CAMHRA in Focus – Opening Address by Professor Veena Das

CAMHRA’s Opening Address by Prof Veena Das: Ethnographic Time: Repetition, Doubling, Voicing

Each spring, the CAMHRA gathers our community 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.

We are very happy to welcome Professor Veena Das as our Opening Address speaker, whose exceptional scholarship will open this year’s CAMHRA Lecture with clarity, reflections and insight.

Abstract

The lecture 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).

Some of these visits were occasioned by the formal periodicity of a survey protocol (reported in the chapter, “How the body speaks” in Professor Das' book Affliction); others were occasioned by the sheer contingency of finding one or other member during visits to the neighborhood (usually the eldest daughter Sapna) expressing an urgent need for a textbook; or insisting that something she had written be read; or asking for help to make sense of a lesson.

The last few visits since 2021 have been initiated by Sapna herself to a new location in a semi-urban village where she now resides. This work is also marked by a strong collaboration among four members of ISERDD (Charu, Purshottam, Rajan and Geeta) and Professor Das.

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.

Further talks

For those interested in encountering the broader intellectual landscape from which this lecture emerges, two earlier public talks by Professor Das offer rich points of entry into her thinking: Conversation on Critique (Allegra Lab) and 8th Social Change Annual Lecture 2026 (CSD India).

Speaker

Professor Veena Das is a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at John Hopkins University. 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.

Veena has been awarded many prizes and accolades for her research, including the Anders Retzius Award of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography, the Ghurye Award, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nessim Habif Prize and honorary doctorates from four universities.

Before joining Johns Hopkins University in 2000, she taught at the Delhi School of Economics for more than 30 years.

CAMHRA 

Further information available on the CAMHRA website.

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