.

16 RICHARDG. FOX

recaptur~ng ·authorit we suggest will only be labor lost. Perhaps, in a Chapter2

nightmarish vindica ion of Marvin Harris's cultural materialism, an an-
thropology of the pr sent will only come about courtesy of a demographic
transition the mas · retirement of the ''elders'' late in the twentieth cen- ANTHROPOLOGY
tury. The contributo s to this volume and, I suspect, many other anthro-
pologists, do not ~nt nd to be so patient.
AND THE SAVAGESLOT
Our industry in San a Fe and in this volume is not only a matter of per- I'

sonal craft . We depe ded on a particular work place, the School of Ameri-
can Research, whic hosted this seminar, and on the labors of Jonathan
The Poeticsand Politicso Otherness 1:
. Ii
:lj
!,
'-R
Haas, Douglas Schw rtz, Jane Kepp, and Jane Barberousse before, during, •
I
,Jf
. jr
i!!
and after the semin r. I thank them for their help and hospitality. This
introduction has be efited greatly from critical readings by the other par-
;

Michel-Rolph Trouillot .•I

.'.i:

'
,'
ticipants in the sem nar and .by Sidney Mintz, Jane Kepp, and Ernestine
Friedl, to all of who I am grateful. I also wish to thank the John Simon •'
'·
Guggenheim Memo ial Foundation and the National Endowment for the •

Humanities, which rovided support during the time I wrote the original
proposal for the adv need seminar, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Res arch, which provided funding for the participants'
,,
travel .

Notes ·.

1. For the concept of the predecessor y ethnography and ethnographer , see

Jose Lim6n's paper in t is volume. J
'
, NTHROPOLOGY faces an unprecedented wave of challenges that
2. Compare 1.aCap a's (1985: 91) criticism of Darnton's ''history in the eth- .,
;
require an archaeology of the discipline and a careful examination of its
nographic grain": "Da nton's binary opposition between the armchair and the
implicit premises. The postmodernist critique of anthropology, which is
archives recalls the te dentious contrast drawn by certain anthropologists be- '.
now the most vocal and direct response to these challenges in the United
tween 'armchair' theo izing and fieldwork. In anthropology, this contrast has
often fostered a self-m tified understanding of fieldwork as untouched by theory States, falls short of building that archaeology because it tends to treat the
and in closest proximit to 'authentic' native experience fieldwork as the virgin- ,
; .J
, discipline as a closed discourse. In contradistinction, I contend that the
ally pure 'real thing' .,,
'•
•
internal tropes of anthropology matter much less than the lar r:..
!,
..
\. sive e wit in w ic ant ro o erates an upon whose existence
'
it isj; -e -ised. A c~ltural critique of -anthro po lo gy-requires a historiciza- ...
, I

i
tion of that entire field. New directions will come only from the new
.
•
vantage points discovered through such a critique .
>

'
.,

'· CHALLENGESAND OPPORTUNITIES

\
\

..
Academic disciplines do not create their fields of significance, they only
.
legitimize particular organizations of rrieaning. They filter and rank and
'
"
'
•
in that sense, they truly discipline contested arguments and themes that
often precede them. In doing so, they continuous ly expand , restrict, or
.,
.,.

•\'
. .
,.
>

,}.
. .·',.
'
..
. .. '.
~
'
'

•
 18 MICH.EL-ROLPHTROUILLOT ANTHROPOLOGY
ANDTHE SAVAGE
SLOT 19
•
.

m·odify in diverse , ays their distinctive arsenals of tropes, the t}1Pesof in the United States are not products of chance, the casual convergence
statements they de m acceptable. But .the poetics and politics of the of individual projects. Neither are they a passing fad, the accidental effect
J ''slots'' within whic disciplines operate do not dictate the enunciative of debates that stormed philosophy and literary theory. 1 Rather, they are
relevance of these sots. There is no direct correlation between the ''elec- timid, spontaneous and ·r that sense genuinely American responses
toral politics' of a d scipline and its political relevance. By electoral poli-
1 11
to major changes in the relations between anthropology and the wider
tics,' I mean the .se of institutionalized practices and relations of power world, provincial expressions of wider concerns, allusions to opportuni- ·
that influence the reduction of knowledge from within academe: aca- ties yet to be seized. What are those changes? What are these concerns?
demic filiations, the mech nisms of institutionalization, the organization What are the opportunities?
of power within an across departments, the market value of publish-or- _ On shee empirical grounds, the differe etween Western an
perish prestige> an other worldly issues that include, but expand way on-Western societies are blu _ . tfilm~ r b~for_e.An-thropo gy>s a~
beyond, the mane vering we usually refer to as ''academic politics.:-''~ ~-t-Pr-Hi1~5 ongoing trans ormation has been typically ad hoc and hap-
Changes in the typ s of statements produced as ~acceptable'' within a· hazard. The criteria according to which certain populations are deemed
discipline; regulated as they are if only in part by these ''electoral poli- legitimate objects of ~esearch continue to vary with departments , with
tics,'' do not necess rily modify the larger field of operation, and espe- granting agencies, with practitioners, and even with the mood shifts of
cially the enunciati e context of that discipline. Changes in the exp,licit individual researchers. Amid the confusion, more anthropol ,ogists reenter
criteria of acceptabi ity do not automatically relieve the historical weight the West cautiously, through the ba,ck door, after paying their dues else-
of the field of sign fi.cance that the discipline inherited at birth. More where. By and large this reentry is no better theorized than were previous ../
likely, the burden o the ast is alleviated when the sociohistor· , - departures for fara~y lands. 2
11 ·a · time af emerg nee have changed so much that While some .anthropologists are rediscovering the West without ever
practitioners face a choice between com lete o liv· n an . fundamental naming it,. what ''the West'' stands for is itself an ob· ect of debate, withi
_ _.,,.._edirecti
_,.
1
one 01nt 1n time, alchemists become chemists or cease to '
' and outside the gates o academe. The reactionary search for a fundamen-
be but the transf rmation is one that few alchemists can predict and tal Western corpus o 'great texts'' by many intellectuals and bureaucrats
even fewer would sh. in the English-speaking world is both the reflection of a wider conflict
Anthropology is ·o exception to this scenario. Lik.e all academic dis- and a particular response to the uncertainties stirred by this conflict. In-
ciplines, it inherited a field of significance that preceded its formalization. terestingly, few anthropologists have intervened in that debate. Fewer
Like many of the hu · an sciences, it now faces dramatically new historical even among those thought to be at the forefront of the discipline have
conditions of perf or ance. Like any discourse, it can find new directions deigned to a~dress directly the issue of Western monurnentalism with
only if it modifies th boundaries within which it operates. These bounda~ , one or two exceptions (e.g., Rosaldo 1989). Even more interestingly, an-
ries not only predat d the emergence of anthropology as a discipline, but thropological theory remains irrelevant to . ·and unused by either side
they also prescribed anthropology s role (and ethnograph ·y's ultimate rele-
1
of the ''great texts' debate, rhetorical references notwithstanding. Today,
1

'

vance) to an extent ot yet unveiled. Anthropology fills a preestablished the statement that any canon necessarily eliminates an: unspecified set of
compartment within a wider symbolic field, the ''savage'>slot of a thematic experiences need not come only from anthropology thanks, of course,
trilogy that helped o constitute the West as we know it. A critical and • -r to the past ·diffusion of anthropology itself, but thanks especially to
reflexive anthropolo y requires, beyond the self-indulgent condemnation changes in the world and to the experiences that express and motivate
of traditional techni ues and tropes, a reappraisal of this symbolic orga- these changes. Minorities of all kinds can and do voice their cultural
nization upon whic anthropological discourse is premised. claims, not on the basis of explicit theories of culture but in the name of
-- - ~ ...............
a ·· e de ends much on its abilit to contest the sav- historical authenticity. The enter the debate not as cademics or not
age slot and the the . ati ue that constructs t . is slot. The times are ripe .or only as academics but as situated individuals · ri hts to histo · ·
!

- - - sue questioning. ore important, solutions t at fall short of this chal- They speak in the · rst person, signing their arguments with an ''I '' or a
lenge can only pus the discipline toward irrelevance, however much ''we," rather than invoking the ahistorical voice of reason, justice, or
they may reflect seri us concerns. In that light, current calls for reflexivity ,, civilization.

'

'
 20 MICHEL-ROLPH
TROUlLLOT ~ ANTHROPOLOGY
ANDTHE SAVAGE
SLOT · 21
•

Anthropology is caught off guard by this reformulation. Traditionally, languages of postdestruction. It is this mixture of ne ative intellectual
it approached the i sue of cultural differences with a monopoly over na- sumris__e,th_is~ostmortem ~uh~ metanar ·ve that i uates the post-
--
tive discourse , hyp critically aware that this discourse would remain a . ~?9~1:T!.i?t..mQod_?~ · aril Western and P!i!11ari_ly E_etit_bour eois.
quote. It is too libe al to acce t either the radical authenti it of the first These words are not inherently pejorative, but they are meant to his-
person or t e conse vative reversion to canonical truths hence, its theo- toricize the phenomenon an important exercise if we intend to have
•
ret1ca s1ence. . , '
· cross-cultural relevance. First, it is not self-evi_dent that all past and pres-
Here again, sile ce seems to me. a hasty abdication. At the very least, ent cultures required rnetanarratives up to their current entry into post-
anthropology shoul be. able to illuminate the myth of an unquestioned
•
modernity. Second, if only the collapse of metanarratives characterized
Western canon upo :which the debate is premised. 3 In doing so, it would the postmodern condition, then some of the non-Western cultures that
certainly undermin some of its own premises; but that risk is an inherent have been busily deconstructing theirs for centuries, or that have gone
aspect of the curre t wave of challenges: its numerous o,pportunities are through megacollapses of ..their own, have long been ''postmodern," and
inseparable from it multiple threats. Nowhere is this combination of there is nothing new under the sun. Things fell apart quite early on the
threats and opport ities as blatant as in the postmodern admission that southern shores of the Atlantic, and later in the hinterlands of Africa, Asia,
f:'
the metanarratives f the West are crumbling. and the Americas.· Third, even ~f we concede, for the sake of argument, :f,'
,.
;ii

.Ji
that metanarratives once were a prerequisite of humankind and are now i,~·.
'·

collapsing everywhere at equal rates (two major assumptions, indeed), we 'I

THE ALLOF THE HOUSE OF REASON .11

' ,:
cannot i~fer identical reactive strategies to this collapse. {I;
, ,:~11,

Whatever else post odernism means, it remains inseparable from the Thus, we must distinguish between ostmodernism, as a mood , and - -... '.
I. '

tr (;_

,,l
acknowle ,dgment o an ongoing collapse of metanarratives in a world the recognition of a situation o ostmodernity. I .e ac now eagment that '.;¥.
:

where reason and ality have become fundamentally destabilized (Lyo- there is indeed a crisis of representation, that there is indeed an ongoing ..~·
,,
•:1
.,• .
.:"~
.,-\'
tard 1979, 1986). 4 To be sure, the related claim (Tyler 1986: 123) that
''the world that ma e science, and that science made, has disappeared'' is
set of qualitative changes in the international organization of symbols
(Appadurai, this volume), in the rhythms of symbolic construction (Har-
·~ f
...

somewhat prematu e. The growing · awareness among literati that ratio- vey 1989) _, and in the ways symbols relate to localized, subjective experi-
nality has not fulfil ed its promises to uncover the absolute becoming of ence, does not in itself require a postmortem. In that light, the key to the
the spirit does not alter the increasing institutionalization of rationality f dominant versions of postmodernism is an ongoing destruction lived as
itself (Godzich _198 :xvii-xix). Indeed, one could argue that the spec- l
I shock and revelation. Postmodernism builds on this revelation of the sud-
tacular failure of sci nee and reason, judged on the universal grounds that den disappearance of established rules, foundational judgments, and
\ scholars love to em hasize, serves to mask success on more practical and known categories (Lyotard 1986: 33). But the very fact of revelation im-
l localized ter.rains in o which academics rarely venture. plies a previous attitude toward such rules, judgments, and catego-
But if the world that science made is very much alive, the world that ries for instance, that they have been taken for granted or as immutable.
made science is no shaky. The crisis of the nation-state, the crisis of the The postmortem inherent in the postmodernist mood implies a previous
individual, the crisi of the parties of order (liberal, authoritarian, or com- ''world of ~niversals'' (Ross l 988a:xii-:--xiii). It implies a .specific view of
munist), terrorism, the crisis of ''late capitalism'' all contribute to a 'v culture and of culture change. It implies, at least in part, the Enlighten~
Western malaise a d, in turn, feed upon it (Aronowitz 1988; Jameson ment and nineteenth-century Eur9pe.
1984). Philosopher reportedly asked: can one think after Auschwitz? But In ctOS$-CUlturalperspective, the dominant mood of postmodernism
it .took some time f r Auschwitz to sink in, for communism to reveal its thus appears as a historically specific phenomenon, a reaction provoked
I
own nightmares, fo ; structuralism to demonstrate its mag1sterial impasse, by the revelation that the Enlightenment and its conflicting tributaries
tI
for North and Sou h to admit the impossibility of dialogue, for funda- t may have run their course. This mood is not inherent in the current world
•

mentalists of all de ominations to desacralize religion, and for reenlight- f situation, but neither is it a passing ambience, as many of the postmod-
ened intellectuals o question all foundational thought. As the walls f
I
ernists, detractors would have even though it ushers in fads of its own.
(
crumbled -North nd South and East and West intellectuals developed I.
It is a mood in the strong sense in which Geertz (l 973b:90) defines

f
•
'
••
'
 •

22 MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILLOT ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE SAVAGE
SLOT 23

religious moods: p werful, persuasive, and promising endurance .. But 'v itself and, more -specifically, on the history from which it sprang. That
contrary to religio s, it rejects both the pretense of factuality and the history does not start with the formalization of the discipline, but with
aspiration to realist· c motivations. It seeks a ''psychoanalytic therapeutic'' .... · the emergence of the symbolic field that ·made this formalization possible.
from the ''modern eurosis," the ''Western schizophrenia, paranoia, etc.,
all the sources of isery we have known for two centuries'' (Lyotard
1986: 125-26). . THE SAVAGE
AND THE INNOCENT
''We '' here, is t e West, as in Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie's In 1492, Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the Caribbean , The ad-·
international hit, '' e Are the World." T~is is no,t ''the West'' in a genea- miral's mistake would later be heralded as ''The Discovery of America,"
logical or territorial sense. ·The postmodern world has little space left for the quincentennial of which two worlds will soon celebrate. To be sure, it
genealogies, and notions of territoriality are being redefined right before took Balboa)s sighting of the Pacific in 1513 to verify the existence of a
our eyes (Appadur i, this volume). It is a world where black American continental mass, and Vespucci'sinsistence on a mundus novus for Chris-
Michaeljackson sta ts an international tour from japan and imprints cas- tendom to .acknowledge this ''discovery." Then it took another fifty years
settes that mark th rhythm of Haitian peasant families in the Cuban to realize its symbolic significance. Yet 1492 was, to some extent, a dis-
Sierra Maestra; aw rid where Florida speaks Spanish (once more); where covery even then, the first material step in a continuously -renewed pro-
a Socialist prime m nister in Greece comes by way of New England and . cess of invention (Ainsa 1988). Abandoning one lake for another, Europe
an imam of funda . entalist Iran by way of Paris. It is a world where a confirvned the sociopolitical fissure that was slowly pushing the Mediter-
political leader in r ggae-prone Jamaica traces his roots to Arabia, where ranean toward northern and southern shores. In so doing, it created itself,
U.S. credit cards a processed in Barbados, and Italian designer shoes y but .it also discovered America, its still unpolished alter ego, its elsewhere,
made in Hong Kon . It is a world where the Pope is Polish, where the its other. The Conquest of America stands as Europe's model for the con-
most orthodox Mar ists live on the western side of a fallen iron curtain. stitution of the Other (Todorov 1982; Ainsa 1988).
It is a world where the most enlightened are only part-time citizens of !
Yet from the beginning, the model was Janus-faced. The year 1516 saw·
part-time communi ies of imagination. the publication of two anthropological precursors: the Alcala edition of
11·
But
. these very henomena and their inherent connection with the the Decades of Pietro Martire d'Anghiera (a paraethnographic account
expansion of what e conveniently call the West are part of the text of the Antilles, and in many ways one of Europe's earliest introductions to
that reveals the do inant mood as eventuating from a West n roble- a ''state of nature'' el?ewhere) and one more popular edition of Amerigo
matique. The perce tion of a collapse as revelation cannot be envisioned Vespucci's epistolary travel accounts. In that sam,e year too, Thomas More ·
outside of the trajec ory of thought that has marked the West and spread r published his fi.'ctionalaccount of an ''ideal state'' on the island of Utopia,
!
unevenly outside of its expanding boundaries. Its conditions of existence \
the prototypical nowhere of European imagination.
coalesce within the est. The stance it spawns is unthinkable outside of The chronological coincidence of these publications, fortuitous as it
the West , and has si · nificance only within the boundaries set by the West. may be, symbolizes a thematic correspondence now .blurred by intellec-
If the postmoder mood is fundamentally Western in the global sense tual specialization and the abuse of categories. We now claim to distin-
delineated above, w at does this mean for an anthropology of the present? guish clearly between travelers' accounts, colonial surveys, ethnographic
First, it means that he present tha~ anthropologists must confro·nt is the rep_orts, and fictional utopias. Such cataloging is useful, but only to some
· reduct of a particu ar past that encom asses the history and the prehis- · extent. In the early sixteenth century, European descriptions of an alleged
r thro olo itse . econ and consequently, it means that t e state of nature in the realist mode filled the writings of colonial officers
I
postmodernist criti ue within North American anthropology remains, so I. concerned with the immediate management of the Other. The realist
I
far, within the very thematic field that it claims to challenge. Third, it mode also pervaded travelers' accounts of the sixteenth and seventeenth
3 means that a trul ritical and reflexive anthropolo · needs to contex- centuries, before settling in the privileged sp·ace of }earned discourse with
,,

tualize the Western metanarratives an rea . critically the place of t e eighteenth-century philosophers and the nineteenth-century rise of arm-
disci line in t e el so discovere . In s ort; ant ropo ogy nee s to turn chair anthropology. Even then, the line between these genres was not
t e apparatus elabo ate in the o servation of non-Western societies on always clear~cut (Thornton 1983; Weil 1984). The realis·t mode also
 '

24 . MlCHEL·ROLPHTROUILLOT ANTHROPOLOGYAND THE SAVAGE

SLOT 25
•

pervaded fiction so much so that some .twentieth-century critics distin- 'v sionaries and Dutch mercenaries were bringing back from Ceylon and by
guish between utopi s and "extraordinary voyages," or trips to the lands Jesuit reports of socialism within the Inca kingdom.
of nowhere with the most ''realistic' geographical settings ..On the other Utopias
_,..,...
--=--, _/
were both rare and inferior by earlier and later stan-
hand, fantasies abou an ideal state increased in fiction but they also dar s ·· uring the seventeenth century. Few are now remembered other
found their way into heater, songs, and philosophical treatises. than those of Campanella, Bacon, and Fenelon. But the search for an
In short, clas~ific tions notwithstanding, the connection between a exotic ideal had not died, as some authors (Trousson 1975) seem to sug-
state of nature and n ideal state is, to a large extent, in the · sym o ic gest. Fenelon's Aventures cle Telemaquewent into twenty printings. The
constrJJction of the aterials themselves. The sym o 1c trans orma 1on Historyof the ,.. Sevaritesof Denis Vairasse d'Alais (1677- 79) was published
through whith Chris endom became the West structures a set .of relations originally in English, then in a French version that spurred German,
that necessitate both uto ia and the sava e. What happens within the Dutch, ·and Italian translations (Atkinson 1920). Utopias did not quench
slots so created an within the genres that condition their historical the thirs·t for fantasy lands,. but only because relative demand had in-
existence is not inc ,nsequential. But the analysis of these genres cannot creased unexpectedly.
explain the slots nor .ven the internal tropes of such slots. To wit, ''utopia'' Trave_l a~f9ynts, of which the numpers kept multiplying, helped fill
has been the most s udied form of this ensernb,le, yet there is no final this fn5eased deman or t e elsewhere. Some i · so wit . reports o -
agreement on which works to include in the category (Atkinson 1920, unicorns an oating isles, then accepted as reality by their public, in- ·
•
1922; Andrews 193 ; Trousson 1975; Manuel and Manuel 1979 Eliav- 1

;
eluding ome of the most respected scholars of the time. But most did so
Feldon 1982; Kamen a 1987). Further, when reached, agreement is often \ with what were ''realist'' pictures of the savage, pictures that would pass
ephemeral. Even if o e cou d posit a continuum from realist ethnography twentieth century tests of accurac_y and are still being used by historians
to fictional utopias, orks move in and out of these categories, and cate- and anthropologists. Du Tertre (1667), Labat (.1722), and Gage (1648)-
gories often overlap n textual and nontextual grounds. Finally, textuality to take only a few recognizable authors writing on one hernisphere-
is rarely the final crit rion of inclusion or exclusion. From the 200-year·- familiarized readers with the wonders of the Antilles and the American
long controversy abo t the Voyageet aventuresde Franfois Leguat(a 1708 mainland ·.
best-seller believed b some to be a true account and by others a work of Outside of a restricted group of overz·ealous scholars and administra-
fiction) to the Castafi da embarrassment to professional anthropology and tors, it mattered little to the lar er Euro ean audience wh,ether such
the more recent de ates on Shabono or the existence of the Tasaday, works wer,e fictitious or not. That the presented a.n elsewhere was
myriad cases indicate the ultimate relevance of issues outside of ('the text'' enough. That the elsewhere was a,ctually somew ,ere was a matter for a
proper (Atkinson 19 2; Weil 1984; Pratt 1986). . few specialists. The ,dream remained alive well into the next century.
That the actual c rpus fitting any of these genres at any given period Montesquieu was so much aware of this implicit correspondence that he
has never been unp oblematic underscores a thematic correspondence gambled on reversing all the traditions at the same time, with consider-
that has survived· th increasingly refined categorizations. In the 1500s, able aesthetic and didactic effect, in his Lettresp~rsanes(1721). The else-
readers could not fa l to notice the similarities b·etween works such as
1

where became Paris; the Other became French; the · utopia became a
Jacques Cartier's Brie Recit,which features araethnographic descriptions well-known state of affairs. It worked, because everyone recognized the
ia .s an som o·f · Rabelais's scenes in Gargantua.Montaigne, an models and understood the parody.
observant traveler hi self within the con nes o • uropel used descrip- The thematic correspondence between utopias and travel accounts or
tions of America to s. t for his readers issues in philosophical anthropol- I
l paraethnographic descriptions was not well camouflaged until the ·end of
i
ogy and in the fam us essay ''Des cannibales,'' he is quick to point out the eighteenth century. The forms conti_nued to diverge, while the number
the major difference etween his enterprise and that of his Greek prede- of publications within· each category kept increasing. Utopias filled the
cessors, including Pl t.o: the Greeks had no realistic database (Montaigne
•
I
I
.
century that gave us the Enlightenment, from Swift's parodic Gulliver's
195 2). Early in the s venteenth century, Tommaso Campanella produced Travels(1702) to Bernadin de Saint-Pierre's unfinished L'amazone(1795).
his Citta del sole (16 2), informed by descriptions that Portuguese mis-
•
!' But so did realistic descriptions of faraway peoples, and so did, moreover,

I
I
 '.
11,t:s=VT of f.f15
SI\V
26 MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILLOT - , ANTHROPOLOGYAND THE SAVAGESLOT 27

cross-national debat s in Europe on what exactly those descriptions ••

of rationality and experience. But the debate was always implicit in the
meant for the rationa · knowledge of humankind. In the single decade of •
·: thematic concordance that had tied the observation of the savage and the
the 1760s, England a one sent expeditions like those of Commodore By- hopes of utopia since at least 1516 .. Swiss writer Isaac lselin, a leading
••

..'
ron, Captains Cartw ight, Bruce, Furneaux, and Wallis, and Lieutenant voice of the Gottingen school of anthropology, criticized Rousseau's ideals ,! '
·I

.''
'!
Cook to savage lands all over the world. Bruce, Wallis, and Cook brought and the state of savagery as ''disorderly fantasy'' (Rupp-Eisenreich 1984: ~
;i.,1
home reports from A .yssinia, Tahiti, and Hawaii. Byron and his compan- 99). The fact that the Gottingen school did not much bother to verify its .! I

ions carried back ace unts ''of a race of splendid giants'' from Patagonia. own ''ethnographic'' bases, or that it used travelers) accounts for other ' ..·~
::,.:•
.• • ••
•••
Cartwright returned ith five living Eskimos who caused a commotion in purposes than Rousseau's (Rupp-Eisenreich 1985), matters less than the !]
,I)
the streets of London (Tinker 1922: 5-25). fact that Rousseau, Iselin, Meiners, and De Gerando shared the same ....
•

Scholars devoure such ''realistic'' data on the savage with a still un- !
·'..··,.,1'
.._ premises on the relevance of sava ery. For Rousseau, as for More and •
surpassed interest, w ile writing didactic utopias and exploring in their Defoe, the savage is an argument for a particular kind of utopia. For Iselin
.
·'
'
•

philosophical treatise the rational revelation behind the discoveries of and Meiners, as for Swift and Hobbes in other times and contexts, it is an
.
··.'
..
•
the travelers. Voltaire who read voraciously the travel d,escriptions of his argument against it. Given the tradition of the genre being used, the for-
time, gave us Candid and ''Zadig.,, But he also used paraethnographic '
" mal terrain of battle, and the personal taste of the author, the argument
descriptions to partic pate in anthropological debates of his time, siding . was either tacit or explicit and the savage's face either sketched ,or mag-
for instance with th Gottingen school on polygenesis (Duchet 1971). .
'
nified. B~f argument there was. .. . . .
Diderot, who may ha e read more travel accounts than anyone then alive, ' f \1' The nineteenth century blurred the most visible·signs of this thematic
and who turned man · of them in paraethnographic descriptions for the correspondence by artificially separating utopia and the savage. To sche-
Encyclopedie,wrote t o utopias true to form. 5 Rousseau, whom Levi- matize a protracted and contested process: it is as if that century of spe-
Strauss called ''the fat· er of ethnology,,, sought the most orderly link be- . cialization subdivided the Other that the Renaissance had set forth in
. tween ('the state of n ture'' first described by Martire d'Anghiera and the creating the West.· From then on, uto ia and the sava e ev two
''ideal commonwealt '' envisioned by More and his followers. He thus distiri uishable slots. Kant had set the philosophical grounds for this sep-
forll!alized the m th f the ''noble -sa~age,'' renewing a them~ that went aration bi laying his own teleology without humor or fiction while mov-
back not only to Pope and Defoe, but to o scure trave ers o t ,e sixteenth ... ing away from the Naturinstink. Nineteenth-century French positivists,
and seventeenth cent ries. Long before Rousseau's SocialContract,Pietro •

in turn, derided utopias as chimeric utopianisms (Manuel and Manuel

Martire already t · ou t t at the Arawak of the Antilles were sweet and 1979).
simple. Magellan'sco panion, Pigafetta, claimed in 1522 that the Indians The growing fictional literature in the United States also modified the
of Brazil were'' credul·e boni'' by instinct. And Pierre B·oucher, writing of . forms of utopia · (Pfaelzer 1984). To start with, America had been the
the Iroquois in 1664 had confirmed that '' tous les Sauuages ont l'esprit imagined site ·of traditional utopias, Tocqueville'sf euille blanche, the land
bon'' (Gonnard 1946: 6~Atkinson 1920: 65- 70). of all (im)possibilities. Defining an elsewhere from this site was a di~
The myth of the n ble savage is not a creation of the Enlightenment. lemma. Ideally, its Eden was within itself (Walkover 1974). Not surpris-
-... Ever since the West ecame the West, Robinson has been looking for ingly, William Dean Howells brings A Travelerfrom Altruria to the United
Friday. The eighteent. century was not even the first to see arguments on States before sending his readers back to utopia. Edward Bellamy chose
"- '
or around that myth ( onnard 1946). The verbal duel between Las Casas .
, to look ''backward." M·ore important, America's savages and its colonized
.
and Sepulveda on th ''nature'' of the Indians and the .justice of their were also within itself: American Indians and black .Americans, only one
enslavement, ·fought t Valladolid i~ the early 1550s in front of Spain's of whom white anthropologists dared to study before the latter part of
intellectual nobility, as as spectacular as anything the Enlightenment this century (Mintz 1971, 1990). With two groups of savages to _pick
could imagine (Andr -Vincent 1980; Pagden 1982). Rather, the speci-
ficity of eighteenth-ce tury anthropological philosophers was to dismiss
l! from, specialization set in, and Indians (especially ''good'' Indians) be-
came the preserve of anthropologists.
some of the past limi ations of this 'grandiose controversy and to claim r.
••
" At the same time, a black utopia was unthinkable, given the charac-
to resolve it not on th basis of the Scriptures, but on the open grounds
•
ter of North American racism an the fabric o ack/w . 1te imagery in
.

f'
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MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILLOT
'
- ANTHROPOLOGYAND THE SAVAGESLOT 29
28

American literature ( evin 196 7). Thus the black pastoral (the unmatched thropology as a specialized fi·eld of .inquiry. Better said, the constitutive
apex of which is Un le Toms Cabin [1851] but note that the flavor is moment of ethnographyas metaphorantedatesthe constitutionof anthropology
also in Faulkner) play d tpe role that Paulet Virginiehad played earlier in as di~cipline.and even precedes its solidification as specialized discourse.
European imaginatio .6 But true-to-form utopia writers in North America The dominant metamorphosis, the transformation of savagery into same-
moved away from the specter of savagery. ness by way of utopia as positive or negative reference, is not the outcome
Other factors wer at play. The nineteenth century was America's cen- of a textual exercise within the anthropological practice, but part of an-
tury of concretene .ss, hen its utopias became reachable. Of the reported r
I• thropology's original conditions of existence. Anthropology came to fill
f
52 million migrants ho left Europe between 1824 and 1924, more than the savage slot of a larger thematic field, performing a role played, in
ninety percent went t the Americas, mostly to the United States. In the I different ways, by literature and travel accounts and soon to be played,
United States, and in urope as well, decreasing exchange among writers, l perhaps, by un ,expected media, if one takes the success of ''Roots," ''Miami
who were involved in different forms of discourse and seeking legitimacy Vice," or ''China Beach'' on North American television, or the interna-
'v on different grounds, ontributed even more to giving each group of prac- I tional sales of Saddam Hussein punching balls during the Gulf War, as
titioners the sentime _ t that they were carrying on a different enterprise. indications of a future. That the discipline was .positivist in a positivist
As they believed thei practice and practiced their beliefs, the enterprises age, structuralist in a context dominated by structuralism, is not very
indeed became separ ted, but only to a certain extent. By the end of the intriguing; and as Tyler (1986: 1,28)notes acutely, the more recent ''tex-
nineteenth century, u opian · novelists accentuated formal interests while tualization ?f 'pseudo-discourse'' can accomplish ''a terrorist alienation
utopianisms were ac . owledged primarily as doctrines ,couched i~ non .. more complete than that of the positivists." Thus, attempts at disciplinary
fictional terms: Saint Simonism, Fabian Socialism, Marxism (Gonnard reflexivity cannot stop at the moment of institutionalization, or emphasize
1946). Travel accoun came to pass as a totally separate genre, however I the internal tropes of late modern ethnographies, even though some
f
Robinson-like some emained. The ''scientifi ·c'' study of the savage qua r
I
rightly allude to the corr,espondence between savagery and utopia or to
'
savage became the pr vileged field of academic anthropology, soon to be t the use of the pastoral mode in anthropology (e.g., Tyler 1986; Clifford
i 1986b; Rosaldo 1986). Such attempts are not .wrong. But the primary
anchored in distingui · hed chairs, but already severed from its imaginary
1
t

counterpart. focus on th~ textual construction of the Other in anthropology may turn
The rest of the st ry is well known, perhaps too well known, inas- our attention away from the construction of otherness upon which an-
much as the insisten e on the methods and tropes of anthropology as · thropology is premised, and further mask a correspondence already well
discipline may obscu e the larger discursive order that made sense of its concealed by increasing specialization since the nineteenth century.
institutionalization . istories that fail to problematize this institutional- Indeed, the savage-utopia correspondence tends to generate false can-
ization and critique premised on that naive history necessarily fall . dor. It rarely reveals its deepest foundatiops ·or its inher ,ent inequality,
short of illuminating t e enunciative context of anthropological discourse. even though it triggers claims of reciprocity. From Pietro Martire and
•

To be sure, anthropol gists to this day keep telling both undergraduates Rousseau · to the postmodernist contingent(s) of North American anthro-
and lay readers that heir practice is useful to better understand '' our- pology, the s~vage has been an occasion to profess innocence. We may
selves,"·but without e er spelling exactly ·the specifics of this understand- guess at some of the reasons behind this recurrent tendency to exhibit the
ing, the utopias behi this curiosity turned profession. t. ·nude as nakedness. Let me just say this much: in spite of such old claims,
It has often been s id that the savage or the primitive was the alter ego the utopian West dominated the thematic correspondence. It did so from
the West constructed for itself. What has not been em hasized enough is
!r behind the scene, at least most of the time. It showed itself in least equivo-
that this Other was Janus, ·
o f whom the savage was only the secon I' cal terms on just a few occasions, most notably in the philosophical jousts
.::::..:: .--. .
___
- . -

face.7 The first face w · the West itse , but the West fanci ully co;nstructe t over American colonization in sixteenth-century Spain (Pagden 1982)
l
as ~ utopian projecti n and meant to be, in that imaginary correspon- f and in the anthropological debates of the eighteenth century (Duchet
f
dence, t e condition f existence of the .sava e. i
[
1971).
T is t ematic cor · ·spo,n ence preceded the institutionalization of an-
l
r, But visible or not, naive or cynical, the West was always first, as utopia
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·. '." '
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 30 · MICHEL-ROLPH
TROUILLOT ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE SAVAGE
SLOT 31

or as challenge to it that is, as a universalist project, the boundaries of borders and the concentration of political power in the name of the Chris-
which were no-_wher , u-topous , non-spatial. And that, one needs to re- tian God presaged the advent of internal order.
- peat, is not a produ t of the Enlightenment, but part and parcel of the Order . political and ideological was high on the agenda, both in

--- horizons set by the enaissance and its simultaneous creation of Europe I theory and in practic e~and the increased use of the printing press stimu-
and otherness, with ut which the West is inconceivable. Thomas More lated the interchange between theory and practice. Thus,. in 1513, three
did not have to wait r ethnographic reports on the America·s to compose years befor,e Thomas More's Utopia,Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince.
his Utopia.Similarly, ighte,enth-cencury rea~ers of travel accounts did not In retrospect, that work signified a thres o : some leaders of the emerg- I
wait for verification. Even today, there is a necessar ap between the ing Western world were ready to phrase the issue of control in terms
'nitial acce · tance oft e most anciful ''ethnographies' and the ''restu ies'' of realpolitik long b,efore the word was coined. The Machiavelli era en-
r ' r,eassessme_pts''t at follow. The chronological precedence reflects a compassed Erasmus's Educationof a Christian Prince, Bud~'s Education
deeper inequality in · ,e two faces o Janus: the u ·,opian West is first in the of a Prince;and other treatises that shared an ''emphasis .
on the work-
construction of this omplementarity. It is the first observed face of the able rather than the ideal," a belief that '~men's destinies were to some
figure, the initial pro·.ection against which the savage becomes a reality. extent within their own control and that this control depended upon self-
The savage makes se se only in terms of utopia. ,-
...___....+-+--- - - -- - - -----i knowledge'' (Hale 1977: 305).
"J The seminal writings that inscribed savagery, utopia, and order were I
\
conceived (in the same era. This simultaneity is but o,ne indication that \
HE MEDIATIONOF Q,RDER \
·these slots were created against the backdrop of one another .. In the con-
Uto,pia itself made se se only in terms of the absolute order against which text of Europe, the works that set up these slots were part of an emerging
it was projected, neg tively or not. 8 Utopias do not necessar· y advance debate that tied order to· the quest fo,r universal truths, a quest that gave
foundational proposi ions, but they feed upon foundational thought. Fic- savagery and utopia their relevance. Looming above the issue of the ideal
I
tiona "ideal states,,, resented as novels or treatises, suggest a r,o ·ect or state of affairs, and tying it to that of the state of nature, was the issue of
a counterproject. It i this very projection, rather than their alleged or t order as both a goal and a means, and of its relation with reason and
proven fanciful chara teristics, that makes them utopias . Her,e again, we justice. Campanell~'s City, the runner-up to Utopia in the critics' view,
need. to go back to t . e Renaissance, that fictional rebirth th.rough which clearly engaged some of Machiavelli's proposals and those of contempo-
Christendom became the West, where two more snapshots may clarify rary Spanish philosophers (Mant1eland Manuel 1979: 261 - 88). Campa-
the issue. nella, like More, also wrote in· nonf1,ctional modes . He commented on
From the point o view of contemporaries, the most important event European political regimes, in terms of their ultimate justification. He
of the year 1492 wa not Columbus's anding in the Antilles, but th,e proposed to various European monarchs a nonfictional plan of rule based
- ~~.ue.s1 _f .-e Musl m kin -dom ·OfGranada and its incorporation into on his religious and philosophical views. Indeed, the opinions expressed
Castile (Trouillot 199 ). The gap between the three religions of Abraham .
in his treatises got him thrown into a Spanish jail, where he wrote his
had paralleled the so iopolitical fissure that split the Med.terranean, but fictionalized utopia (Manuel and Manuel 1979; Trousson 1975: 39, 72-
because of that fissur , religious intolerance increasingly expressed itself 78). ·sir Thomas More, in turn, was executed.
in ways that intertwin ,d religion, ethnicity, territory, and matters of state · The relatio,n between fictionalize·d utopias and matters of political
control. To put it_si ·ly, as Christendom became Europe, Europe itself ,
'
power goes way back to the ancestral fo,rms of the genre in ancient Greece
became Christian. It ·s no acci dent that the fall of Muslim Granada was
1 (Trousson '1975: 39). So do debates on the nature of otherness. But we
immediately follo,wed by the expulsion of the Jews from the now Chris- need not take the naive history of the West at face value: Greece did not
tian territory. It is no accident either that the very same individual who beget Europe. Rather, Euro e claimed Greece. The revisionist historiog-
•
signed the public ord r against the Jews also signed Ferdinand and Isa- raphy throug whic t e Renaissance turne Christendom into Europe
r· and gave it its Greek heritage · is itself a phenomenon that needs to be
bella's secret instruct ons to Columbus. Indeed, nascent Europe could
turn its eyes to the tlantic only because the consolidation of political
[ ....
placed in history. The distinctiveness of the Renaissance was, in part, the
 32 MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILLOT _ - ANTHROPOLOGY
ANDTHESAVAGE
SLOT 33
•

invention of a past f r the West. 9 It was also, in part, an emerging claim Charles's ''election'' to the imperial crown in 1519. But the condemnation
to universality and to an absolute order inconceivable without that claim. of Luther (1520), rural agitation within Castile itself, and the so-called
1
As Las Casas, Mont squieu, and Montaigne were quick to point ou.t in Oriental menace (culminating with the 1529 siege of Vienna by the Turks)
different terms and ti es, a major difference between Europe and ancient kept reminding a nas~ent Europe that its self-delivery was not to happen
Greece was the realit of the savage as experienced by Europe after 1492. without pai s. The notion of a universal empire that would destroy,
Unlike that of Greec and Rome, or that of the Islamic world the West,s
~
I· through its inelt.Jctable expansion, the borders of Christe.ndom became
. I

vision of order impli d from its inception two complementary spaces, the I both more attractive in thought and mo e unattainable in p,ractice.
here and the elsewhe e, which premised one another and were conceived The fictionalized utopias that immediately allowed More's and over-
as inseparable. lapped with the practical reshaping of power in a newly defined Europe
-- In imaginary ter s that elsewhere could be Utopia; but in the concrete were by an,d large reformist rather than revolutionary, hardly breaking
terms of conquest, it was a space of colonization peopled by others who new imaginary ground (Trousson 1975: 62- 72). This is not surprising,
would eventually be ome ('us' or at the very least who should in a
1
· for, just as the savage is in an unequal r,elac·onship with utopia, so is
project of assimilati n antithetic to the most liberal branches of Greek utopia in an uneven relation with order. Just as the savage is a metaphori-
philosophy. In that s nse, order had become universal, absolute both in cal argument for or against utopia, so is utopia (and the savage it encom-
the shape of the risi g absolutist state (quite opposed, indeed, to Greek passes) a metaphorical argument for or against order, conceived of as an
democracy), and in he shape of a universal empire stretching the lim-
~ its of Christendom ut into nowhere. Colonization became a mission, as the ult1 ate s1gn1fiedof the savage-utopia relation, t at gives the triad
and the savage became absence and negation. 10 The symbolic process its full sense. In defense of a particular vision of ord·er, the savage became
through which the · est created itself thus involved the universal legiti- evidence for a particular type of utopia. That the sa1ne ethnographic
..,
macy of power · an • order became, in that process, the answer to the source co~ld be used to make the opposite point did not matter, beyond
•
question of legitima y. To put it otherwise, the West i.s inconceivable a minimal requirement for verisimilitude. To be sure, Las Casas had been
without a metanarra ive, for since their common emergence in the six- there, Sepulveda had not; and this helped the cause of the procurador.To
teenth century, both ·he modern state and colonization posed and con- be sure, the Rousseauists were right and Gottingen was wrong about cra-
tinue to pose to th West the issue of the philosophical base of order. nial sizes. To be sure, the empirical verdict is not yet in on the Tasaday.
As Edouard lis t 1989: 2) hrases it: The West is not in the West.
11
But now a.s before, the savage is only evidence within a debate, the im-
It is a project, not a place, a multilayered· enterpr'se in transparent
t, portance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very
universality. existence . .
Chronological co vergences again illustrate the point. At ,about the Just as utopia itself can be offered as a promise or as a dangerous
time Machiavelli wro e The Prince, the Spanish Crown made known its illusion, the savage can be noble, wise, barbarian, victim, or aggr,essor,
supplementary laws n American colonization, and the Medici clan in I
depending on the debate and the aims of the interlocuts>rs. The space
1513 secured the pa acy with the nomination of Leo X the same Leo, r within the slot is not static, and its changing contents ·are not predeter-
bishop of Rome, to . horn Pietro Martire dedicated parts of his ethnogra- mined by its structural position. Regional and temporal variants of the
phy. Two years later he accession of Francis I as king of France signalled savage figure abound, in spite of recurring tendencies that suggest geo-
the self-conscious invention of the traditions constitutive of the French graphical specialization. 12 Too often, anthropological discourse modifies
nation-state a self-c6nsciousness manifested in the imposed use of the the projection of nonacademic observers only to the extent that it ''disci-
French dialect and th · creation of th,e College de France. 11 One year after plines'' them. 13 At other times, anthropologists help create and buttress
Francis's advent, Cha .les I (lat.er ,Charles V) became king of Castile and of images that can question previous permutations. 14 Thus, what happens
its New World poss sions, and Martin Luther published the ·theses of within the slot is neither doomed nor inconsequential (Fox, this volume;
Wittenberg. The sec nd decade of the new century ended quite fortu- Vincent, this volume). The point is, rather, that a critique of a~thropology
itously with a sembl nee of victory on the side of order, that is, with cannot skirt around this slot. The direction of the disc-(pline now depen s

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 MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILLOT - ANTHROPOLOGYAND THE SAVAGESLOT 35
34

rect, together they expose the unspoken assumptions of postmodernist

anthropology in North America and reveal its inherent limitations. For
he West The Rest
t \ the po_rtrait of the postmodernist anthropologist that emerges from this
dual exercise is not a happy one indeed. Camera and notebooks in hand,
j
The Observer The Other he is looking for the savage, but the savage has vanished.
Culture Nature The problem starts with the fated inheritance of the moderns them-
History Stories selves. T that the anthro olo ist inherits has wi ed out the em-
irical trace of the sava e-object: Coke bottles and cartridges now obscure
!
!
•I the familiar tracks. To be sure, one could reinvent the savage, or create
0 DER SAVAGE l

new savages within the West itself solutions of this kind are increasingly
Noble appealing. The very notion of a pristine savager· r, however, is now awk-
Barbarian ward, irrespective o t~e savage-object. Lingering conditions of modernity
•
Wise make t e notion a hard one to evoke in imagination, now that hordes of
Evil savages have joined the slums of the Third World or touched the shores
of the West. We are far from the days when five Eskimos caused an uproar
in .London.( The primitive has bec?me terrorist, refugee, freedom fi hter,
St te: Justice UTOPIA
1um and coca rower, or arastte. He can even p ay ant ropo ogist at
Paradisiac times. Televised documentaries show his ''real'' conditions of existence;
Communist underground newspapers expose his dreams of modernity. Thanks to mo-
Innocent dernity, the savage has changed, the West has changed, and the West
Illusory knows that both have changed empirically.
T ought: Reason But modernity is only part of the anthropologist's difficulty. Modern
obstacles have modern (technical) answers, or so we used to think. The
'
! more serious issue is that technical solutions do not suffice anymore. At
Here Elsewhere
best, they can solve the problem of the empirical object by removing the
Cokes and cartridges. At worst, they can fabricate an entire new face for
I
savagery. But they cannot remedy the loss of the larger thematic field,
Figure2.1. The symbolic rganizationof the savageslot, ca. 1515-1990. I
. especially since the savage never dominated this field. He was only one of
the requisite parts of a tripartite relation, the mask of a mask. The prob-
upon an explicit atta k on that slot itself and the symbolic order upon lem is not simply that the masks are torn, that true cannibals are now
which it is premised ( -g. 2 ..1). For as long as the slot remains, the savage rare. The problem is that now as ·n Norman Mailer's Cannibalsand
is at best a figure of s eech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and Christians ( 1966) both are equally ·good, or equally evil (Walkover
the universe, about being and existence in short, an argument about 1974), if evil itself can be defined (Lyotard 1986).
foundational thought. \ This is altogether a postmodern quandary. It is ·part of the world of
constructs and relations revealed by our juxtaposed snapshots, and it is
an intrinsic dilemma of postmodern anthropology. For if indeed founda-
PORTR IT OF THE ARTISTAS A BUBBLE
I
tio~al thoughts are seen as collapsing, if indeed utopias are arguments
•

This brings us right , ack to the present. I have argued so far that to about order and foundationa1 thoughts, and if indeed the savage exists
historicize the West i to historicize anthropology and vice versa. I have primarily within an implicit correspondence with utopia, the specialist in •

further suggested that the postmodern condition makes that two-pronged ----=- sacvagery
....;.. is in dire straits. He does not know what to aim at. His avorite
historicization both u ent and necessary. If these two arguments are cor· model has isappeare or, when found, refuses to pose as expected. The
I
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ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE SAVAGE
SLOT 37
36 ' . MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILLO
·T '·

fieldworker examine his tools and finds his camera inadequate. Most authorial legitimation may be associated with midterm maneuvers, it also
importantly, his very field of vision now seems blurred. Yet he needs to i
must be seen in another context. In that context the thematic field de-
lineated by order, utopia, and the savage ·_this em hasis on textualit
>

come back home wit a picture. It's pouring rain out there, and the mos-
quitoes are starting o bite. In desperation, the baffled anthropologist represents a strategic retreat triggered by the Eerception of on oing de-
burns his notes to c eate a moment of light moves his face against the - struction. in ·other words, .electoral politics alone cannot explain post-
flame, closes his eyes and, hands grasping the camera, takes a picture of
-·- ---
modernist anthropology. To propose viable alternatives, one needs to ta ·
himself. .- the ideological and theoretical co xt of · ostmodernism seriousl , more
seriousl than the ostmodernists do themselves. One needs also to take
more seriously both literary criticism and philosophy.
TACTICSAND STRATEGY
Lest this portrait be t ken to characterize the postmodernist anthropolo- METAPHORSIN ETHNOGRAPHYAND
gist as the epitome o self-indulgence (as many critics, indeed, imply), let ETHNOGRAPHYAS METAPHOR
me say that narcissis labels characterize postmoderni$t anthropologists,
ag individuals, ·no be ter than they typify their predecessors or adversa-
'·•
The recent· discovery of textuality by North American anthropologists ~y
1
ries. Intellectuals as group claimed and gained socially sanctioned self- is based ·on a quite limited notion of the text. The emphasis on ' the
indulgence long be£ re postmodemism. Individual intent is secondary indepen~nt importance of ethnographic writing as a genre'' (Marcus
here. At any rate, a thropology's postmodern situation ¥{arrants more 1980: 507), the dismissal of pre-text, con-text, and content, all contribute
sober reflection tha petty accusations of egomania across theoretical to reading the ant~ropological product as isolated from the larger field in
.,,
camps. which its conditions of existence are generated. Passing references aside,
I may end up bei g both more lenient and more severe thus risking the course of inquiry on the relations among anthropology, colonialism,
the condemnation of foes and proponents alike by saying that the per- and political ''neutrality,,, which opened in the late 1960s and early 1970s 1
ceived self-indulgenc of the postmodernist anthropologists inheres in the (e.g., Asad 1973), is now considered closed, because it allegedly revealed
situation itself. That i what makes it so obvious and such an easy target . all its partial truths. Passing mentions of gender aside, femin~m as a
for opponents. If we ake seriously the perception of an ongoing collapse discourse that claims the specificity of (some) historical subfects -· is by-
of the Western metan rratives, the vacuum created by the fall of the house "- passed beta use it is said to deal only with ''content." 16 Passing references
of reason in the once ertile fields of utopian imagination, and the empiri- to the Third World, notwithstanding, the issues raised by Wolf's histori-
cal destruction of the avage-object, then the anthropologist who is aware · cization of the Other ( 1982), an inquiry that inherently makes anthro-
of the postmodern si uation has no target outsi ,de of himself (as witness) '! ; pology part of this changing world, are considered moot .. Mentions · of
and his text (as prete t), within the thematic universe he inherits. ,, relations oftextual production notwithstanding, the mechanisms and pro-
··,

Once phrased in t ese terms, the dilemma becomes manageable. One cesses emphasized are those that singularize the voice of anthropology, as
obvious solution is t confront and change the thematic field itself and
•.'

'
.
if anthrop ·ological discourse was either self-enclosed or ·self-sufficient.
..
claim new rounds f r anthropology w 1c 1sJust w at some anthro- ,
.
Not surprisingly, the archaeological exploration that underpins the
'

pologists have been oing, t oug wit ·out explicit programs. But the ,, North American exercise in reflexivity tends to stop at the institutional-
•

dilemma, as lived by .he postmodernists, is no less real, and the epiphany

'. ization of anthropology as a discipline in the Anglophone world, or at
of textuality cannot e reduced to a mere aggregate of individual tactics best at th;e delineation of a specialized anthropological discourse in the
of self-aggrandizeme , t or preservation. 15 If electoral politics may explain Europe of the Enlightenment. In spite of the professed renunciation of
either overstatements or the craving for new fads in North American an- labels, boundaries are set in modern terms to produce a history of the
thropology and else here, they say little o·f the mechanisms leading to discipline, albeit one with different emphases. The construction exposed
specific choices amo g myriad possibilities. Why the text? Wh the sud- · is a discursive order within anthropology, not the discursive order wit in
den (for anthro olo i ts to · · me extent) rediscovery o · iterature, an o -- ~ -hich anthro 'polog ' .0 erates' and makes sense 'even though, here again,
some literature at tha ? However much the (re)discovery o textuality and this larger field seems to warrant passing mention. The representational
 '.,
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r
38 MICHEL.ROLPHTROUILLOT ANTHROPOLOGYAND THE SAVAGESLOT 39
•

\
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aspect of ethnograph c discourse is attacked with a vigor quite dispropor- '' keeps creeping back into the mea culpa anthropology, but the men and
tionate to the refere tial value of ethnographies in the wider field with.in women who are the subjects of history. 19 It is to acknowled e t at t is
which anthropology nds its significance. In short to use a language that space of the historical subject is out of reach of all metanarratives, not
still has its validity, · e object of inquiry is the ''simple'' rather than the oecause a metanarratives .are created equal and are equally wrong (w ich
''enlarged,, reproduce·on of anthropological discourse. Terminology and is the claim of nihilism and always ends up favoring some subjects and
citations notwithstan.
ing, the larger thematic field on which anthropol- some narratives) but because rnet@arrative claims to universality neces-
ogy is premised is ba ely scratched. sarily imply the muting of first persons, singular or p ura , ·eeme ,-
But if we take se iously the proposition to look at anthropology as gina ~ sa t at ot erness rs a ways spec1 c an 1storical is to reject
metaphor as I thin we can, given the thematic field outlined we can- t , is mar inality. The Ot er cannot be encompassed by a resi ua cate- 1

not just look at meta hors in anthropology. The study of ''ethnographic gory: there is no savage slot. The ''us and all of them' binary, implicit in '
I

l
allegory'' (Clifford l 9B6b; Tyler 1986) cannot be taken to refer primarily the symbolic order that creates the West, is an ideological construct, and
to allegorical forms i ethnography without losing sit.e of the larger pic- the many forms of Third-World-ism that reverse its terms are its mirror
ture. Our starting p int cannot be ''a crisis in anthropology·' (Clifford images. Ther,e is no Othe , but multitudes of others who are all others for :I
•
•
1986a: 3), but in the histories of the world. 17 We need to go out of an-, different reasons, in s ite of tota izin narratives, includin that of ca ital.
thropology to see th construction of ''ethnographic- authonty not as a l Many propositions follow from this statement, not the least of which ,,
- _, - -=re uirei:Pent o}_a 1hro- ofo _i~ ldiscourse Cl1 ord f9,83b) but as an is that ~ discipline whose object is the Other may in fact have no ob- '

earl co~ppf!erit of_! is wig_e !._~~19..i_hat

is i~selfconstitutive of anthro ol- ject which may lead us to take a much needed look at the methodologi- )
o . Would that the , ower of anthropology hmged upon t e academ - 1-.c- cal..specificity of anthropology. It also follows that the authenticity of the
success of genial im igrants such as Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinow- historical subject may not be fully captured from the outside even by way
ski! It would allow u to find new scapegoats without ever looking back of direct quotes; there may be somethin irreducible in the first person
at the Renaissance. B t the exercise in reflexivity must go all the way and singular. This, in turnl raises two related issues: that o e epistemologi-
examine fully the en rged reproduction of anthropological discourse. 18 -· ca status of native discourse;20 and that qf the theoretical status of eth-
Observers ma w nder wh · the o ·moder · e eriment in U.S. an- nography. I will turn to these issues, not so much in a purely abstract
thro ·olo · has . · s r e of substantive models. The ques- mode (though this may be also necessary), but as entwined with specific
tion of time aside, th difficulty of passing from criticism to substance is research projects.
not simply due to a t eoretical aversion to content or an instinctive sus- -L - First,, anthropology needs to evaluate its gains and losses in light of
picion o,f exemplars. f ter all, the postmodernist wave has revitalized sub- , these i-ssues with a fair tally of the knowledge anthropologists have pro-
1

stantive production i other academic fields. It has stimulated architects . duced in the past, sometimes in spite of themselves a d almost always in
and political theorists alike. At the very least, it has provoked debates on spite of the savage·slot. We owe it to ourselves to ask what remains of
and of substance. Fur her, some political radicals advocate the possibility I ---~ ~--,~--,-.~ -- ~----_,..---:-
anthropology and of specific monograp s w en we remove t is slot not
,- ------

of militant practices ooted in postmodernism although not without v to revrralize fsc1p1nary tradition throug cosmetic surgery but tobuild
controversies (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Arac 1986; Ross l 988b). More both an e istemolo and a semiology of what anthropologists , one
important, the implic t awareness of an expanding situation of postmo- and can do. We cannot simply assume t at mo ernism has exhausted all
dernity continues to otivate grass-roots movements all over the world, its potential projects; Nor can we assume that ' realist ethnography'' has
. with their partial tru hs and partial results. In fact, an anthropologist produced nothing but empty figures of speech and shallow claims to
could well read post odernism, or at the very least the postmodern situ- authority.
ation, as a case for th specificity of otherness for the destruction of the
1 :iZ{; Second, armed with this renewed arsenal, we can recapture domains
savage slot. of significance by creating strategic points of ' reentry'' into the discourse
To claim the speci city of otherness is to sug . est a residual of histori- on otherness: areas within the discourse where the introduction of new
cal ex erience t at a a s esca es universalisms exactly because history voices or new combinations of meaning perturbate the entire field and
itself alwa s involves rreducible subjects. It is to reserve a space or the open the way to its (partial) recapture. 21 This chapter is not the place to
subject not the exis ential subject favored by the early Sartre and who l expand in the directions of these many queries, so I can only tease the
 . ·-
ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE SAVAGE
SLOT 41
40 MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILLOT

reader. But a few tas s seem to me urgent in this new context: an .e jst~- I Times h·ave changed since the sixteenth century: one now is innocent
molo ical reassessm nt of the historical sub· ect (the first person singula-r;>- until proven guilty. Thus, claims of innocence can take the shape of si-
that has been overw · e med by the voice of objectivity or by that of the lence. Somehow, to my surprise, I miss the faithful indignation of a Las
narrator and that i so important to many feminists, especially Afro- Casas.
American feminists) ,; a similar reassessment of nativeness and native dis-
Notes
course, now bare _ly onceptualized; and a theory of ethnography, now .
My thanks to all those who commented on earlier versions of this paper, the
, repu ,~iated as the n '<false consc .iousness." An or the time e1ng, at
participants at the Santa Fe Seminar, graduate students and faculty at Johns Hop-
least, we need more ethnographies t at raise these issues through con- lI kins University and at the New School for Social Research, and the readers for
crete cases. Not so uch ethnographies that question the author/native the School of American Research. Personal thanks to Kamran Ali, Talal Asad,
dichotomy by exposi g the nude as nakedness, but ethno · ra no- Lanfranco Blanchetti, Ashraf Ghani, Ananta Giri, Richard G. Fox, Richard Kagan,
t=· historio-?emiolo ies? that offer new oints of reentr b uestionin the 1 and Eric Wolf, none of whom should be held responsible for the final product.
s bolic world u o which ''nativeness'' is remised. At the very least, An early version of this paper, ''Anthropology as Metaphor: The Savage's Legacy
anthropologists can how that the Other, here an e sewhere, is indeed a and the Post-(Modern World," appeared in Review,a Journal of the Fernand Brau-
product symbolic nd material of the same process that created the del Center, vol. XIV, no. 1, Winter 1991.
West. 22 In short, · th time is ripe for substantive propositions that aim ~ 1. For reasons of space, I cannot retrace here all the connections between
explicitly at .the <lest uction of the savage slot. --- ~- -- -- - - -- -----· recent debates in philosophy and literary theory and recent critiques of anthro-
----_::__..,._. ~-,~ ·- - - -
at it has not b en so among the postmodernists of North American pology. Our readings are too parochial, anyway to the point that any major
thinker needs to be translated into the discipline by an insider. Anthropology has
anthropology is thu a matter of choice. In spite of a terminology that
intimates a decoding of ''anthropology as metaphor,'' we are barely read-
! mu·ch more to learn from other disciplines, notably history, literary criticism,
'

I' and philosophy, than the reflexivist interpreters assume. There are blanks to be
ing anthropology its lf. Rather, we are reading anthropological pages, and I

it filled by the reader with proper use of the bibliographical references.

attention remains fo used primarily on the metaphors in anthropology. r
I
f- 2. Other reasons aside, long-term fieldwork in the so-called Third World,
This recurring refus 1 to pursue further the archaeological exercise ob- r
after the initial dissertation, is. becoming more difficult and less rewarding for a
scures the asymmett cal position of the savage-other in the themati _c field i
I majority of ~nthropologists. Unfortunately, issues such as the increased compe·
II
upon which anthrop logy was premised. It negates the specificity of oth- !
I
titian for 'funds to do fieldwork abroad or the growing proportion of two-career
erness, subsuming t e Other in the sameness of the text perceived as l. families in and out of academe only make good conversation. Practitioners tend
II .
.I liberating cooperatio . ''We are the world''? 1 to dismiss them in written (and therefore ''serious'') assessments of trends in the
--"":'""' r• discipline. The sociology of our practice is perceived as taboo, but see Wolf
_) Anthropolo di not create the savage. Rather, the savage was the I
l
r

raison d'etre of anthr po logy. Anthropology came ·to t e savage s ot in 1 (1969)) whose early appeal for such a sociology fell on dead ears, and Ra.binow
[t'
the tri ogy order-uto ia-savagery, a trilogy w~ich preceded anthropolo- ,.
1
(this volume).
r 3. In that sense, I take exception to Renato Rosaldo's formulation that the
gy's institutionalizati n and gave it continuing coherence in spite of in- r

tradisciplinary shifts this trilogy is now in jeopardy. Thus the time is I conservative domination "has distorted a once-healthy deb.ate" (Rosaldo 1989:
f 223). What a certain kind of anthropology can demonstrate is exactly that the
ripe and in that se se, it is postmodern to attack frontally the visions '
' debate was never as healthy as we were led to believe.
f
that shaped this trilo y, to uncover its ethical roots and its consequences,
1,
t.
l• 4. See Graff (1977), Jameson (1984), Arac (1986), Lyotard (1986), Ross
and to find better a chor for an anthropology of the present, an anthro- (1988b), and Harvey (1989) on conflicting definitions of postmodernism. I am
pology of the changi g world and its irreducible histories. But postmod- not qualified to settle this debate. But if postmodernism only means a style, a
ernist anthropologist -pass near this opportunity looking for the savage in r,. bundle · of expository devices, characterized (or not) by ''double coding" (Jencks
~ 1986), then it does not much matter to anthropologists as long as they note
the text. They want · s to read th_e internal tropes of the savage slot, no fr
doubt a useful exer ise in spite of its potential for self-indulgence. But i that double coding has been part of the cultural arsenal of many non-Western
;'

they refuse to addr ss directly the thematic field (and thus the larger
•
•
cultures for centuries. On th·e connection between po·stmodernism and meta-
narratives, see Lyotard (1979, 1986), Eagleton (1987), and Harvey (1989).
world) that made ( akes) this slot possible, morosely preserving the
5. The first consists of two chapters in Les Bijouxindiscrets.The second is the
empty slot itself.
 42 MICHEL-ROLPHTROUILL.OT ••
· · ANTHROPOLOGYAND THE SAVAGESLOT 43
.- .
fantastic Supplementau voyagedu Bougainville,a primitivist utopia where Tahiti is ' historically untenable ·without the invented tradition necessary for the symbolic
the Other in more than one way, being both savage and female (Trousson construction of the nation. It is only by one of those ironies of which history is
1975: 140; Brewer 1985). full that this tradition became fully alive at the time of the Revolution and was
6. I owe my ideas on the black or plantation pastoral to conversations with solidified by a Corsican mercenary with no claim to Frankish nobility, namely,
Professor Maximilien Laroche and access to his unpublished paper on the sub-
~t
! Napoleone Buonaparte.
I·
ject. ln Bernadin Saint-Pierre,s successful Paulet Virginie (1787), whose setting is I•,
I 12.. One suspeccs that the savage as wise is more ·often than not Asiatict the
I
a plantation island, a group of maroon slaves surprises the two lovers. But to the savage as noble is often a Native American) and the savage as barbarian is often
heroes' amazement, the chief of the runaway slaves says, "Good little whites, don't
1 African or African-American. But neither roles nor positions are always neat, and
'
be afraid; we saw you p*ss this morning with a negro woma~ from Riviere-Noire~ the structural dichotomies do not always obtain historically. Jews and Gypsies,
you went to ask her gra~e to her bad master; in gratitude, we will carry you back
•
for instance, are savages "within" the West an awkward position not accounted
home on our shoulders.,,
I •
by the here/elsewhere dichotomy, but resolved in practice by persecution.
. 7. Some writers have made this point. Others have assembled the necessary 13. }\nthropological insistence on, say, rebellion and resistance in Latin
information to make it,:without always drawing the same conclusion from their America~economic qua material survival in Africa, or ritual expression in South-
juxtapositions. I have read over the sh'oulders of so many of them, and imposed east Asia partakes of a symbolic distribution that predates chronologically and
my reading on so many others, .that credits for this section and the next were precedes epistemologically the division of labor within the discipline. A major
sometimes difficult to attribute in the main text~but see Atkinson (1920, 1922, limitati"onof the work o·f Edward Said is the failure to read "Orientalism as one
11

1924), Baudet (1959), Chinard (1934), Duchet• (197D, De Certeau (1975), Gon- set of permutations within the savage slot .
nard (1946), Todorov (1982), Trousson (1975), Rupp-Eisenreich (1·984), and 14. My gieater familiarity with Caribbean anthropology may explain why I
Droixhe and Gossiaux (ti. I
985). find most. of my positive examples in this corner of the world, but it is obvious
8. My phrasing of t~is issue in terms of order owes to conversations with to Caribbeanists that anthropology helped challenge the vision of the Antilles as
Ashraf Ghani. 1 remain ~esponsible for its µse here and its possible shortcomings. islands in the sun peop1ed by indolent natives a view popularized since the
Empirical elements of an analysis of the role of order within the symbolic hori- j nineteenth century by racist yet celebrated writers such as Anthony Trollope
zons of the Renaissance,I are plentiful in Hale's RenaissanceEurope: Individual and (1859). ·How successful was the challenge is another issue, but forty years before
Society, 1480-1520 (Ha]e 1977).
. !t ''voodoo .economics" became a pejorative slogan in North American political par-
I

9. Genealogies that trace the beginnings of anthropology to Herodotus (why t lance, some North American and European anthropologists took Haitian popular
f
• not Ibn Battuta?) partake of that naive history. They serve the guild interests of !
f
religion quite seriously (e.g., Herskovits l 937b). ·
(
the !(discipline,"its construction of tradition, authorship, and authority and the l 15. To be sure, in its current form, the alleged discovery of the text provokes
f...
reproduction of the savage slot upon which it builds its legitimacy. Note, how- I
I
transient ·hyperboles. We all knew that ethnography was also text if.,only because
ever, that it was only inlthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Romantics
•

of the ABDs relegated to drivi~g cabs when their lines could not see the light
and racists abandoned the ancient Greeks' own version of their cultural origins, of day) o~ because of the careers destroyed when dissertations failed to sprout
denying the contributions of Africans and Semites to ''civilization." Classicalstud- ''publishable'' books (the text/test par excellence?). That Marcus ·and Cushman
ies then invented a new .past for Greece with an Aryan model (Bernal 1987). (1982: 2 7) "for simplicity ... do not consider the very interesting relationship
10. From then on, d'escriptions of savagery would inscribe grammatically the between ·the production of a published ethnographic text ~nd its intermediate
absence in a way now all too familiar (and unquestioned) by anthropologists. The written versions)' is not novel. Tenure co~mittees have been doing the same for
savage is what the West is not: ''no manner of traffic, no knowledge of lett~rs, years, also ''for simplicity,') while we all continued to ignore politely the electoral
no science of numbers' . . . no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no
I
f:
!
politics that condition academic success.
properties ... " (Montaigne 1952: 9'4). This language is quite· different from that f'
i
16. See Clifford,s (1986a:2 l) indulgent neglect of feminism on purely textual
of Polo (1958) or even ;from that of Pliny. But its immediate antecedents are in ! grounds: ''It has not produced either unconventional forms of writing or a devel-
the very first descriptiotls of the Americas: Columbus, for instance, thought the oped reflection on ethnographic textuality as such." Never ·mind that feminism
"Indians'' had "no relig~on by which he probably meant "none of the three
11
-····
I now sustains one of the most potent discourses on the specificity of the historical
religio.ns of Abrah~m.''
11. One cannot suggest that Francis I consciously foresaw a French nation-
I
I
subject and, by extension, o,n the ·problem of "voice." To be sure, some white
middle-class women, especially in the United States, want to make that new-
t
state in the modern sense, but the absolutist order he envisioned revealed itself ~
l•
found ''voice'' universal, and their feminist enterprise threatens to become a new
i

•
 ..
44 MICHEL·ROLPHTROUILLOT

metanarrative, akin to Fanon's Third-World-ism, or Black Power a la 1960. But

'
•
:, Chapter3
it is at the very least awkward for Clifford to dismiss feminist and "non-Western
f
writings'' for having ma~e their impact on issues of content alone. . tt
17. In fact, I doubt that there is a crisis in anthropology as such; rather, there r ENGAGINGHISTORICISM
is a crisis in the world that anthropology assumes. , tI
18. The limited exercises of the postmodernists would take on new dimen- I:
sions if used to look at the enlarged reproduction of anthropology. For example, 1:
I

[ Joan Vincent
were we to rekindle the notion of genre to read ethnography (Marcus 1980), we \
would need to speculate either a metatexc (t,he retro~pective classification of a t1,
critic), or the sanction 'of a receiving audience of nonspecialists, or a thematic ~t'
and ideological framework in the form of an archi-textual field (Genette, Jauss,
and Schaffer, 1986). To speak of any of these in relation to ethnography as genre ! •\

would illustrate enlarged reproduction and reexamine anthropology's own '\' '

>.

grounds. .
f:
19. I thank Eric Wolf for f<?rcingme to make this important distinction.
20. The matter of t~e status of ··halfies" (approached by Abu-Lughod in this
volume) can be further analyzed in these terms. We need not fall into nativism
in order to raise epistemological questions about the effect of historically accu- f'
mulated experience, the ,.historical surplus value" that specific groups of sub- \

,·
jects-as-practitioners bring to a discipline premised on the existence of the savage r••
slot a~d the commer:i,surability of otherness. At the same t~me, for philosophical
and political reasons, I am profoundly opposed to the formulas of the type ''add
native, stir, and proceed as usual,'' so successful in electoral politics in and out
of academe. Anthropoldgy needs something more fundamental than reconstitu- ,, .
f
tive surgery, and halfies, women, people of color , etc., deserve something better I
than a new slot. r THE
cutting edge of anthropology in the 1980s lay with criticism:
21. The symbolic reappropriation that Christianity imposed on Judaism, or f historical, on the one hand, and textual, on the other. Criticism's chief
lf
that liberation theology is imposing on Christianity in some areas of the world; r characteristic, in both its postmodern and postmarxist forms, has been
the reorientation that the ecology movement has injected into notions of ''sur- f:• unsettlement, or ''crisis,'; its goals, displacement and the assertion of new
'~ ' '

vival''; the redirection that feminism has imposed on issues of gender; and Marx's orthodoxy. Yet its perception of temporal and emergent structuring within
f,
perturbation of classic,al political economy from within are all unequal examples . 'I.
anthropology tended to render it at once timeless and anachronistic. It
' I'
of ''reentry'' and recapture. '"
' lacked ,a sense of ''discontinuous histories."
22. The anthropology of agricultural commodities as material and symbolic
This essay is a reading of one moment in the ,19s·os, written in the
boundaries between human groups (along the lines opened by Mintz 1985b);
context of rethinking historicism. 1 I argue that anthropology must be both
the anthropology of the categories and institutions that reflect and organize
power such as "peasants, ''nation," ''science," (Trouillot 1988, 19.89, .1990;
1
'
critical and attuned to the politics of its history. First, I sketch out what
Martin 1987) or the "West' itself (to renew with both Benveniste [ 1969] and
1 is involved in rethinking historicism, applying its commitments ,first to
'

Foucault); the anthropology of the transnational media and other . forms of com- ethnographic texts conceived 'as process and then to today's critical mo-
munication ~haping the ,international organization of symbols all can be fruit- ment in anthropology. In the l 96Qs, anthropology provided a transfer
fully conceptualized within such .a scheme. point among the humanities, a position occupied in the 1980s by literary
criticism. I ask what happened, and suggest why this needs to be anthro-
pology's concern right now. Finally, I attempt to show how the rehistori-
'Cization of an earlier era in anthropology allows us to repossess the past
to talk to the present and future.

;
'
i