Professor Veena Das
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at John Hopkins University
Ethnographic Time: Repetition, Doubling, Voicing
Professor Veena Das presents the Opening Address for the CAMHRA In Focus Event Series: “Ethnographic Time: Repetition, Doubling, Voicing. In this lecture, she attempts to provide a portrait of a family by aligning their accounts gathered over a long period through intermittent visits to them at different sites.
Each spring, the CAMHRA community gathers into a shared space of reflection, to think alongside one another, and to explore the shifting contours of mental health across worlds, disciplines and lived experiences.
In her lecture, Professor Veena Das attempts to provide a portrait of a family by aligning their accounts (husband, wife, three of the six daughters) gathered over a long period (2000–2026) through intermittent visits to them at different sites (shifting homes, school, clinic).
While Veena does not adopt the conceptual and methodological apparatus embedded here in a straightforward way, she hopes to gradually allow certain concerns with issues such as how the singularity of a life (here the life of a household) becomes an inquiry into the reinstitution of life and of a reality (putative or not) that is made by our participation in it.
Professor Veena Das is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at John Hopkins University, and one of CAMHRA’s Global Professorial Fellows. Before her retirement, she was the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and The World Academy of Sciences. Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2000, she taught at the Delhi School of Economics for more than 30 years.
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