Veena Das

Veena Das is an Indian anthropologist, born in 1945, who holds the Krieger-Eisenhower Professorship of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University after chairing its anthropology department from 2001 to 2008 and earlier teaching at the Delhi School of Economics from 1967 to 2000. Her work on the anthropology of violence examines how violence becomes woven into ordinary life rather than simply interrupting it, engaging closely with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, most fully in her book Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2006). Her other books include Structure and Cognition: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual (1977) and Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (2014). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.