Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World

183 Pages·2003·21.91 MB·English

by  Michel-Rolph Trouillot (auth.)

Global Transformations
Global Transformations
Anthropology and the Modern World
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
*
GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS
© Miehel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003
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DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publieation Oata
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
Global transformations: anthropology and the modern world/by
Miehel-Rolph Trouillot.
p.em.
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-29521-9
1. Anthropology-Philosophy. 2. Globalization. I. Title.
GN33.T762003
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction
Chapter 1 Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and
Politics of Otherness 7
Chapter 2 North Atlantic Fictions: Global Transformations, 1492-1945 29
Chapter 3 A Fragmented Globality 47
Chapter 4 The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization:
Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind 79
Chapter 5 Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises 97
Chapter 6 Making Sense: The Fields in which We Work 117
Notes 141
Bibliography 157
Index 173
Acknowledgments
This book has been an ongoing project since 1991 and many parts of it have
appeared elsewhere as individual publications. However, the framework offered
he re allowed me the opportunity to draw this work and research together in ways
that I could not have envisioned when I first began working on what would later
become this book. My acknowledgments must therefore of necessity be incom
plete, since I could not hope to mention all the colleagues, graduate students, and
others with whom conversations and debates have shaped my thinking.
Most of chapter 1 was originally published in 1991 as "Anthropology and the
Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness," in Richard G. Fox's edited vol
urne, Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Drafts of that article were
commented on by participants at the Santa Fe Seminar, graduate students and
faculty at Johns Hopkins University and at the New School for Social Research,
and readers for the School of American Research. Kamran Ali, Talal Asad,
Lanfranco Blanchetti, Ashraf Ghani, Ananta Giri, Richard Fox, Richard Kagan,
and Eric Wolf all offered comments and suggestions on that piece at the time.
I have updated this piece here, especially the introductory section on postmod
ernism that now, a decade after its original publication, seems somewhat dated.
The bulk of chapters 2 and 3 of this volume began in 1999 as an introduction
to an edited volume that I intended to produce as a reader on the anthropology of
globalization, but which never went to publication. In retrospect, working on that
piece provided the inspiration to pull together thematically related research into
the current volume once the project for the reader was shelved. Parts of chapter 2
originally appeared in 2002 as "The Otherwise Modern: Caribbean Lessons from
the Savage Slot;' in the volume Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities,
Anthropologies, edited by Bruce M. Knauft, and as "North Atlantic Universals:
Analytic Fictions, 1492-1945;' in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly edited
by Saurabh Dube. Parts of chapter 3 were written in 1998, when versions of it were
presented at Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of
Virginia at Morgantown, Duke University, and at the workshop on Theory and
Politics after Postcoloniality (Institute for Global Studies, Johns Hopkins
University). This paper was later published in a 2002 volume edited by Elisabeth
Mudimbe-Boyi, Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cu ltu res, and the
Challenge of Globalization. My thanks also to Michael Dorsey, Jeffrey Mantz,
Nabiha Megateli, and Clare Sammells, whose research tips inform this text, and to
Vivek Dhareshwar, for the ongoing conversation that provoked some of these lines.
Chapter 4 was prepared for the "Close Encounters" Conference held at the
Department of Cultural Anthropology of Stanford University on April 9-10, 1999,
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
and a revised version was later presented at the co11oquium, "Resilience or Erosion?
The State under Attack from Above and Below;' of the Centre d'Etudes de Relations
Internationales (CERI), Paris, Tune 15-16,2000. At both of these meetings partici
pants offered helpful suggestions. After many revisions, it was then published in 2001
as "The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of
the Deceptive Kind" in Current Anthropologywith the encouragement of the journal's
editor, Benjamin Orlove, and with further comments from Gavin Smith, Kay Warren,
and the anonymous referees for that journal. Sections of that article were then pre
sented at the Conference "Identity, Difference and Globalization" at Candido Mendes
University, Rio de Taneiro, on May 24, 2001, and at the Conference" 'Globalisation
studies': Epistemological and Methodological Considerations from Anthropology" at
the University of Oslo on Tune 7, 2001. Comments I received at both of these pre
sentations helped me shape that article into its current form. Gwen Faulkner and
Clare Samme11s both provided useful research assistance on this project.
The "adieu" of chapter 5 took a long time to say. My uneasiness with the race
culture complex in North American anthropology dates back to graduate schooI. I
first put it into words at the presidential session on race at the 1991 American
Anthropology Association meetings in San Francisco. My arguments were revived
for the paper "Exploring The Limits of Liberal Discourse: American Anthropology
and U.S. Racism," presented at the symposium "Anthropologists of Color Speak
Out: Perspectives on Race and Public Anthropology" at American University on
October 25, 1997. This essay in its current form was first proposed at the Ben
Gurion University in the Negev (Israel) in April 2000 with the encouragement of
Sam Kaplan. It was later discussed at the Wenner-Gren Conference that led to its
appearance in the 2002 volume Anthropology Beyond Culture, edited by Richard G.
Fox and Barbara J. King. I thank participants to all these venues and also Xavier
Andrade, Lee D. Baker, Bruce I(nauft, Sam Kaplan, Richard A. Schweder, George W.
Stocking, Tr., and especially Richard G. Fox for their substantial comments.
Special thanks to Brackette F. Williams, from whom I continue to learn both in
print and conversation. I also owe my thanks to the many graduate students at Duke
University, Tohns Hopkins University, and the University of Chicago who took my
"Concepts and Categories" seminar during the last 16 years. I extend my thanks also
to Clare Sammells, who has been my graduate research assistant at the University of
Chicago for over three years. She worked on this project (among many others) from
its inception, finding and suggesting research materials, tracking down citations,
reading drafts, offering comments, and proofreading the final manuscript. Thanks
also to Greg Beckett and Miche11e Knip-Beckett, both of whom provided additional
research assistance and proofreading during the final stages of preparation. I am
indebted to Kristi Long, Amanda Fernandez, and a11 those at Palgrave Macmillan
who patiently supported me throughout the preparation of this book.
My wife Anne-Carine and my daughter Canel have supported and encouraged
me throughout this project and many others, and they have my love as weIl as my
thanks. Despite all the talented individuals that have challenged and encouraged
me to express the ideas I present here, ultimately I must claim full and sole
responsibility for what some will see as the outrageous conclusions of this book.
Introduction
A
nthropology is what anthropologists do.l That is to say, the boundaries as
well as the distinctive features of the discipline vary with time. Changes in the
world at large and in academe, anthropologists' responses to these changes, and
their individual and collective initiatives all contribute to the dynamism of the
discipline.
Since the 1980s one major change in sociocultural anthropology has been an
increased focus on global flows of populations, ideas, goods, and resources and on
the transformations that such massive movements provoke among the popula
tions involved. As the word "globalization" becomes part of our vocabulary, soci
ocultural anthropologists struggle to understand the ongoing transformations
that its use evokes and the implications for our theories and methodologies.
This book is an attempt to face those challenges, yet its point of departure
precedes most studies of globalization by five centuries. One of the many reasons
for that greater time-depth must be stated at the onset: This book aims to criti
cally reassess the challenges that typify our times in light of history-both the his
tory of anthropology and the history of the West. Its central premise is that these
two histories have been intertwined from the very beginning, that the geography
of imagination inherent in the creation of the West five centuries ago is a condi
tion of possibility of anthropology. One of its goals is to unravel some of the
major knots of this interconnectedness.
This, in turn, means taking some distance horn dominant histories of both
the West and anthropology. Historical narratives necessarily produce silences that
are themselves meaningful (Trouillot 1995). What are the major silences in the
history the West tells about itself? What are so me of the related silences that
anthropology as a discipline produces about its own history?
North Atlantic Geographies
In creating "the West," the European Renaissance shaped a global geography of
imagination. That geography required a "Savage slot;' aspace for the inherently
Other. Martinican author Edouard Glissant (1989:2) writes: "The West is not in
the West. It is a project, not a place." Indeed, the place we most often call the West
is best called the North Atlantic-not only for the sake of geographical precision
but also because such usage frees us to emphasize that "the West" is always a
fiction, an exercise in global legitimation. That exercise sometimes takes the form
of an explicit project in the hands of intellectual, economic, or politicalleaders.
2 GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Yet most humans who see themselves as Westerners, aspire to become so, or
criticize that aspiration experience the West in the form of a projection: the pro
jection of the North Atlantic as the sole legitimate site for the universal, the default
category, the unmarked-so to speak-of a11 human possibilities.
Thus, the West has never had a fixed content, nor is it an unchanging site:
Its center moves from Rome to Lisbon, from Vienna to London, from Washington
to Geneva, and from Venice to Grenada depending on the claims being made. It
can absorb parts of Eastern Europe or Latin America, and more recently, Japan
not because of any feature common to these areas, but rather depending on who
else is being excluded. As a11 default categories, the West as the universal unmarked
operates only in opposition to the populations that it marks.
Anthropology emerged in the nineteenth century as aseparate discipline
specializing in the occupants of the Savage slot. However noble their political
values or accurate their theories, anthropologists have inherited the structural
limitations of the slot that they share with the Savage. To put it differently, anthro
pology as a practice is part of the very geography of imagination that it seeks to
understand. Anthropology as a discipline emerges from the projection of the
West, from the gap between the Here and the EIsewhere, in ways that no other dis
cipline does. No wonder it has been accused of being an inherent tool of North
Atlantic power in ways that no other discipline has been charged, as being a child
of both colonialism and imperialism. These charges are deserved only to the
extent that many anthropologists have ignored the duality of the West and thus
the global inequalities that make their work possible. Indeed, anthropologists
sometimes forget that the projection of the West entails not one but two
intertwined geographies.
From the beginning, the geography of imagination went hand in hand with a
geography of management that made possible-and was in turn refueled by-the
development of world capitalism and the growing power of North Atlantic states.
Just as the West was global from the start, capitalism, as an economic system
premised on continuous spatial expansion, was also global from the start
(see chapters 2 and 3). So was the modern state system, since the existence of any
single state rested on the recognition of that system as a whole. Thus management
and imagination have always been connected globa11y and 10ca11y, as distinguish
able yet intertwined phenomena connecting space and time, politics and eco
nomics, production and consumption. Insofar as Renaissance imagination
entailed a universal hierarchy, control and order were also premised on this enter
prise (chapter 1). So was colonization. So were profits from trade. So was the
extraction of forced labor in the colonies for the improvement of free trade in
North Atlantic states. In short, the geography of imagination was always sustained
on the ground, both at horne and abroad, by the elaboration and implementation
of procedures and institutions of contro!, and by aglobai geography of manage
ment that this imagination helped to consolidate and reproduce. That the two
maps generated by these two geographies do not fu11y overlap should not surprise
uso Indeed, it is in the interplay of these geographies that we are likely to identify
processes most relevant to the joint production of sameness and difference that
characterizes the dual expansion of the North Atlantic and of world capitalism.