Veena Das interviewed by Paul Standish

Abstract Veena Das is Professor Emerita in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities and numerous other prestigious awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship awarded in 2009. She taught at the Delhi School of Economics for more than thirty years and at the New School before she joined Johns Hopkins University in 2000. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2019 was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests range across anthropology, philosophy, and literature. She is particularly interested in how the textures and contours of everyday life can be rendered, with the everyday and the event conjoined in the making of the ordinary and the critical. She is known particularly for her work on childhood, suffering, and violence, health and disease, and urban transformations. Her life and career have been influenced from early on by her reading of Wittgenstein and of classical Sanskrit texts. She has participated closely in bringing Stanley Cavell’s philosophy to bear on anthropological modes of enquiry and in nourishing the anthropological tone in philosophy. Her writings have been translated into many languages including Chinese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, Bangla, Japanese, and Korean. In this interview, she responds to questions from Paul Standish.