From an ethnography of the everyday to writing echoes of suffering

Abstract

Veena Das has introduced a major shift in our contemporary conception of ethnography. While she brings forward a new way of looking at everyday life, which is already a major achievement, she also offers a conceptual resolution to a classical unresolved opposition between the individual and the collective, and between idiosyncratic psychology (subjectivity) and collective modes of thinking, through a challenging debate on what makes one a member of a group and yet radically distinct from all others. The ethnography in her book Affliction stands on three major pillars: The first is the ethnographer's subjective position in the field regarding the issues of lives, testimony, and research. The second is the neighborhood as the site of fieldwork, with all of its heterogeneity, rather than the group, such as an ethnic or racial group or one cohering around another criterion of belonging. The third and final pillar is the focus on the ordinary through ethnography of the everyday. I then illustrate Veena Das's perspective on subjectivity with my own fieldwork with survivors of the Cambodian genocide.

Introduction

“…Oft en it is a mute condition of constraint" (Stoler 2016: 7). Richard Rechtman (2017), refl ecting on the work of Das, uses the concept "subjectivation" to describe the methodology Das uses to grasp the invisible, to know the almost "unknowable" that is part of subjectivity. In our case, we search for the more tangible outcome of living in duress by a focus on the decisions people make but also on the words they use to refl ect on their lives.…”

The confessional community

“…This perspective challenges the idea that the expression of pain must have some cathartic value (Kearney, 2007). It also forces one to sit with the uncomfortable presence of violence and suffering as it unfolds through continuous narration (Escalante Gonzalbo, 2000; Rechtman, 2017). In the denial of catharsis, there can be found one of the facts about violence in Mexico: it continues.…”

Plotting the field: Fragments and narrative in Malinowski's stories of the baloma

“…If many anthropologists have called attention to the work of their own hand in the fictioning of a narrative form, and its possible disjuncture with the emergence of stories in the course of everyday life, Das draws us into the space between the two forms of a storytelling, in order to convey how differently existential stakes are configured. In a reflection on Das’s ethnography, Richard Rechtman (2017) draws an important distinction between what he calls the ethnographically fictional construction of a chronological narrative, and its attendant “subjectivitzation of experience,” and the “subjective experience” of suffering that resists absorption into such a narrative. Neither the categories of psychiatry, nor local ways of talking about pain suffice.…”