Veena Das (born 1945) is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. She also serves on the Executive Board of the Institute of Socio-Economic Research on Development and Democracy in India. She studied at the Indraprastha College for Women and Delhi School of Economics at the University of Delhi and taught there from 1967 to 2000. She has published extensively as an ethnographer of India and thus is an established figure within Indian anthropology. Beyond India, her research has broad appeal within the anthropology of violence, suffering, and the State.
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Das completed her Ph.D. in 1970 at the University of Delhi under the supervision of M.N. Srinivas. She was Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research from 1997-2000 before moving to the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Some of her research interests include: feminist movements, gender studies, sectarian violence, medical anthropology, post-colonial and post-structural theory.
Her first book Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1977) brought the textual practices of 13th to 17th century in relation to self representation of caste groups in focus. Her identification of the structure of Hindu thought in terms of the tripartite division between priesthood, kinship and renunciation proved to be an extremely important structuralist interpretation of the important poles within which innovations and claims to new status by caste groups took place.
Veena Das's most recent book is Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, California University Press, 2006. As the title implies, Das sees violence not as an interruption of ordinary life but as something that is implicated in the ordinary. The philosopher Stanley Cavell has written a memorable foreword to the book in which he says that one way of reading it is as a companion to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. One of the chapters in the book deals with the state of abducted women in the post-independence time period and has been the interest of various legal historians.
Since the eighties she became engrossed in the study of violence and social suffering. Her edited book, Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia published by Oxford University Press in 1990 was one of the first to bring issues of violence within anthropology of South Asia. A trilogy on these subjects that she edited with Arthur Kleinman and others in the late nineties and early twenties gave a new direction to these fields. The volumes are titled Social Suffering; Violence and Subjectivity; and Remaking a World.
She received the Anders Retzius Gold Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 1995 (Johns Hopkins blurb), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2000 (University of Chicago Magazine article). She is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (American Academy members) and a fellow of the Third World Academy of Sciences. In 2007, Das delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester, considered by many to be the most important annual lecture series in the field of Anthropology.[1]