Poverty and The Quest For Life Forum

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015
Book Forum:
Bhrigupati Singhs Poverty and the Quest for Life

Naveeda Khan
Johns Hopkins University
William E. Connolly
Lisa Stevenson
McGill University
William Mazzarella
University of Chicago
Swayam Bagaria
Bhrigupati Singh
Brown University
Edited by
Todd Meyers
Wayne State University
In this next installment of our book forum series, Naveeda Khan has organized a tremendously
engaging and challenging set of commentaries on Bhrigupati Singh's forthcoming book, Poverty
and the Quest for Life (Chicago, 2015). The currents that run between these pieces do not need
channeled by a long preface as will become apparent, these passages already run deep. We
hope you enjoy an exceptional set of commentaries and Bhrigu's reply.
Book forum: Bhrigupati Singhs Poverty and the Quest for Life
Introduction: An-other Ethnography

Naveeda Khan
Bhrigupati Singhs Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural
India, due out from The University of Chicago Press in March 2015, is, as his commentators
note, a book about many things. Bill Connolly attempts a list in his comments: Waxing and
waning intensities, territorial and temporal crossings, thresholds of life, bipolar sovereignty,
erotics and agonistics, agonistic intimacies, traveling gods, teasing songs, spiritual attachments to
life, illegible zones of threat and possibility, intensities deeper than deep play, cultural settings
and rules of eye contact, erotics, aesthetics and life, divine migrations, a positive frugality of
desire. Lisa Stevenson says of it: Its that kind of book as she draws out what it is to speak
from the side of life.
Its inviting and capacious nature embolden me to take a different track across it by way of
introducing it for this book-forum in Somatosphere than the conceptual foci that informs the
generous and probing comments to the book by Bill Connolly, Swayam Bagaria, William
Mazzarella and Lisa Stevenson. I wish to focus on Bhrigus ethnographic descriptions that
present an iconic landscape of post-colonial rural India with the sequestering of forests,
settlements of nomadic communities and the concurrent extension of mechanized agricultural
practices, the growing exposure of the rural economy to capitalist forces and the expansion of the
welfare state. At the same time, Bhrigus thick description also draws into this landscape the
fluctuating presence of the state, (a theme attended to by Swayam Bagaria in his comments), the
thickness and complicity of relations produced of prevailing caste sociality, its transection by
transactions with gods and animals, and, always, the quality of singularized striving that militates
against any commonsense presumptions that this place in Shahabad, Rajasthan is bare life,
virtually unthinkable (1).
Within this descriptive fullness, shot through with rhetorical questions, wry reflections, the alert
establishment of analytic difference and that of sensibility from what has prevailed in scholarship
and the active birthing of concepts, I find a minor note that suggests to me a new way to think of
the craft of ethnography. More specifically, I find enticing the play of rhythm and animation that
hints that ethnography may be the speech of one caught in such play and perhaps it has always
been that way. Let me illuminate what I mean with a few examples from the text. Like
Malinowski, Bhrigu provides us a scene of the anthropologists first entry into his field site.
While the scene is worth reproducing in whole as it will undoubtedly stay in the minds of those
who read it, let me draw attention to two elements within it that show what I mean by rhythm
and animation:
As our bus neared the village of Mamoni, my destination for now, I was startled by a
luminous orb hovering close by, atop a low hill. I had seen it before. Nonetheless, this
was the first time the moon chose to reveal itself to me...No wonder dogs howl and tides
stir. Ours are water bodies too (7).
Suddenly the planetary is amidst us, with the moon reaching down to impress itself on our sense
perceptions but also enfolding us, along with dogs and tides, into its circumambulation around
the earth. We are reminded perhaps for the first time of our watery constitutions that make us
open to such rhythmic influences.
Further on, Bhrigu writes: Nearer still, just outside our window, were trees, a few of which
seemed to be twisted with distress. Others stood swollen and proud. These are typical
postures...The trees, like other inhabitants of the region, were recovering from a trauma [of] two
successive droughts...(ibid.). These are not frozen postures but momentary stills of lively trees
in the process of germinating, growing, adapting, twisting and dying.
Such rhythms that either issue through this landscape or evolve out of it, and animations that
double the lives and liveliness of the landscape are sprinkled throughout Bhrigus ethnography.
In speaking of Thakur Baba, the deity who is the subject of chapter two, Bhrigu writes that
people say of him: this is his area....This area was an uncertain demarcation, but the gesture
seemed to indicate proximity and locality, a portion of the earth rather than an infinite sky (33).
We are drawn into another cosmic interplay, this time between the vastness of the sky
telescoping a moving point on the earths surface. Or, ahead in chapter three, Bhrigu asks when
passing a shrine to Thakur Baba: Are the deities offended by the cutting of the forest?... Why
would the deities care? Bhagirath replied. They are hungry for incense (79). Even the
appetites of gods are animated and nuanced.
The rhythms and animations are not the effects of Bhrigus writing alone, as the reflexive turn
within the writing of ethnography would suggest, their original impulse perhaps being to take
down the authoritative tone assumed by master anthropologists, such as Malinowski. Yet they
are not the effects of evocation either as Marilyn Strathern writes in Partial Connections (2004),
evoking multiple worlds and perspectives. Rather Bhrigus focus is on transections,
amplifications and depletions of forces accomplished across what he calls thresholds of life, the
concept William Mazzarella most explores in his comments. And one knows to write about them
because, given attentiveness, one inevitably becomes immersed in this sea of exchanges, or the
earth reaches up to one. Recall Bhrigus dreams in the chapter on Thakur Baba and his fainting
spell during one of the festivals for Tejaji, the deity of whom he writes in chapter seven.
Can one say then that ethnography is the product of possession, of the state of being possessed?
But Bhrigus is not the tortured expression of witching and being bewitched that we find in
Jeanne Favret-Saadas Deadly Words (1981). There is even a slight tone of detachment noted by
Bill Connolly in his comments. Can we speculate that the tone is less detachment than a striving
for impersonality to recollect for us the impersonal dimensions of the rhythmic and the
(re)animated? Given that entropy is woven into Bhrigus equally historical and ethnographic
descriptive of life in Shahabad, can its presence within the book make ethnography a reanimation of the genre of natural history in which a decisive rhythm is that of life and decay?
These thoughts on the craft of ethnography, among many others explored by the commentators,
are encouraged and taken a long ways by Bhrigus book.
Naveeda Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the
author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke 2012) and editor of
Beyond Crisis: Re-evaluating Pakistan (Routledge 2010).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/introduction-an-other-ethnography
The Nomadic Ethnography of Bhrigu Singh

William E. Connolly
Waxing and waning intensities, territorial and temporal crossings, thresholds of life, bipolar
sovereignty, erotics and agonistics, agonistic intimacies, traveling gods, teasing songs, spiritual
attachments to life, illegible zones of threat and possibility, intensities deeper than deep play,
cultural settings and rules of eye contact, erotics, aesthetics and life, divine migrations, a
positive frugality of desire.
Bhrigu Singh is an exploratory thinker and, to me, a practitioner of nomadic ethnography. He
folds thinkers, gods, and visionaries from different places and times into the visceral life of a
poor district in India. Doing so, he seeks to disrupt and move practices of ethnography rooted in
territorial modes of historicism, majoritarian traditions of thought, sociocentrism, or the
sufficiency of cultural internalism. He crosses thresholds of territory, time, the human/nonhuman
divide, and major/minor traditions as he concentrates his attention on lower caste life in one zone
of India. He might be said to place a minor tradition of European thoughta tradition
contesting Majority European traditions from inside its own territory---into close contact with
minor thinkers, deities and practices in India. In proceeding thus he challenges the twin ideas that
one major tradition is simply superior to the other or that either is intact in itself. For both are
challenged internally by minor traditions, and two of those minor traditions cross east/west
boundaries in this ethnography. Gods, thinking, practices, and hierarchies all travel in this study,
as anthropology does too. His topic is the district of Shahabad as locals, the state, global, and
planetary dimensions of life pass through it.
I am, clearly, taken with the adventure Bhrigu Singh pursues and impressed with how he weaves
a diverse array of voices into an ethnographic adventure.
Of course, several objections could be posed to this brand of nomadic ethnography: It insinuates
the ethnographer too deeply into the practices its studies; it is not objective enough; it is not
somber enough; it mixes diverse traditions in confusing ways; it pays insufficient attention to the
Indian state as a site of both caste domination and neoliberalism; it does not pay enough attention
to the local as a key site of belonging, protection and solace. Why, then, celebrate it as a mode of
anthropology and call for its emulation?
Perhaps I can start to respond to that question by noting the planetary condition in which the
study is set. A planetary condition that, though differentially, infuses localities, officials,
anthropologists, diverse states, global politics, consumption, markets, devotees of different gods,
generals, and philosophers.
We inhabit the Anthropocene. This is not merely an era when a former, gradual pace of climate
change, ocean current flows and species evolution has been interrupted by the historical
intervention of extractive capitalism and communism. Indeed, a critical ethnography of theories
of gradualism with respect to species evolution, geological processes, glacier flows, weather
patterns, and paleontology would show that there have been numerous changes before, first, the
human estate made much of difference and, second, that estate made a radical difference. There
were, for instance, the five major species extinction events before the Anthropocene,
accompanied by several punctuations in the planetary organization of climate, oceans, glaciers
and species life. The Anthropocene, then, is the 200 year period when capitalist and communist
modes of political economy have introduced massive infusions of CO2 into several nonhuman
self-organizing processes. The pre-human punctuations make the Anthropocene even more
dangerous than some early summations of it as a unique intervention had suggested.
This is the contemporary planetary condition, one that makes any study of anthropology, politics,
philosophy or economics pitched merely at intersections between local, state and global sites
radically insufficient to themselves. Such studies commit the fallacies of sociocentrism and
cultural internalism, in that they fail to explore how partially self-organizing, intersecting,
planetary processes of climate, weather, glacier flows, ocean currents, and species evolution
enter into cultural life at each site. But you cannot study the planetary alone either, so a nomadic
anthropology is one that folds a planetary dimension into readings of local, state and global
practices as it also folds each of these scales into it.
Bhrigu suggests that some minor gods who travel across castes and territories leave a cultural
imprint in part because they amplify local experiences of the contemporary planetary condition.
Not only do they do that. They throw out pearls of wisdom about how to enliven the local sense
of the new planetary condition, how to reconfigure ascetic practices and aesthetic priorities to
speak to this condition, and, most importantly, how to foster a positive ethos of frugality during
the contemporary age. This is an ethnography on the way to a local/planetary anthropology.
Bhrigus guess is that no puritan ethos from either east or west is up to the task of today. The
invocation of puritanism, perhaps, is effective in containing desire in this or that domain only to
release it elsewhere in avalanches of divine violence or compensatory modes of consumption. Its
piety is grounded in self-denial, lack and inhibition.
Bhrigus forays into the sexualities of caste and territorial crossings are not merely delicious in
themselves, they may also give clues about how to promote a positive ethos of existential
attachment to the abundance of life today during a period when material abundance must be
challenged. Erotics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Of course, such non-moral sources of an
affirmative ethos with planetary bite cannot become consolidated without radical shifts in the
infrastructure of consumption, at least in the zones of affluence within eastern and western
regions. And those shifts in the infrastructure will not proceed far without significant reforms of
political economy. So these three elements-ethos, infrastructure and politics--are in fact
interwoven. Each requires an advance in the other two to proceed far itself.
And Bhrigu, with help from Kalli, Deleuze, Tejaji, Zarathustra, and Queen Bee, has made more
provocative suggestions about how to proceed on the first frontexistential ethos--than anyone
else I know. Others, again, may base their hopes on consumer denial and/or sovereign
prohibitions. Bhrigu reviews and experiments with living practices that fill life with a surfeit of
positive meanings and connections without recourse to material abundance. The point again, is
that a positive ethos of frugality both sets one condition for affirmative politics today and enables
that politics, if and when enacted, to find receptive responses in everyday life. That is how this
text and another essay by Singh together offer a local, engaged anthropology of the
contemporary planetary condition. (Singh 2011)
I also appreciate how Bhrigu elides spectatorial questions of pessimism and optimism, turning
instead to practices that can possibly speak to urgent needs of the day. For during this time of
urgency the assessment of probabilities must take second place to the pursuit of positive
possibilities that could speak to the need of our time. So: the pursuit of frugality through
nurturing an ethos of existential abundance rather than one of abstinence; engagements with need
and possibility over those anchored assessments of probability.
I have plenty of worries about the world. But what concerns do I have about this text? I note one.
Occasionally when talking about living spiritualities, a critical topic in this project, Singh (I
switch to the impersonal designation now) places the issue of popular belief in the gods in
scare quotes. He is interested in what spirituality the gods convey and how it is received rather
than in answering the question of whether the gods are figures or realities to the participants. He
is not interested in articulating his own beliefs here either. I wonder, though. Does Singh here,
even as he refuses to adopt a superior stance, slip toward a mode of ethnographic superiority
rather than one of exchange and respectful engagement? Does this very distancing tactic fail to
foster a relation of agonistic respect with the populace he engages?
Once you break the hold of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy in ethnography and in the social
sciences at large you can see how creedal belief and spirituality are essentially inter-involved
without either being entirely reducible to the other. My beliefs about, say, an omnipotent god, or
the immanent divine, or entering into a mode of communion with being as such enters into the
spirituality I adopt. And any of these beliefs may express ambivalence or uncertainty, as it finds
variable expression in diverse layers of the culture/body complex. But when considered
comparatively, it is difficult to say that some faiths express beliefs while others bypass that issue
altogether. For one feature of belief is the ability to compare and contrast it to others. Moreover,
an unexpected natural event or a new finding may shock some latent beliefs, forcing believers
back to the drawing board. Some Hindus, Muslims, Christians and non-theists may thus find
themselves undergoing conversions of belief, in the broadest senses of the words "conversion"
and belief.
Creedal beliefs are thus inter-coded with spirituality, but neither is entirely reducible to the other.
So people sharing a formal creed may diverge on the spirituality with which it is infused. Some,
say, fold presumptive love of the world and diversity into their creedal beliefs while others fold,
say, secret resentment of their god for being so demanding or of the world for lacking the gods
they had expected.
I suspect, for instance, that Singh identifies with several onto-beliefs propounded by Deleuze and
Nietzsche, even as he also identifies fervently with the spiritualities each pursues and finds
expressions of such spiritualities in a local Indian district. He folds a gratitude for being as such
into his onto-creed. Charles Taylor also folds a positive spirituality into his creedal beliefs, but
he may not captivate Singh in the same way. Singh could pursue an affinity of spirituality with
him across a difference of creedal belief, however, as he might with John Thatamanil in a
different way.
The first point in thinking about linkages and distinctions between spirituality and belief is to
come to terms with how both color our thinking, actions and interpretation. The second is that
when we actively appreciate how a diversity of creedal beliefs can sink into cultural life we are
in a better position to pursue a positive pluralist assemblage across those faiths, class locations,
countries and age cohorts. The critical assemblage needed during the late stages of the
Anthropocene is one in which a large variety of creedal constituencies forge connections across
affinities of spirituality.
What would happen if Singh specified his onto-beliefs in relation to the constituencies he studies
while actively pursuing positive affinities of spirituality with both them and us? My sense is that
his project would be even more engaged and more nomadic. Indeed, I think he is already doing
this.
I am aware that the issue posed here is a subtle one and that not only the content but the very
meanings of belief and "spirituality" vary across traditions. My point is only to pose the
question of how to think belief comparatively along both dimensions. The issue seems important
for those who seek to negotiate positive affinities of spirituality across regions, classes, and faith
affiliations.
This, then, remains a debatable issue. But I did not want to express my appreciation for the
singular achievement of Bhrigu Singh's book without posing at least one issue.
Works Cited
Bhrigupati Singh, Agonistic Intimacy and Moral Aspiration in Population Hinduism. American
Ethnologist 2011; 38(3): 430-450.
William Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins
University. He is the author of numerous books, most recently The Fragility of Things: SelfOrganizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies and Democratic Activism (Duke 2013), A World of
Becoming (Duke 2013), Capitalism and Christianity: American Style (Duke 2008).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/the-nomadic-ethnography-ofbhrigu-singh
Of Winter Moons
Lisa Stevenson
McGill University
There were many essays I could have written about Bhrigupati Singhs Poverty and the Quest for
Life. There were so many ideas and approaches therein that resonated with my own work or
furthered and clarified my thinking. For instance: Singhs concept of thresholds of life and
how that relates to my the idea of life that is constituitively beside itself; the question of forms
of sovereignty over life that refuse the notion of any absolute or omnipotent power over; the idea
of coming to know something rather than knowing it at the beginning; the idea of transcendence
in everyday lifeThe list could go on. Its that kind of book. What follows is the brief essay that
I did manage to writewith the awareness that there are other essays hovering in the outskirts of
my mind as I write.
***
Poverty and the Quest for Life is a remarkable, and ultimately brave, piece of writingBut what
kind of writing is it? Is it a poem, a song, a philosophical treatise? Is it, in fact, for real? Or have
we, as previously faithful readers of anthropological monographs, also been transported to a
setting (i.e., an extramarital tryst) where that marriage to anthropology-as-usual recedes
Does the book flirt with us? (What would anthropological flirting look like anyway?) Why are
we smiling? (Is that really Friedrich Nietzsche giving Singh marriage advice?) Laughing out
loud? (Is that really a somewhat forlorn Singh sitting on a brick wall waiting for his own tryst to
take its inevitable course?). Is this the proper affect for a reader of anthropology? As Singh
writes, Strangely enough in my scholastic neck of the woods, such is the view of life (or is it
only a mode of feigning gravitas?) that it is harder for now to prompt a smile than it is to confirm
a global catastrophe (58).
Singhs thoroughgoing blurring of the distinctions between play (flirtation) and serious work,
reality and unreality, the secular and the sacred, the mundane and the spiritualhis ability to
allow these to remain in an unresolved, nondialectical tension throughout the bookis part of
the books particular force. It allows for a particular way of thinking and being to come into
viewa way of thinking that finds its inspiration in a nondialectical or affirmative genealogy
of thought, a genealogy which Singh traces through Deleuze back to Nietzsche.
In fact, Poverty and The Quest for Life could be productively read alongside Nietzsches The
Genealogy of Moralsbut not as a recapitulation of the philosophies therein, but as a raucous,
sometimes bawdy, always exuberant incarnation ofor giving flesh toNietzsches concept of
10
the will to power, which in Singhs hands becomes forms of life, rich and abundant in life
force (135). For Nietzsche, the will to power was the essence of life, those spontaneous,
aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces that give new interpretations and directions (1989:
79). In Nietzschean style, then, divinity for Singh becomes, a being to whose tune we learn how
to dance (196)and there is a lot of dancing, much divine inspiration, much spontaneous,
aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces in this book.
Singh characterizes such intellectual inspiration as friendship (remember that in this book
Nietzsche can give marriage advice), and he remarks that, Perhaps if Agamben and Schmitt had
been my philosophical friends, I would have written a different book, about the Sahariyas as
bare life. That book, too, would have been true to life, differently conceived (285). Given the
friends Singh has fallen in with, he sees in the world in degrees (thresholds) of intensity rather
than poles of opposition. Life is not a question of either/or. Thus Singh refuses to reduce the
life he encounters among the Sahariyas of Shahabad (a subdistrict of Rajasthan) to mere lack.
That is, he refuses the equation: lack of food, lack of water, lack of infrastructure equals lack of
life. As so he says, in almost aphoristic style, to be poor is not necessarily to be poor in life. One
cannot leave the definition of the quality of life only to economists (271).
Following on the heels of this observation, Singh asks what I see as the books truly subversive
question:
In what ways is the fullness of life measured? When economists use the term quality of
life, they usually define it according to basic capabilities (Sen 1993: 31), or minimally
adequate levels for the sustenance of life (41). With what indicators do we measure the
maximal qualities of life? (262).
Poverty and the Quest for Life is in some sense an extended answer to this question. In its
exuberance and the, shall we say, immanent transcendence of this book, the only mode of
being that becomes suspect is that of ressentimenta negativity that tears at the fabric of life.[i]
For instance, in characterizing what he calls the active aggression of his activist friend Kalli, or
the vitality of the life of the spiritual leader Bansi, Singh takes pains to distinguish Kallis form
of aggression from the aggression involved in ressentiment. He writes,
By active, I do not mean all forms of aggression or combative agency. Kallis nephew,
Devkaran Sahariya, a young man from Nahargarh, was also a fighter in some sense. His
never-ending tales excoriated one and all for their corruption: X screwed over Y, and Z
screwed over X, and I screwed them both. So reactive were his descriptions of village
politics that his listeners would invariably end up in a nihilistic mood and sigh that
perhaps the time of kings was better than our democratic present. (202)
An apt description of ressentiment. Kallis active aggression is completely different. As Singh
writes,
I have tried to express her life not, or not entirely, through images of poverty and lack but
through variation and plenitude. And what was my image of plenitude? Inspired by the
moon, I did not seek an unblemished, constant, solar form of the good, but rather waxing
11
and waning intensities, which I found in abundance in Kalli. In an earlier chapter I called
this lunar enlightenment. (223)
I find Singhs description of Kallithe description of her life as marked by plenitude
immediately appealing. And I would like to spend the space I have left on Singhs ethical
commitment to seeing and witnessing plenitude in the lives of others.
I remember returning from my field site in Arctic Canada, working with youth who had been
deeply affected by the suicide epidemic there. Early on I came across a short story by the Native
American writer Sherman Alexie called, What you pawn I will redeem. I highly recommend
the story. When I had finished the story, I thought, thats itI dont need to write my
dissertation anymore. All the beauty, the plenitude and the forms of transcendence within
everyday life, is right theremixed up with the injustice, the pain, the ongoing oppression of
North Americas Native Peoples. This is, I think what Singh wants to call: waxing and waning
intensities (223) of life. And this is also what Singh wants to call lunar (as opposed to solar)
enlightenmentthe ability to capture the non-duality of dissolving pain and perilous joy in a
single sentence.
I had a similar feeling when reading Singhs writing, written in the light of the moon. Yes! Hes
done it! Hes shifted us away from the idea that pain and suffering create a lack so momentous
that nothing else can ethically be said about the people anthropologists live, work, and play with.
Ethics, for Singh lies elsewhere.
And yet, in the spirit of accompanying Singh into this tangle of ideas and feelings, I want to say
that at times the waning (as opposed to the waxing) of the moon is less developed. In fact, at one
point ethics is defined as the mode of agonistics that brings us closer to life than to death
(162). I instinctively want to agree. And yet, there is a way in which one of the terms of the
nondialectial dialectic is privileged: life as an active, generative force seems (occasionally) to
sneak in as the final arbiter of the good.
In a characteristically brave passage, Singh describes returning to Shahabad after fieldwork and
finding the grounds of the NGO that where he had lived during fieldwork overgrown with
shrubs. And he cant seem to find Bansi, the holy man he canonizes in the ninth chapter of the
book. He writes,
Bansi, already in his mid eighties during my fieldwork, had suffered a stroke and was
paralyzed. I only heard about this. I couldnt find him, although maybe I did not try hard
enough. Maybe I didnt want to see my highest man in a reduced state. (295)
I recognize the situation well. I have also been unable to find friends from fieldwork. But what is
it that we are afraid to see? Or is it that the moon has disappeared, and there is nothing left to see,
only something to feel, something that we cant quite face?
I think, (and this is a tentative contribution to the opening Singh has provided for us in this
book), the question remains of what we, as anthropologists, make of the experience of death in
life. Singh has named itand given us an image for itthe waning, or even eclipse of the moon,
12
but Im not sure he has yet had time to flesh it out, in the way he has done so beautifully for the
waxing moon. By the experience of death in life I dont mean the kind of transcendental death
that redeems all life, nor am I primarily talking about moments of abandonment by the state, by
friends, by family, but the moments, or days or years of boredom, of failure, of unremitting
sorrow. I mean moments when holy men falter and die profane deaths, moments when Inuit
youth feel trapped by the lack of roads out of town. I also dont mean to ask how we measure
these with quality of life indicators, but instead how we grapple with them in life, setting them
alongside the moments of transcendence, without perhaps trying to resolve them into a life force.
I am not concerned with death in life as a structural possibilityI think Singh has that covered
with the concept of waningbut in death in life as an ethical possibility.
Walter Benjamin says in his essay on The Storyteller that Boredom is the dream bird that
hatches the egg of experience (1968: 91). But what is more important, the experience or the
boredom? We usually see the boredom as redeemed by the rich experience. This is what I hear
from my colleagues: We need to do nothing to be able to do something. But what about the
nothing on its own? Can we accept the boredom for and in itself?
Extending Singhs metaphor of lunar enlightenment, we might say that Poverty and the Quest for
Life was written under a harvest moon. And I think it needed to be, I think that moon is central to
the profound contribution Singh is making to ethics, politics, and aesthetics in anthropology. But
if it isnt too soon to ask: what then of the winter moon?[ii]
Wallace Stevens, in his poem The Snow Man says in the opening line that one must have a
mind of winter, and then he says that such a listener, one who possesses that mind of winter,
listens in the snow/And, nothing himself, beholds/nothing that is not there and the nothing
that is (1990: 10). In conclusion, I just wanted to offer a piece of my own writing, culled from
the epilogue of my book, and written perhaps under a more wintry moon.
One night in Iqaluit, in the fall of 2003, Monica, Jesse, and I were hanging out at the
place I was housesitting. We were in the living room, that standard Iqaluit living room
with a tightly stuffed blue couch and matching armchair, a glass coffee table, and a
television. Government housing. We were talking about one thing and then another,
arranging ourselves on the couch, on the floor, moving back and forth to the kitchen to
bring out plates of food. Monica, still besieged by the death of her best friend, tells me a
dream she had just after her uncle died. She dreamed about seeing him in the NorthMart,
the local store where he had worked on and off before his suicide. In her dream she keeps
looking toward a bookshelf that obscures the steady stream of customers coming in the
front door of the store. She tells us, For some reason I kept looking towards that way.
You know, you cant really see people coming . . . So I was walking and I kept looking
there. And I saw my uncle passing by. He was just looking at me, we didnt smile or anything. We looked at each other till we couldnt show.
Till we couldnt show. The dreamer, like the dreamed, disappears from sight,
soundlessly, without remainder. Nothing shows.
13
A little later in our conversation Monica tells me the dreamin which her best friend,
who committed suicide, appears. The dream doesnt make sense to her, but she tells it to
me anyway. A bunch of people are sitting in a restaurant, and her friend is there too, but
she wont look at her, wont make eye contact. Then, as if out of nowhere, her dead
friend looks at her and says, Trade spots?
So yeah, we just traded spots. And then this other dream just showed up that we were
outsideit was just meoutside of Convenience crying, and I knew that she passed
away. And I was like, This doesnt make sense. Or something AndI dont know. I
was writing or drawing stuff on Styrofoam. Cause there was lots of Styrofoam outside.
In dreams of the dead, voices can seem muffled, muted, as if the volume has been turned
down, sonority denied. Instead of speaking, my friend writes on Styrofoam. Lots and lots
of Styrofoam (2014: 171-172).
There is no transcendence here. No overcoming. No dialectical resolution for sure. I want to
suggest that maybe Wallace Stevens notion of the nothing that is and that this may be
different from the nothing that isnt might help us here. My thinking here depends (I think) on an
interval between death and non-being. One can be dead just as one can be alive. So death is also
(and Singh would, I think, agree) a form of being, a way to be. In his terms it is a threshold of
life. Non-being, of course, is something else entirelysomething, that has, possibly, more to do
with a kind of soundlessness. My lingering question is this: is there an ethics that might emerge
from also listening to, residing in, these places where no one is dancing and even the sounds are
hard to make out? In Wallace Stevenss words, The sound of the land/full of the same wind/that
is blowing in the same bare places (1990: 10).
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter
1968 The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nicolai Leskov. In Illuminations. Pp. 83110. New York: Harcourt Brace & World.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
1989 On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage Books.
Alexie, Sherman
2003 What You Pawn I Will Redeem. The New Yorker (April 21):168-177.
Singh, Bhrigupati
2015 Poverty and the Quest for Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stevens, Wallace
1990 The Snow Man. In The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Pp. 9-10. New York:
Vintage Books.
14
Stevenson, Lisa
2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Notes
[i] For Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, our morality has been co-opted by the Christian
priests who, in order to gain power over the strong, have defined the weak as the good and the
strong as the oppressors. To be strong, to have a will to power, is thus to be oppressive and even
evil. The power that the priests have over the strong is derived from ressentimenta reactive
instinct borne out of what we might today colloquially call an inferiority complex. Thus
Nietzsche argues that the flourishing he associates with a will to power is converted into egoism
and pleasure in that flourishing is converted into sin.
[ii] Another way of asking this, perhaps, in a different idiom: What of Freuds death drive? Is it
radically incompatible with Nietzsches will to power?
Lisa Stevenson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University and the author of
Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press 2013).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/of-winter-moons
15
Dialectics at the Threshold

William Mazzarella
University of Chicago
This is what Bhrigu Singh says about the journey he had in mind for his book, Poverty and the
Quest for Life: I wanted to move closer to life in Shahabad. I also wanted to move farther away,
to view Shahabad amid global movements of spirit and matter. This, then, was my bipolar
orientation, nearer and farther than doxa, the impressionistic flatland of disembodied common
sense (20). Id like to use my time here today to explore how Bhrigu navigates this journey, this
bipolar orientation and I want to do so through an exploration of what I take to be his key
concept in the book: thresholds of life. My journey across his journey will take place in three
short movements. The first movement is about how Bhrigu clears the ground, how he moves, as
he puts it, farther away from doxa, the better to be able to move closer to life in Shahabad. The
second movement explores this moving closer to life in Shahabad, and especially how it allows
Bhrigu to develop his key concept, thresholds of life, immanently out of this moving closer. The
third and last movement briefly takes up another one of Bhrigus central concepts agonistic
intimacy and responds to it as an invitation to reflect, in an intimately agonistic way, now not
on thresholds of life as a concept but rather on concepts as thresholds of life.
First movement: clearing the ground
Bhrigus signature gesture is to stay the moralizing hand of a social science that always already
knows what its talking about and how youre supposed to feel about it. This is the social science
that has pre-identified the people among whom he conducted his fieldwork as abject and the
officialdom that is supposed to serve them as corrupt. This kind of social science deals in what
Bhrigu calls the solar certainties of the enlighteners and the modernizers whose critical
common sense (31) sees only failed states and bare life. That Bhrigu does his fieldwork in a part
of northwestern India where everyday life is undeniably characterized by extreme poverty,
drought, malnutrition, and marginalization only heightens the stakes of what he wants to achieve:
that is, to find a way of talking about the waxing and waning of vitality, of human and nonhuman potencies, in a zone where solar wisdom sees only bare existence.
Bhrigus first and continuous task, then, is to move away from those strongly moralized concepts
that stand in the way of a different ethics of ethnographic attention. Against blinding solar
knowledge, Bhrigu proposes what he calls a form of attentiveness to shifting tides: a lunar sense
of enlightenment (117). The promise here is the disclosure of a different drama. No longer now
16
the pre-moralized struggle between freedom-fighting heroes and colonizing villains but
rather more ordinary necessities and desires (122-123). No longer now just Epochal terms
such as feudalism and capitalism or neoliberalism but rather hybrid mixtures of old and new
modes of transaction (126). Thinking sovereignty not in terms of ideals of plenitude versus
nightmares of abjection, but rather in terms of the actualities of the state (67). In this
preliminary, ground-clearing movement, then, Bhrigu invites us to think further about actual
life rather than life-denying ideals (138). And in a lovely line from the very final part of the
book, he pokes gentle but serious fun at our would-be critical attachment to epochal drama he
says: In waiting for the oceans to part, we may simply miss out on life (229).
But Bhrigu is by no means simply calling for ethnography over theory. Far from it. In fact,
Poverty and the Quest for Life is a work with grand theoretical ambitions and a work that is
wonderfully unembarrassed about its ambitions to theoretical generality. From an
anthropological point of view, Bhrigus book is refreshing not least because it does the classic
anthropological work of emphasizing ethnographic particularity against reified
conceptualization. And while Bhrigus writing is deeply immersed in the cultural and linguistic
particularities of life in Shahabad, his analysis refuses to fall back on culturalism as a mode of
asserting the integrity of difference. One might say that Poverty and the Quest for Life is less
interested in accounting for difference per se than in acknowledging a difference that might make
a generalizable theoretical difference that is to say, a difference that might shift the threshold
for how we understand sovereignty, life, and action in general.
Second movement: moving closer
Thresholds indeed; thresholds of life. Having cleared the ground, Bhrigu finds himself immersed
in local life. But what is the measure of life? Maybe there is, as he speculates early on, no
measure for life. Can we, for instance, retrieve anything useful from the heavily moralized
phrase quality of life (4)? As Bhrigu makes the ethnographic rounds, local potencies and
potentates crowd in: regional deities, companion spirits, forestry officials, gurus and secular
givers. As he strives to understand the play of these multiple potencies, their waxing and their
waning, they start to become clearer and they begin, as it were, to prompt their own conceptual
translation. Bhrigu says: the gods helped me formulate a signature scholastic tool concepts
(32).
Among these concepts, perhaps none is as omnipresent and as protean in Bhrigus book as
thresholds of life, a phrase that he typically qualifies as varying thresholds of life, a concept
that Bhrigu tells us performs an encompassing ontological role (282, his emphasis) in his
work. He also tells us that its derived from Deleuze but when I tried to follow up the page
reference in Deleuzes Pure Immanence, I found only a blank pageperhaps this was a
mischievous bit of thug vidya or trickster knowledge on Bhrigus part? Turning, as one does,
to Google, I did find some scattered references to the self as a threshold in Deleuze and
Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus. But in truth Im more interested in what kind of vital threshold
this concept thresholds of life is in Bhrigus text how it lives and moves in the book and
what kinds of life it makes sensible and intelligible in his project.
17
At first, Ill admit, I was confused. In an explicitly definitional moment toward the end of the
book, Bhrigu says that by thresholds of life he means two things. One meaning is moments of
passage in a life - often ritually marked like birth, marriage, death as well as phases of postmortem life. But the concept of thresholds of life is also, Bhrigu explains, a way of talking about
how different potencies, different vitalities become manifest or, as it were, come alive socially.
As he puts it, In this sense, rather than thinking of the supernatural versus the rational, we
can ask what thresholds and dimensions a culture or a self is open to (282). As I say, though, it
wasnt immediately clear to me how this worked in Bhrigus writing, because sometimes
thresholds of life appear in the guise of objects trees, water, food sometimes they appear as
the modes in which such objects might be discursively or ritually animated, sometimes they
appear as states of being or consciousness for example possession, renunciation or samadhi are
all thresholds of life and sometimes thresholds of life are what one might otherwise refer to as
ideological narratives and practices like nationalism, religion, or post-colonial historiography.
Some thresholds of life would seem to be culturally defined as higher or purer than others,
which is not to say that they are more efficacious under all circumstances, but rather that they
enjoy a kind of prestige whereby they might presume to incorporate or subsume lower or
cruder thresholds of life.
Im still not entirely sure that I fully understand what Bhrigu intends by thresholds of life, but as
I read back through and across his book I began to form a version of the concept that seemed
both useful to me and pretty much in line with the spirit of Bhrigus thinking. My sense is that
thresholds of life might be understood as more or less formalized occasions or forms through
which the multiple vital potentialities that animate a social field might be actualized in more or
less durable ways. In that regard, Bhrigus reflections on what we might conventionally call
religious ritual seemed helpful. Acknowledging the etymological basis of the word religion in
notions of binding or tying together, Bhrigu suggests that we might understand ritual practice
not in the usual sense as an act of binding together the community in smooth solidarity, but
rather as a practice of producing variably durable assemblages of contestation and contract, of
potency and its routinization. That Bhrigu should read ritual this way is of course in line with his
explicitly Nietzschean optic: an optic in which behind all the moralizing pieties of normative
discourse we find an infinitely dynamic field of agonistic potencies. But this is also where the
concept of thresholds of life becomes, I think, quite powerful in his analysis. It helps us to think
through problems like why it is that gods are born and fade away at certain times and in certain
places, why a debilitating condition of madness may, at another level, be a source of social
power, and why the quality of life only becomes interesting as a concept once its opened up to
a plurality of qualia that is to say, variable thresholds of life.
Theres stuff in here that I find extremely useful for helping to think through my own
preoccupations. Bhrigu asks, for example, why it is that we have such a hard time theorizing the
vulnerability of state power as anything other than corruption or state failure? Have we been led
too far down the road, leading from Weber to Foucault, of thinking state power only as more or
less total rationalization? What about what Veena Das calls the element of illegibility that is
internal to the modern state or what Talal Asad calls the margins of uncertainty that live
alongside legal-bureaucratic legitimation? This is not, for Bhrigu, just a matter of the arcanum of
power of the sublime core of quotidian sovereignty. Rather the question of the partial
illegibility of the state opens up a more complex set of problems for our theorizations of power,
18
where weakness may not be the opposite of strength and from the standpoint of subjects
equality may not be the opposite of inequality. On this latter point that is to say, our habit of
thinking of democratic politics as a salvific machine for the pursuit of equality Bhrigu very
characteristically completely refuses the anthropological balm of culturalism: we are certainly
not going to get any relativizing organicist pieties about homo hierarchicus from him. But just as
crucially, for him the alternative is also never a liberal-secular universalism in which persistent
inequality can only be read as an index of disappointed political aspirations. What emerges
instead from the pages of Poverty and the Quest for Life is a vision of politics as a kind of
multiscalar agonistic contest in which various kinds of entities human and non-human
mobilize forces that we might variably recognize as aesthetic, magical, and charismatic in a
pursuit of enhanced life. Indeed, as obsessed as I am right now with revisiting the classic
anthropological category of mana, there are many points in Bhrigus text that open up vitalizing
thresholds for thinking potentiality and efficacy across religious and secular domains.
Third movement: agon
I promised just now that my third movement would travel from a look at thresholds of life as a
concept to some words on concepts as thresholds of life. And here again, Bhrigu meets me more
than halfway, declaring near the beginning of his book that Concepts are spirit mediums (32).
But what do these mediums channel? Certainly not just local worlds. Concepts arising
immanently out of fieldwork in highly particular places should not have to stay put. Rather they
pursue their own trajectories of life in a comparative field. As Bhrigu puts it, emphatically: It is
not that Mitra-Varuna are Indian gods and thereby explain only the Indian state. These are
inherently comparative mythologies (286).
I couldnt agree more. The idea that local worlds can only be explained by local concepts, and
that local concepts must remain bound by local worlds is little more than positivism
masquerading as ethnographic ethics. The anthropologist is also a medium, a threshold of life,
and the act of interpretation, when it is done well, actualizes potentialities in the substance of our
encounters that go far beyond mere description. If concepts, as Bhrigu says have a rhythm and a
timing (284), then part of what this means is that concepts are not just like pairs of spectacles or
differently shaped windows through which we view the world. Concepts, too, are thresholds of
life; that is to say, they actualize and animate the world in new ways.
And here I want to tease my good friend a little bit, taking him up on his invitation to an intimate
agonistics. He already knows that I think his spirit guide Deleuze in so many ways a threshold
of life in Bhrigus project he already knows that I think that Monsieur Deleuze has entirely
misled him when it comes to his characterization of dialectics as life-denying. Against the neovitalist current, I would like to assert that the idea that concepts might emerge immanently from
our ethnographic encounters is paradigmatically dialectical indeed, it is a paradigmatically
Hegelian thought. Having suggested that concepts are spirit mediums, Bhrigu adds, much later,
that Concepts, too, are mortal (287). This, too, reads to me like an opening to a Hegelian
thought: concepts, the great German master taught us, are internally dynamic because, in their
immersion in life, they become internally agonistic that is the source of their life, their
potential, and their death. And when Bhrigu says that, in fieldwork, first impressions are at once
moved beyond and retained, what could be a better gloss on the classic Hegelian idea of
19
Aufhebung or sublation? But, someone will object, isnt sublation a teleological and totalizing
concept? Right, but thats precisely where negative dialectics come in a non-teleological, nontotalizing dialectics as Adorno defined the term.
As I say, Im playing with my friend a little bit here, dressing up his thoughts in the very terms
that he so vehemently rejects. But my purpose here is not just to fantasize a little playful
theoretical cross-dressing, but perhaps also to open up a conversation about conceptual
voluntarism about what it means to choose a position from which to write, whether we can
really choose a position from which to write, especially if good anthropology involves, as
Bhrigu puts it so well, a particular mode of attentiveness to life (285). In a Nietzschean spirit,
Bhrigu is advocating a joyful, life-affirming anthropology against the moralizing pathos that he
finds in critical theory. As he puts it: Strangely enough in my scholastic neck of the words, such
is the view of life (or is it only a mode of feigning gravitas?) that it is harder for now to prompt a
smile than it is to confirm a global catastrophe. What spirits possess us? (58). Yes of course, I
want to say but then who wouldnt choose life over death, the smile over the catastrophe, as
long as the two are presented as an either/or? Perhaps were losing our way, and losing our
attentiveness to life, as soon as we start imagining affirmation and negation as separable
stances, as if one might choose one or the other, as if one doesnt activate and potentiate the
other?
And what is this thing that were doing when we choose, anyway? Bhrigu has some wise things
to say here, for instance when he reflects: what form of life are we drawn to? We often express
what impresses us, what impresses itself upon us. This is not so much a question of logic as of
ethics, the kind of life to which we are attracted (223). But if what attracts us is what impresses
us, then what it is that makes us impressionable in a particular way in the first place? Surely
there are deep histories, unconscious histories here, histories that turn us into particular kinds
ofwhat? Spirit mediums? Thresholds of life? Interpretive media? Slightly later in the book,
Bhrigu suggests: At best, like Nietzsche, for instance, we might set out the coordinates of a
tension as accurately as possible and declare the direction of our own attraction, as he does for
Dionysus (276). I couldnt agree more but it seems to me that, again, the important point here
is not the attraction to Dionysus per se, but rather the phrase coordinates of a tension that is,
the tension between Apollo and Dionysus is not an either/or, but rather a both/and: the tension is
constitutive and in itself productive and, perhaps, vitalizing.
As Im sure you can tell, a few passages in Bhrigus book had me on the defensive when he
writes, for instance, of the gloomy spirit of negative dialecticians in the post-9/11 era (55), and
I know exactly what and whom hes talking about but I also absolutely dont want to waste the
rare and precious term negative dialectic on those guys. Or when he uses a phrase that, to me,
has to be a contradiction in terms: a transcendentally negative dialectic (44). But in the spirit of
intimate agonistics, this is of course entirely appropriate. In my long-standing pursuit of what I
call dialectical vitalism, I continue to dream of peculiar monsters. And the force of this
exceptionally fine book, Poverty and the Quest for Life, is that it asks not what will you
defend? but rather what can you become?
20
William Mazzarella is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author

of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Duke, 2003)
and Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Duke 2013).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/dialectics-at-the-threshold
21
Sovereignty without the Sovereign

Swayam Bagaria
Bhrigupati Singhs book is an evocative, powerful, and an exquisite ethnographic reanimation of

several concepts that has over time amassed ruinous potential in our imagination of the present.
Waylaying their persistent expression in a rhetoric of crisis, Singh carries out this reanimation
not out of a repetitive necessity to keep these concepts in circulation outside of its historical
suitability, but rather out of a desire to resist easy transactions of novelty where new concepts
often replace old ones too hastily and too uncritically. In this note, I will confine my remarks to
one such concept out of an entire filigree that Singh maps, that of sovereignty.
Singhs own definition of sovereignty at first light seems rather uncontroversial. He defines it as
the power over life. In this seemingly modest turn of phrase, what Singh however does is
establish a contact point between what is considered in present academic parlance to be two
distinct political imaginaries: that of sovereignty and that of a notion of power that has life as its
object. Depending on how we read the specific force of the terms power and life, the clause
power over life might imply either the presence of a unified sovereign or the absence of one.
But before we delve into how Singh himself sutures these two seemingly disparate conceptions
together, I want to briefly refer to how these two came to be aligned with distinct historical
epochs in the first place.
In a reading of Foucault that has gained common currency, he is seen to be committed to the
view that the displacement of the sovereign modes of royal power with disciplinary and
biopolitical modes of regulation in the European nation states during the 17th, 18th, 19th
centuries signaled a putative break in the qualitative nature of power and the relations it
established between the state and its subjects. The sovereign mode of regulation characterized by
the law, which is always the wielder of the sword, was replaced by the disciplinary mode of
government characterized by norm, which produced a technology of power centered on life. It
was not that the concern with life was somehow absent in the epoch of sovereignty, but it had not
yet become the exclusive substrate of political existence. Legal subjects had not yet been
replaced by living beings as the sole object of power.
This transition in Foucault, however, comes with its own set of perturbations and inconsistencies.
One may justifiably ask: If we do not just relate sovereignty and biopolitics in chronological
succession with each other then how does one emerge from the other? What happens to
sovereignty as it recedes into the background and what do we specifically understand when we
22
nominally speak of it as background? How does it remain there in an incomplete withdrawal and
what does this do to our understanding of the sovereign remains? Foucault does not provide
definite answers to these questions, but they come into sharp relief and even brought to a crisis in
a thinker whom Singh dialogues with directly in his book, Giorgio Agamben. For Agamben, the
receded nature of sovereignty within a bio-political horizon comes into full presence in moments
of exception when life is stripped of all its relational niceties and is presented as bare life. A life
that only has death left for itself. This particularly sovereign characteristic of dealing death
emerges as the hidden double of biopolitics most manifestly in the extermination camps where
death is allocated in the name of optimizing life. Thus the ambiguity of the transition from
sovereignty to biopolitics in Foucault is, for Agamben, a feigned trick which only serves to
further establish sovereignty as the secret crypt of biopolitics.
This context is essential for understanding the stakes that Singh has in retaining the concept of
sovereignty as not only something that is necessary but also perhaps desirable. Contrary to
Agamben who makes sovereignty in its most extreme thanato-political form the pulsating
heartbeat of all biopolitics, Singh retains the ambiguity and tenuousness of this transition in
which sovereignty never completely falls off our intellectual and political map but also never
becomes the hidden imaginary that saturates our conceptual and empirical worlds.
For Singh, the question of sovereignty arises most explicitly in his encounter with Thakur Baba,
a headless horseman who is revered as a deity in Shahabad. Singh traces his history in a minor
key in which Thakur Baba was not simply a figure in the annals of royalty but also emerges as
part of a warrior-band who opened up a new possibility of life. The figure of the warrior (of
which Thakur Baba is one) along with the figure of the ascetic, however, are important for more
than just historical reasons. Both the figures for Singh are representative of not purely a will to
self-annihilation but as specific markers of sacrifice, which Singh translates as achieving a higher
threshold of life. The inevitable crossing to death that every human has to ultimately make is
transformed into a conquest over death for the warrior and the ascetic, thus providing them
with an uncanny hold over life, death, and the threshold that lies between. Singh sees the power
of Thakur Baba as deity, as emanating from this heightened intensity of life that he was able to
acquire courtesy of his historical wager as a warrior. Thakur Babas sovereign power over life is
not however all encompassing, but becomes pertinent on three occasions; first, in atoning spirits
of those who underwent untimely deaths, second in addressing childbirth, and third as an
overseer who gives courage.
Another characteristic of Singhs sovereign is that these transactions between Thakur Baba and
the people of Shahabad do not merely subsist as relations of sheer force directed from the deity
to the devotee but as a complementary mix of force and contract (derived from the Vedic Gods
Mitra and Varuna) in which force comes to be associated with the violence of sovereignty while
contract entails a much more negotiable give-and-take relation. For Singh, this particular
genealogy of sovereignty as arising out of the Vedic divinities of Mitra and Varuna is not
specific to any deity or nation but is the germane condition of all sovereignty. Thus in Singhs
picture of sovereignty, Agamben merely radicalizes its forceful aspect while discounting the
contractual half. For Agamben, every democracy is a disguised totalitarian regime, which is its
secret double; for Singh, even the most totalitarian of all regimes has seething within it a silenced
democratic vulnerability.
23
But let us stay a bit longer with why this notion of sovereignty might perhaps be indispensable
for Singh. When does power become the specific mandate of sovereign power? Singh considers
his own meditations on sovereignty as arising out of a theological-political lexicon that emerges
from the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who defines the sovereign as he who decides
on the exception. What is salient for Singh in Schmitts work is not however the indelible and
fatal opportunism or decisionism at work in the definition of sovereignty, rather it is Schmitts
articulation of it in a specifically theological-political register that modernity in its repeated
affirmations of secularization tends to repress. By appealing to this particular formulation of
sovereignty and then replacing the omnipotent God of Schmitt with the more diminutive Vedic
divinities of Mitra and Varuna, Singh is able to arrive at a concept of sovereignty that is not
totalizing and absolute but forceful and yet contractual. As conceptual argument, the resultant
notion of power that Singh reaches might well be deemed sovereignty. But then the
understanding of sovereignty articulated herein cannot be coterminous with Schmitts singular
definition of it as the one who decides on the exception. Of course, it does not have to be but one
may then ask what relation of force and contract is not sovereign for Singh. Or might there be
any relation of power that is also simultaneously not a relation of sovereignty?
Viewing these questions within the prismatic of sovereignty as it appeared in our discussion of
Foucault might proffer an alternative and perhaps more sobering picture of sovereignty in
relation with life. Schmitt is a good point of departure but not a very useful one of arrival. In
opposition to the stentorian and timeless assertion characteristic of the sovereign in Schmitt is
Foucaults shadowy sovereign who progressively recedes after the event of its symbolic
beheading but never completely disappears. Singhs picture of sovereignty might be better
aligned with the latter as I see him using a vocabulary more proximate to it.
Let us recall Singhs definition of sovereignty as that of power over life. Life, which is the
paradigm of replenishment and novelty, is always, for Singh, anterior to any impingement or
capture from the outside. This particular understanding of life, one might say, is very different
from how it appears in Foucaults concept of biopolitics in which life and politics are mutually
intertwined with each other. Singh seems to have a much more expansive understanding of life
than the form it takes in biopower. Even though it might not be the same expression of life, I
think it is not all that different either. For Foucault, the proliferation of what counted as life was
the precondition for the oncoming of more regulatory and immanent mechanisms of power that
aimed to evaluate these burgeoning forms and kinds of living. These different mechanisms of
power were not a replacement of the sovereign mode but instead became wounds in its armor
that signaled the incapacity of the sovereign to subsume all forms of life. Thus sovereign power
was progressively weakened though it could never be completely eradicated. For Singh life is
also inassimilable within set or measured forms of power that cannot seize it in any coherent
manner. But instead of an absolute sovereign that realizes the finitude of its powers with time,
Singh considers a notion of delimited sovereignty as arising from within the precincts of life.
Delimited because the sovereign is territorially and ritually marked; Thakur Baba appears as
sovereign only within a specific area and is associated with specific rituals of enabling and
engaging life like childbirth. The sovereign here does not get progressively attenuated as it does
in Foucault but is always limited or finite in its role to begin with. The difference perhaps lies in
the prior degrees of redemptive or catastrophic expectations we might have from a sovereign
figure. Additionally, while Foucaults sovereign, even in its depleted form, retains the violence
24
of the sword and so of death, Singhs figure of sovereignty, on the contrary, enables and pushes
life onto thresholds that it is not usually accustomed to. Thakur Baba was a vir who through his
own conquest over death, and not through allocating death to others, had attained the sovereign
efficacy that he exercised. His sovereignty was not given as transcendent law but was yet
established in a register of transcendence (or as Singh calls it, higher threshold) from within
life. Consequently, his recognition as a sovereign figure in Shahabad appears then as not
something that is disagreeable or necessary but rather desirable and even volitional.
This switch of framework of sovereignty hardly resolves any questions but probably only leads
to many more. To conclude I will raise some of them as further provocations: How might we
incorporate this unsaid notion of desire into the twofold relation of force and contract that Singh
attributes to sovereign power? Moreover, given that Thakur Babas sovereignty is not a given but
an achievement, via attaining a higher threshold of life, is it characteristically different from the
sovereignty of the state (which we did not quite elaborate on, but which also manifests as a
reciprocal relation between force and contract) which merely exercises its power but does not
really achieve it? Perhaps Thakur Babas sovereignty is more immanent than that of the
state? What does this cleave do to the notion of sovereignty as a specifically theological political
concept in which the theological and political counterparts become somewhat at odds with each
other? Might we speak about Thakur Babas power as singular but not sovereign? Just like a
sovereign power can radicalize as Varuna which is its violent face, can it also radicalize as Mitra
or just its contractual face? Even though my own piece was geared towards bringing two
radically different articulations of sovereignty together, one archaeological and the other
ethnographic, is it possible that a philosophical notion of sovereignty might be fundamentally
different from an ethnographic articulation of sovereignty given the different temporal horizons
within which the concept is considered?
These questions only serve to reveal the powerful and timely set of concerns that Singh has
brought to our doorstep, that too without the contrived sense of immediacy that so often gets
attached to them. Singhs book is a testament to how even a little awakeness to the humility of
experience can so radically shift our intellectual horizon that what we thought of as ephemeral
and deficient becomes something lasting and immeasurable.
Swayam Bagaria is a graduate student in the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins

University. He is carrying out his research on figures of immolated women and their religious
afterlives in Jhunjhunu (India) and the textual traditions of Hinduism.
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/sovereignty-without-the-sovereign
25
Reply to comments
Bhrigupati Singh
Brown University
Just as one feels a kind of embarrassed, inexpressible gratitude towards a friend who organizes a
baby shower, I dont quite know how to thank Naveeda for inviting this small group of well
wishers to hold my first born, Poverty and the Quest for Life. And the group of guests each of
whom, including Naveeda herself, brought with them the gift of such attentive and generous
reading. Scholastic gifts are probably best understood in a Maussian sense, as a potentially but
not necessarily agonistic process of give and take, which might make one poorer or richer.
Poorer if one responds poorly. There is a labor involved in receiving the thoughts of another. I
hope I will be able to do justice to the labor of love and energy that our respondents put in, in
receiving my text.
Let me begin with a teacher from whom I have received many gifts over the last decade and a
half, William (Bill) Connolly, who along with Paola Marrati, initiated me into the writings of
Gilles Deleuze, and who gave me a central concept in my lexicon that of agonistics. Is there a
bestowing attitude other than agonistics or pedagogy through which we might picture intellectual
relatedness? Lets call it a labor of the affirmative, when the affirmation is not simply praise but a
transfiguration. Bill transfigures my book and welcomes it into a different picture of the present
than the one I began from. When I was doing my fieldwork it was said that we (a global
abstraction, as convincing and debatable as such abstractions are) live in the post-9/11 era. We
debated questions of religion and secularism. I had never heard of the term anthropocene. Now it
feels like the zeitgeist and the notion of what constitutes a timely debate, has shifted slightly, or a
lot. Bill himself would not think in such teleological terms. And it remains an open question
whether it is good to think in eras, since it may be hard to predict how the world summons us
to undertake a particular kind of work.
These uncertainties of times and eras notwithstanding I am deeply grateful for Bills opening
affirmation that this book may be read productively as part of newer conversations on climate
change, as well as questions of religion and secularism. Part of the untimeliness of this book, I
hope, is that it traverses different notions of timeliness. Bill suggests two ways in which the book
is situated in and contributes to conversations around the anthropocene. The first is through what
he calls nomadic ethnography, which is a way of inhabiting the planetary condition in which
the study is set. Some in current anthropology prescribe multi-sited ethnography or
transnational movement, as the way to engage the kinesis of this world. Is it possible to travel, to
become planetary, while staying in one place, in one set of villages, in an old-style village
study ethnography? Bill generously affirms my attempt at stillness, which also enables a
movement between different dimensions, or thresholds of life, such that to be in one place may
also to be multi-sited.
26
As such, with some, not always conscious inspiration from Thousand Plateaus, and out of an
initially unspecifiable ethnographic necessity, I found myself writing chapters or parts of
chapters on seemingly utterly diverse themes, which might have been the topic of different
dissertations, on popular religion, on forests, on water, on capitalist agricultural transformations,
on bureaucracy, on colonial mapping practices, on animals, on ritual sacrifice, and more. To
express even the most ordinary moments in Shahabad, one needed to inhabit these diverse forces
and dimensions all at once. What interested me was not just a chaotic multiplicity but rather
movements and relations between elements, but also separateness, and the ways in which
different thresholds may express diverse relations to vitality, such that life, a life, may wax and
wane, veer towards life and towards death, at the same time. In my book I call this a lunar form
of enlightenment.
Naveeda reorients this thought further by noticing moments when the text notices the
landscape, not as background but as co-constitutive of human subjectivity. There are lines in her
stunning introduction that I can do no more than repeat, and to fold my hands at the thoughts that
pass through us. She says we are reminded perhaps for the first time of our watery constitutions
that make us open to such rhythmic influences. With this proposition she marks the five words
that I was maybe happiest with in this book: Ours are water bodies too. How did we forget
that? And what reminds us for the first time? As Naveeda says, in relation to the practice of
ethnographic writing, such a mode of attentiveness is not exactly reflexivity but a striving for
the impersonal. And maybe it is not an innovation, as she says, but simply what anthropologists
do. Here is another line that I keep returning to in Naveedas introduction: I find enticing the
play of rhythm and animation that hints that ethnography may be the speech of one caught in
such play and perhaps it has always been that way. True, it has always been that way. What
leads us to forget our condition?
Bill also hints at another, different thought that my book, maybe I shouldnt call it my book
anymore, as it slowly separates itself from me, might offer to our times, the time of late
capitalism, the time of climate change, these times, differently conceived. However much these
conceptions may vary, many would agree that there seems to be no clear overarching incentive to
consumptive self-limitation. In other ontologies and times, some of which may still continue in
these times, self-limitation was animated by the promise of an otherworldly reward or imposed
by state fiat. So then, in the absence of such rewards or punishments, is there no spur to
systematic self-limitation? How does human desire become attracted to frugality? This question
recurs in a few of the chapters, and the answer, varied as it is, for instance, with Tejaji, or with
Bansi, turns, as Bill suggests, on a positive ethos of frugality. It may be cruel to speak of
frugality, of voluntary poverty, in a milieu of grinding, often desperate poverty, as Shahabad is.
As food for thought, Ill offer two signposts to suggest what a positive ethos of frugality might
look like in such a milieu.
First, such an ethos hinges on a different conception of abundance. As I say at the outset of the
book, to be poor is not necessarily to be poor in life. A book that also traveled with me
throughout fieldwork was Thoreaus Walden. Here is a line from Walden, from the author who is
best remembered (and sometimes caricatured) for attempting a modern experiment in ascetic
living. Rather than austerity and humility, Thoreau suggests the possibility of a different kind of
27
abundance: I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enoughso as to be

adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra-vagance! It depends on how you are
yarded. (Thoreau 1960: 272). How are we yarded? What is our measure of the quality of life?
Worded as such we can see that this is not a question only for poets or philosophers, but for
anyone who ventures a measure, not just on minimum indicators, but also a conception of what
constitutes a maximal, or better quality of life.
Abundance may be the feeling of owning a forest, even when one does own it as property, a
feeling I discuss in the chapter titled Who Ate up the Forests. It may also be a feeling of
plenitude brought on by the possession of a cellphone, or by a benign spirit possession or a
creative reorganization of ritual sacrifice and ways of eating together, such as Bansis. It is not
pre-given what frugality, or excess, might mean at a given time. And this would be the second
aspect of such an ethos, which is that what constitutes frugality is the object of an investigation
into the tectonic shifts in which we are implicated, such that a small change in behavior could
enable a significant shift. For instance, the connections between social and dietary aspiration, the
former rarity of wheat, the recent fall of millets (and its historical status as a poor mans grain)
and the related decline of the water table, and the suggestion, that restoring millet to our diets, on
a large enough scale, could have a major impact on the water table, for me, constitutes a
discovery in the genre of Thoreau and Gandhi. Frugality need not be seen as less but as a
reorientation, we might even call it a conversion, or at least an examination that turns on the
point of our genuine needs.
This brings me to the doubt Bill poses, between belief and spirituality, a distinction that may at
first sight be quite contestable, but let me work with it for now. As Bill suggests, we may share a
disposition, a spiritual orientation with someone from a very different belief system. In my own
text the word belief was usually in quotes because in relation to the life worlds I was writing
about, particularly to popular religious practice, the word belief is over-determined and
determining. Popular religion (some assume) is about belief and faith, as distinct from
(sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly), higher religious forms and speculative traditions.
This need not be Eurocentrism. It can also be the assumption, for instance, that Upanishadic texts
express a kind of speculative, theological reasoning, in a way that is not involved in worshiping a
headless horseman at the base of a tree. As I show in several chapters, there is a lot more
happening in popular religious life than mere expressions of faith, and even when faith is
expressed, it has an internal relation to skepticism, as in the constant testing of spirit mediums, or
in Bansis refusal to enter temples, even as he leads large groups on pilgrimages, or, differently,
in the complex everyday genre of gyancharcha (knowledge-talk), or in the work involved in
sustaining myth and ritual, as vital forms, and what it means to have a living relation to a
particular corpus of myths, such as the oral epics, or the gote songs for the headless horseman.
But Bill is not talking about beliefs of this sort. He is talking about onto-beliefs, what he
elsewhere calls an article of faith. Do I have onto-beliefs? How could you not, some might say.
Do I know what my beliefs are? I say at the outset of the book that one of the tasks I set myself
in Shahabad was to unearth my beliefs. What did I find? I hope (ardently hope) that the book will
read like a journey of discoveries rather than of impositions. But we still do impose our selves.
What does an onto-belief look like? We often dont know until someone points it out. And
something resembling such a gesture of unconcealment happens with Lisa.
28
Writing Besides Life, Writing Besides Death

Lisa expresses her appreciation, even her delight, for the range of moods that infuse this book. Is
it proper for a scholarly book to make us smile, to laugh out loud? As I argue social science,
even in its supposedly most value neutral forms, expresses and incites moods. In Deleuzian
terms, concepts are accompanied by affects. My companions in thought and life did not express
an unceasing gravitas. Gravity was one among the influences I felt. High seriousness may at
times be a habit of thought and writing that eclipses important aspects of our ethnographic
experience. We may eclipse whatever little light this world offers. Lisa and William Mazzarella
both recognize the seriousness of lighter moments, as when (as Lisa points out), I conceptually
differentiate Kallis active aggression from the excoriating, dishearteningly comic tirades of
her nephew. But then Lisa approaches a doubt, which gradually turns into a criticism: does life
(implicitly, explicitly) get smuggled in, as a higher principle than death? Do I pay inadequate
attention to Shahabad as seen in light of the waning moon?
Before offering counterarguments, I should say that these are doubts that I myself arrived at, and
continue to arrive at, expressed for instance in the conclusion of the book, where my daemon, the
Yaksha who initially sent me to Shahabad asks me: Shahabad is an area of poverty. Shouldnt
you have used darker colors to paint this landscape? Here is the answer I gave the Yaksha,
quoted from the conclusion:
I began with first impressions of disaster, poverty, and exclusion. For some today,
ordinary life in such a milieu is itself a disaster, and research, if it is to have a use, must
find someone culpable for the damage. Maybe this was a peculiarity of Shahabad, but I
found no scapegoats or monsters there whom I might blame - within the state, or
commerce, or a particularly dominant social group. Instead, I found a more complex
mixture of the tragic, the comic, and the everyday, and slow-moving catastrophes, some
of which might be averted. As critically, I found that to be poor is not necessarily to be
poor in life.
In wanting to present Shahabad as a diurnal flux rather than nothingness (and I sense that Lisas
invocation of nothingness is not a sense of lack, it is a flux of a different sort, a sense of
entrapment), did I obscure the waning moon? Here is my first response: the chapters on Kalli and
Bansi are meant to be an account of a civil uprising, ascending life, although not in the mode of
resistance or rebellion. This is meant as a countermovement to the previous four chapters, in
which I describe the devastation of animal life and forests in Shahabad, and its impact on the
livelihoods of the Sahariyas; and specific state and development projects that fail, sometimes
despite genuinely good intentions; in the chapter on Contracts, Bonds and Bonded Labor, I
agree with and supplement Jan Bremans classic argument that the lives of bonded laborers are
becoming economically worse, after the so-called abolition of bonded labor, as they become
wage-hunter gatherers in unpredictable informal economies. In The Coarse and the Fine, I
show how the water table has depleted to threatening proportions.
So my first response would be to say that I did try to sit under the waning moon and the
afternoon sun, and to listen to other moods, in a minor key, in Shahabad. The ascending
29
portraits of Kalli and Bansi, are counter posed to others, Lala Ram, economically the worst off
person I met in Shahabad, who as I show, is tragically one of the few people not on the states
Below Poverty Line list. Or the first four Sahariya who became literate and graduated from the
local government school, and were all given government jobs as part of tribal upliftment
efforts, and who all resigned within a couple of years, and one of them committed suicide. In this
book I wanted to convey a sense of what it means to be poor in a rural setting (and I emphasize
rural because urban poverty is a different phenomena), and to offer concepts that I hope might
survive in other climates, even under other moons, and the harsh light of day. For instance, what
is exploitation? In the terms of this book, following the lives of bonded laborers, it is a particular
relation of force, without the possibility of any renegotiation of contracts.
Am I just being defensive? Is there another way to receive Lisas response, to take it as an
invitation rather than a criticism? I cant help but make one further clarification. Why didnt I go
to see Bansi, as Lisa asks? Was there something I couldnt face? It is not just a passing concern
she raises. It is an ethical, even a philosophical question because Nietzsche in his encouragement
of strength is sometimes seen as repulsed by weakness. In my book I give various examples of
moments when I felt compelled to offer what Cavell would call acknowledgement. In the case of
Bansi, (and maybe I should have made this clearer) it was a kind of ritual that if you wanted to
see him you had to send a message through one of his assistants. I sent two such messages and
got no response, which had never been the case over the years before that. I knew how important
self-presentation is to Bansi, as one who had to painstakingly and joyfully work his way up from
the lowest to the highest status in his milieu. So I took it as his parting communication, that as
someone he knew was writing the story or least a chapter on his life, we had said goodbye at the
peak of his powers, and that now he didnt want to see me. So it was my parting
acknowledgement to him, not to insist or to just land up at his home, since I did know where to
find him.
But clarifications aside, I want to spend a moment, in stillness, asking myself: what might Lisa
mean? I know she did not misunderstand my book. She read it carefully and affectionately. I
began to read her book. I was struck initially, by some of our shared concerns, as we wrote, both
of us, accounts of communities that might be called Adivasi. In one of the opening sentences of
her book, Lisa asks: What thereness do the dead share with the living? Consider how
proximate this is, to my own more prosaic formulation of such a concern, early on in my book:
how might we conceive of the dead and spirits and deities as participants among the living?
Lisa focuses on two moments among the Canadian Inuit, the tuberculosis epidemic (1940s1960s) and a suicide epidemic (1980s to the present). In focusing on suicide prevention
exercises, Lisa arrives at an unsettling insight: it is not so clear that life always trumps the
possibility of a life after death and it may be that any hope one has lies beyond life itself.
(Stevenson 2014: 10). And a sentence later: It became evident to me that presuming the value of
life, staging it as the ultimate good, could be as dangerous as negating it.
In what ways do these lines illuminate or darken my words? I could offer conceptual resistances.
For instance, my conception of life, to whatever extent it is drawn from Deleuze does not hinge
on a simple separation of life and death. As Deleuze says in Negotiations, Its organisms that
die, not life. (p.143). Within a certain Stoic conception, there may be instances where suicide
can be a form of life-affirmation, as one might read Deleuzes own suicide (Janning 2013). But
30
must we affirm life? What about Freuds death drive, as Lisa asks? There are moments in my
book, I think, when something like life-force and the death-drive exist simultaneously, as with
Kallis madness (I am brave because I am mad), or in Holi (in Erotics and Agonistics), where
I sense the shared energies between a riot and a festival. That said, led by Dionysus do I
consistently, consecutively, at times unknowingly, choose the festive over the void? Or to ask the
question differently, what would it be like, for me to accept rather than to resist Lisas thought?
There are moments, flickers (or anti-flickers) in my text that I recognize, that Lisas comment
points towards. Bansis waning is such a moment, but there are others. At one point in the text,
Dhojiajis son tells me, referring to Shahabad: there is nothing here for someone like me. As it
happens, a few months later he committed suicide, after a marital dispute, a fact I mention in the
book, although without naming him. Or I encounter Jorawar, one among the first four Sahariyas
to graduate from high school, immediately after which he was given a locally high-ranking
government job as a revenue officer. He resigned soon after, and has spent the last four decades
informally assisting local government officials implement development programs. It is well
known that Jorawar is drunk by 10am every day. As I say in the book, his long-standing
intimacy with Mitra (the care-giving state), had left him peculiarly hardened and vulnerable, and
in time I no longer sought him out. What if I had continued to seek him out? What if I had
written a chapter on Jorawar or on Dhojiajis son, instead of (or alongside) pursuing Kalli or
Bansi, as I did?
Has Lisa located what Wittgenstein would call aspect blindness within my way of seeing? It
isnt blindness exactly, because I do see these points of dusk. I am quoting moments from my
own text, after all, which perhaps reveal more than I knew. It isnt blindness. In time I no longer
sought him out. Is this avoidance or is it a repulsion of sorts? I say a few times, I was
determined to provide a different account of Shahabad, different from the activists, the
journalists, and nearly every educated visitor, who saw only lack, nothing, bare life. Until now
I have thought of this impulse in somewhat heroic terms. Like the protagonists in various cycles
of myth, in my epic too, I went in search of life. But maybe there is something less heroic that is
also at work here, a fear, readable through an image much favored by Lisa, ravens. Edgar Allen
Poes The Raven may be read as a parable for how a little black spot, not the imp of the perverse,
but a raven of melancholia, enters and insistently settles into the antechamber of the soul. At one
point the poet gets up and follows the raven to an open door, where he sees the infinite darkness
from where the raven came. And he turns away. Maybe it is too dangerous for him to follow the
raven. And so he is afraid.
Then on second thoughts, maybe I shouldnt make such heavy weather of it. Lisa is drawn to
ravens. Maybe I am just a different kind of songbird. As I say in the book, to locate a tension, a
difference, might also mean we can make music together, like between a string and a drum. I
could ask Lisa too, what unwritten chapters might have emerged, what aspects of her milieu she
might have emphasized differently, if she had inhabited Nunavut, with the conceptual genealogy
and disposition with which I lived in Shahabad? Which brings me to William Mazzarellas
question: to what extent do we choose our optic? Is it even an optic?
Instincts and Concepts
31
Sometimes a philosopher may help us find words and concepts for feelings we had but didnt
quite know how to name. I entered academic writing through the anthropology of media, writing
on Hindi cinema. Here, it was a source of some discomfort to me, why the task of analysis
always seemed to be to somehow negate the object, to expose the ideology of cinema, whether
this took the form of nation, religion, class or gender. This form of analysis seemed tone deaf to
peoples affective investment in cinematic forms. Or differently, I wondered why accounts of
inter-caste relations always had to play out some version of a master-slave, dominationresistance dialectic. It was only many years later, reading Deleuze that I realized that the
common thread running through many of my discomforts, across disciplines and subfields,
ranging from cultural studies to subaltern studies, was my antagonists shared inheritance of
Hegelianism and negative dialectics, and that the counter-Hegelianism of Deleuze (and the
genealogy he creates through Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson), offer a different set of possibilities.
So I didnt choose Deleuze in any simple way. Rather certain philosophical texts claimed me
and gave me a language in which to voice my existing discomforts with particular styles of
analysis. I write about this in a recent essay (Singh 2014), so I wont go into to the conflict
between dialectics and non-dialectics here, except to respond to the urgent, if playfully staged
question that William poses, in drawing a blank (literally a blank page!) while searching for a
Deleuzian definition of thresholds. I could point to other pages in Difference and Repetition
where Deleuze speaks of intensities. Or I could to pages in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze
and Guattari discuss strata and stratification. Living with these pages brought me to the idea of
thresholds and maybe that is my own term. Rather than pointing to a better page, which would
resolve the question of whether the concept is his, or mine, I want to ask what is to receive and
inhabit a style of thought, beyond citations? Deleuze is only explicitly cited roughly five or six
times in the entire book. But the philosophical route that Deleuze names (since a philosophical
name refers as much to a person as to a route of thought, that for me leads as strongly, maybe
more strongly, to Nietzsche), infuses every line, I daresay, sometimes more accurately than socalled Deleuzians, who I sometimes find disconcerting, inasmuch as they only seem to
rearrange and repeat fragments of Deleuzes texts.
And there is something to choosing an orientation here, not like we would choose this or that
commodity, but as a discipline in a monastic sense. Maybe that makes it sound too exalted. A
discipline could be as mundane as spending fifteen minutes a day (for months, for years)
focusing on particular aphorisms, a style of engagement that Nietzsche, for instance, particularly
encourages. It becomes a discipline when we start taking those words to heart. It isnt like a
choosing a pair of spectacles, as William says. In my essay (2014) that I referred to a moment
ago, I describe this as being akin to finding ones voice within a particular gharana (a
school/style of singing in Indian classical music), or a particular orientation to life, akin to being
a Stoic or an Epicurean or a Cynic in ancient Greece.
So if one thinks of oneself as part of a genealogy/clan, then are the conflicts between clans more
or less predictable, structurally determined? Counting the instances of conflicts with negative
dialecticians/dialectical arguments that populate my book (Chakrabarty, Hardiman, Agamben,
Zizek, Badiou, would count as instances there is a diversity, but also a unity, a relay between
these conflicts), I will say that each instance has its own unpredictable specificities; it had to be
earned and fought for. And at times the disputant, as with Chakrabarty and Agamben, offered
32
fertile seeds in contrast to which I could grow my own formulations. And then there may be
moments of affinity, of a different sort, that exceed conceptual disagreements. Maybe here we
return to the difference Bill Connolly offers between creeds vs. spiritual affinities. Despite our
different creeds (since William Mazzarella, like me, does claim to believe in, and remain loyal
to my philosophical antagonists), there is a spiritual affinity that may exceed and cross over those
differences. For instance, there is a palpable relief, a sense of being able to breathe freely with
my words that William expresses in the first two sections of his comments, which I sense are
very genuine.
As for the antagonism, or the dissolution of the antagonism that he proposes: while I dont agree
with Williams suggestion that the conflict with dialectics doesnt exist or that it can be resolved
by rereading Hegel differently (and for me, this is not merely a theoretical dispute, it makes a
tremendous difference to how we view the world), there may be points where a dispute is
transformed into something else altogether, as with Williams loyalty to Adorno and the idea of
dialectical vitalism. Here my response will have to be a promissory note, and a desire to be
educated further, to better understand how Adorno would reshape the philosophical map through
which I find my bearings. As with Lisa, the difference with William may not be resolved, but I
hope the tension, if interestingly threaded, may enhance rather than preclude the possibility of
speaking together.
New and Old in Anthropology
Lastly, Swayam offers a striking thought, one I hadnt explicitly considered as yet. How do we
understand newness in our own analyses, without making a claim to novelty? We may seem to
be returning to very traditional concepts, such as sovereignty, and I give it a very unoriginal
definition, power over life, as Swayam says. We could equally have discussed this with respect
to other old questions that populate this book: ethics, sacrifice, exchange relations, or even the
idea of an old-style village study, where, again, I am not claiming any epochal newness or
radical rupture such as postcoloniality or neoliberalism. Focusing on the concept of sovereignty,
Swayam, considers the movement from Foucault to Agamben and back. Foucault had famously
sought to rethink the problem of government by decentering sovereignty, we need to cut off the
kings head, that hasnt happened yet in political theory, as he put it. Agamben, as many have
argued, re-centered the sovereigns head via Schmitt. My headless horseman, Swayam suggests,
re-centers (as force and contract, violence and welfare) but also decenters, by arriving via
Foucault, via Dumezil, at conceptual possibility through which we might understand the seeming
fluctuations of a variety of institutional actors, ranging from lower level government officials, to
NGOs, to policy diktats, to divine forces, as these embody different forms of Mitra Varuna.
Swayam asks: how does desire enter these relations of force and contract? This seemingly simple
(very Deleuzian) question remains under-theorized in my book, and I can do no more than offer
one or two instances to show how central this question might be. One way desire enters is
through moods and emotions. For instance in the chapter titled Mitra, the Care-giving State, I
analyze a question previously asked by Michael Herzfeld: why do the seemingly wellintentioned caregiving efforts of the state, end up generating so much bitterness? The answer I
arrive at is not entirely dissimilar from Herzfelds idea of the state as a secular theodicy. Its not
only people in the field who have emotions and desires. Equally, theologically, I wanted to be
33
alert to the unspoken desires and affects that accompany our analytical concepts. In this sense, I
ask, why for instance did subaltern studies analysts place such a heavy and constant emphasis on
rebellion? I wager that this has to do with an unexamined Christian/Abrahamic messianic
impulse that runs deep within the intellectual left, what Walter Benjamin called divine
violence, the promise of a redeemer who will undo the violence of force and contract.
I did not want to echo the unexamined desires of others, and tell a story of catastrophe and hope
for redemption, as if that were the only way to be serious. Above all, I wanted to write an honest
book. Is it possible to speak about honesty without a fixed point of truth? I didnt want to engage
in any kind of political posturing or to paint pictures of governmental, colonial or postcolonial,
demons and villains against whom I affirmed my own implicit goodness. Whatever goodness I
did find, in thinking about what constitutes a good life, may have involved a striving for power
over life, for instance with Bansi and Kalli, former bonded laborers who for me embody the
attainment of a kind of swaraj (self-rule). At what point, and how, does the logic of power over
life, morph and move between the state, the family, and the self? Im not sure if I have a good
answer just yet to Swayams profound question.
Im also not quite sure how to end this response. My teacher (if I may use this term without
embarrassment) Veena Das ends her recent book Affliction with a dream, a passing away into
sleep, into a kind of death, in the company of enduring friendships. I end my book by attempting
a version of one of the most interesting genres of thought that I encountered in Indian
philosophy, Yaksha Prasna, a dialogue with a daemon, that is to say with aspects of oneself. And
maybe that is what a book finally is, a kind of public solitude, which hopefully, in some small
ways might outlast and enrich our individual solitudes, and our ways of being with the world.
Bhrigupati Singh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University and the author of
the forthcoming book Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural
India (University of Chicago Press 2015).
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Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Dialectics at the Threshold

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

William Mazzarella is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Sovereignty without the Sovereign

Bhrigupati Singhs book is an evocative, powerful, and an exquisite ethnographic reanimation of

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Swayam Bagaria is a graduate student in the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/sovereignty-without-the-sovereign

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

abundance: I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enoughso as to be

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Writing Besides Life, Writing Besides Death

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/reply-to-comments

Somatosphere | March 13, 2015

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