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This article analyses how we might understand corruption as anchored in ordinary, everyday practices. Avoiding the double trap of condemnation and relativism, it shows how the urban poor see the aspiration for a purified polity as creating the conditions of possibility in which the political space of action closes down for those within what one might call a corruption complex. Moving between ethnography and literature, the article pays close attention to forms of talk as well as forms of action and demonstrates that the poor display much more nuanced understanding of the state as compared to the way it is represented in the work of public intellectuals and activists.

This article examines questions of trauma and testimony from the perspective of political community. It argues that terms such as riots, pogroms, and genocide reflect the points at which the body of language becomes one with the body of the world. Hence the performative force of these terms comes from their capacity to relocate narratives of violence and to anchor them to juridical-political discourses. The article asks for double vision in which life and its forms are subjects of the political but then are remade at the level of the personal. Critiquing grand projects for building identity and/or self, the article asks for mindfulness towards experience and forms of making the experience of violence knowable when saying gives way to showing.

Compte rendu de deux ouvrages de G. Obeyesekere, Medusa's Hair : An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1981| The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984. La femme, la sexualite feminine, la maternite et les contradictions du role de la femme au Sri Lanka vues dans une perspective symbolique et psychanalytique

Man need not be degraded to a machine, by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.GILBERT RYLE