During the past calamitous year, puzzle companies reported record sales as people attempted to piece something together, whether to occupy the mind or to conjure fantasies of order. For some, the achievement of the puzzle's solution is a draw; for others, the process of piecing itself is the point. The latter process anchors the ambition of Veena Das's Textures of the Ordinary: Doing Anthropology after Wittgenstein, a groundbreaking work that will be eagerly met by audiences in anthropology, philosophy, and South Asian studies.

In much of her work, Das employs metaphors of mundane acts of craft, such as stitching, folding, and unraveling, to invite readers into her philosophy of the ordinary. In Textures, Das asks, What might it mean to live with concepts, if one does not mark out a sequestered domain for ethical life? What if “we thought of ethics as embedded in the most ordinary of actions?” (p. 120). She argues that anthropology has the powerful ability to address how people live with concepts, “eschewing explanation in favor of description” (p. 10), and thus sitting both the texture of moral thought and the texture of living. Life in South Asia and elsewhere cannot be reduced to separate pieces of thinking and living (p. 323). Scenes of the not-yet or never-to-be solved are as much the grounds of life as an assembled outcome. They are also the grounds of anthropology and philosophy.

Some of the core puzzle scenes of the book emerge from Das's long-term fieldwork in low-income neighborhoods in Delhi: What does it take to secure water and electricity in a single neighborhood (chapter 2)? How does the process of one Hindu boy falling in love with one Muslim girl seed relations between neighbors (chapter 5)? How does the struggle to authorize madness emerge as a young man moves through psychiatric treatment (chapter 6)? What potential does the law offer—and for whom—in the wake of the abduction, torture, and rape of a young girl (chapter 8)? Each chapter tracks how people encounter the potential to develop curiosity, neglect, love, denial, friendship, suspicion, doubt, humor, and certainty. The scholar's task is to understand that relations to specific events are themselves the source of thought. Concept scenes are provisional, and they are meaningful because they are provisional. This cannot be grasped if one attempts to shove pieces into nooks and crannies of totalizing explanatory frames, or if one insists on the pieces remaining separate.

Das guides readers through the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, focusing particularly on this core question: How “are [words] given life? And how might they be drained of life?” (p. 4). Readers will likely be familiar with her noted essay on Wittgenstein and anthropology, which appears in an expanded form in Textures. The book's comprehensive structure alternates between chapters whose primary focus is on dwelling within fieldwork-based scenes (chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8) and chapters whose primary focus is on dwelling within philosophical conversation (chapters 1, 3, 7, and 9). Both of these ambitions permeate each chapter, to be sure, but readers can follow the paths of Das's thought across these different foci depending on one's domains of curiosity. Wittengenstein and Stanley Cavell are important guides for anthropological thought throughout the chapters, because they remind us that the everyday's “very ordinariness makes it difficult for us to see what is before our eyes. Hence, we need to imagine the shape that the ordinary takes in order to find it” (p. 15). Das detects the piecing together of the everyday in varying domains, including domestic life, medicine, infrastructural politics, juridical claims of courts and the police, Sanskrit grammar, repetitive daily actions, Hindi and Bangla poetry and folklore, and Hindu myth and epic. This exquisite range of sources offers readers multiple entry points, and their riveting description creates a renewed sense of possibility for thinking and writing the real through human striving.

The book is also a magnificent contribution for its comparative thinking, through what Das terms “the crisscrossing of concepts.” Although most of the book's sources derive from South Asian lifeworlds, several chapters take different trajectories. Chapter 7 delves into two of J. M. Coetzee's novels; chapter 10 tracks the resonances between hermeneutics of Vedic texts and classic texts in British social anthropology. Chapter 11 also works in terms of comparison, but its ambition differs slightly. Written in what Das calls “an autobiographical voice,” the chapter poses the possibility that different routes exist by which “an anthropologist awakens to the reality into which she is sometime thrown, or sometimes drifts into” (p. 308). Das reminds readers that concepts hardly arrive ready-made; they are instead “drawn out of us” in difficulties that agglomerate through long-term exposures to matters of struggle, death, and harm. Readers with methodological commitments to fieldwork, to archives, and to literary analysis will be challenged to sit with this crucial intervention.

Ultimately, Das looks to attempts at puzzle piecing for “emissaries,” which are signs that “the everyday send[s] in order for it to be recognized” (p. 21). This is in keeping with Wittgenstein's task to “lead words home” (p. 331), the ambition to lead thought and sociality into a space of repair. In Textures, Das has crafted a magnificent emissary for us, as we confront a table with open possibilities.