II. Jackson, Michael, 1940– III. Kleinman, Arthur. IV. Singh, Bhrigupati. GN33.G76 2014 301.01—dc23 2013042778 CONTENTS Ac know ledg ments, vii Introduction. Experiments between Anthropology and Philosophy: Affi nities and Antagonisms, 1 Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, and Bhrigupati Singh 1 ■ Ajàlá’s Heads: Refl ections on Anthropology and Philosophy in a West African Setting, 27 Michael Jackson 2 ■ Th e Parallel Lives of Philosophy and Anthropology, 50 Didier Fassin 3 ■ Th e Diffi culty of Kindness: Boundaries, Time, and the Ordinary, 71 Clara Han 4 ■ Ethnography in the Way of Th eory, 94 João Biehl 5 ■ Th e Search for Wisdom: Why William James Still Matters, 119 Arthur Kleinman 6 ■ Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s Phi los o phers, 138 Ghassan Hage 7 ■ How Concepts Make the World Look Diff erent: Affi rmative and Negative Genealogies of Th ought, 159 Bhrigupati Singh 8 ■ Philosophia and Anthropologia: Reading alongside Benjamin in Yazd, Derrida in Qum, Arendt in Tehran, 188 Michael M. J. Fischer 9 ■ Ritual Disjunctions: Ghosts, Philosophy, and Anthropology, 218 Michael Puett 10 ■ Henri Bergson in Highland Yemen, 234 Steven C. Caton 11 ■ Must We Be Bad Epistemologists? Illusions of Transparency, the Opaque Other, and Interpretive Foibles, 254 Vincent Crapanzano 12 ■ Action, Expression, and Everyday Life: Recounting House hold Events, 279 Veena Das References, 307 Contributors, 329 Index, 333 vi Contents AC KNOW LEDG MENTS ■ Th is book is the result of collective energies and conversations that have remained ongoing over years, sometimes de cades, between friends, colleagues, and collaborators. Th e idea for this book emerged in the course of animated conversations in Cambridge and Baltimore, and perhaps it bears the imprint of these two institutional locations, although our hope is that the kind of exploration we have undertaken here might extend much further. Our fi rst thanks go to the authors and contributors of this volume, for the enthusiasm with which they embraced this project and found it to ex- press thoughts that they had been mulling over for years. Th e preparatory workshop for this volume was held as the W. H. R. Rivers Symposium at Harvard University and was made possible by the Michael Crichton Fund of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medi- cal School. We want to express our gratitude to Marilyn Goodrich and Mi- chele Albanese for their help in coordinating the Rivers Symposium, and to Melody Walker for helping with innumerable logistical issues through- out the production pro cess. Two of the participants in our symposium, Naveeda Khan and Charlie Hallisey, were unable to submit their essays for this volume because of other deadlines and compulsions, and we keenly feel the loss that their thoughts would have brought to this endeavor. We are also grateful to Byron Good and Janet Gyatso for their participation in the workshop and for the thoughts they shared with us. We would also like to thank our two anonymous reviewers at Duke Uni- versity Press for their advice on revisions, particularly for the introduc- tion to the volume; Elizabeth Ault and Jessica Ryan at Duke University Press for editorial help; and our editor, Ken Wissoker, for his valuable in- puts. Last, we thank Andrew Brandel profusely for his eff orts, spurred by his intellectual curiosity and sympathy for this project, in helping to bring this volume together at the fi nal stages of its submission. We hope that this book will speak to students like him and to future interlocutors, many of whom we may never meet, who come to value anthropological and phil- osophical investigations as distinct but related ways of engaging the world. viii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s INTRODUCTION Experiments between Anthropology and Philosophy: Affi nities and Antagonisms Veena Das, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, and Bhrigupati Singh ■ Th e guiding inspiration of this book is to explore the attraction and the distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. How are the dividing lines drawn between these modes of inquiry? Or, to pose the same question diff erently: What constitutes a philosophical under- current or moment in the practice of those who do not claim to be profes- sional phi loso phers? In his infl uential “Questions in Geography,” Michel Foucault (1980b: 66) wrote with a hint of impatience, “And for all that I might like to say that I am not a phi los o pher, nonetheless if my concern is with truth I am still a phi los o pher.” For its part, anthropology, with its multiple origins and manifold subfi elds, has maintained a comparably uneasy rela- tion of distance from and affi nity with philosophy. In France Durkheim wanted to establish sociology as a discipline within philosophy, and in India the earliest departments of sociology grew out of social philosophy— yet an engagement between these two disciplines is neither easy nor assured. It is not that phi los o phers and anthropologists do not engage common is- sues. For instance, an abiding concern in both disciplines is an engage- ment with the limits of the human. In most cases, though, philos o phers turn to thought experiments about these limits, and descriptions of ac- tual human societies and their diversity are bracketed on the grounds that empirical data cannot solve conceptual questions. Anthropologists from diff erent subfi elds and styles of thought would mea sure their distance from and affi nity to philosophy very diff erently. Perhaps one should turn, then, not to philosophy and anthropology as two fully constituted disciplines but to their encounters in the singular and see if there is something to be learned from these encounters.1 With such a project in mind, in April 2011 the four editors of this volume invited twelve anthropologists to refl ect on their own mode of engagement with philosophy. Our aims were modest. We were not trying to stage an in- terdisciplinary dialogue between anthropologists and phi los o phers, though this might emerge in an anthropologist’s struggle with a specifi c problem. Our questions were simple and posed in specifi c terms: What kinds of ques- tions or pressures have made you turn to a partic u lar phi los opher? What philosophical traditions (whether from West or East, North or South) do you fi nd yourself responding to? We wanted to investigate specifi cally what anthropologists sought in these encounters, what concepts liberated thought, what wounded them, and how this engagement with a par tic u lar region of philosophy changed their own anthropological thinking. Th at said, to measure the diff erent contours of this relationship in anything resem- bling its entirety would be an encyclopedic endeavor. Our aim was not to cover all or even most anthropological and philosophical traditions. Rather we asked a small number of scholars to refl ect on their practice, in the hope that this would yield interesting ways of looking at the relation that an- thropology bears to philosophy through singular encounters. Singularity does not, of course, exclude multiplicity; rather, as Lévi-Strauss (1971: 626) uses the term in connection with his study of myths, singularity is the nodal point of past, present, and possible events, the intersection where phenom- ena become manifest, originating from countless contexts, knowable and unknowable. In this sense, the par tic ular scholars stand for themselves but are also treated as “intersection points,” where the contested nature of an- thropological knowledge becomes visible. Our relation to the par tic u lar scholar, then, is both personal and impersonal, as singular trajectories that also express genealogies of thought. We want to emphasize that we were not looking to philosophy to pro- vide “theory,” as if anthropology were somehow lacking this impulse. We were asking these scholars what is specifi c in their anthropology that at- tracts them to some regions of philosophy within the context and course of concrete projects of research and thought. Th e results of this exercise were surprising, fi rst, as to which phi los ophers were found to be most at- tractive as interlocutors and, second, for the passionate engagement with partic ular texts these anthropologists read in relationship to their eth- nography. As such, it seems that for philosophy to have value in our world, it must learn to respond to the puzzles and pressures that an ethnographic 2 Das, Jackson, Kleinman, and Singh engagement with the world brings to light. What we present in this chap- ter is a set of questions and puzzles that we hope will stimulate further refl ections on what kind of place par tic u lar phi los o phers might have or have had in the making of anthropological knowledge. As a starting point, we could perhaps accept that the phi los o pher’s an- thropology and the anthropologist’s philosophy may mutually illuminate on some occasions but that it is also the friction between them that allows us to walk on our respective paths.