This is a book about how anthropologists seek to make sense of the social worlds they choose to understand. And then how they engage with philosophy, if they do at all. Not by looking up to philosophy as providing some kind of an overarching theory about ‘life’ or to anthropology’s claim to address the particularities of everyday life. Rather, the remarkable contribution this book seeks to make lies in Veena Das’s assertion that the ‘philosophical puzzles’ that philosophers like Stanley Cavell bring up, ‘can and do arise in the concrete relations and weaves of life we inhabit’ (p. 281). It is in the ordinariness of the everyday that philosophy may find itself. This makes the relationship between anthropology and philosophy unique; indeed, following Das, we may argue that philosophy would remain disembodied, as it were, without the flesh and blood of anthropology.
June 2015, volume 39, No 6