Global Transformations

Through an examination of such disciplinary keywords, and their silences, as the West, modernity, globalization, the state, culture, and the field, this book aims to explore the future of anthropology in the Twenty-first-century, by examining its past, its origins, and its conditions of possibility alongside the history of the North Atlantic world and the production of the West. In this significant book, Trouillot challenges contemporary anthropologists to question dominant narratives of globalization and to radically rethink the utility of the concept of culture, the emphasis upon fieldwork as the central methodology of the discipline, and the relationship between anthropologists and the people whom they study.

'Michel-Rolph Trouillot gives us a splendid statement of new possibilities for anthropology. He leads anthropologists away from the 'savage slot' with which the discipline perforce began and toward a rejuvenated moral optimism that will critically engage with the West and the emerging global order. Trouillot's brilliance takes us beyond both a superficial denunciation of Western domination and a knee-jerk political correctness.' - Richard G. Fox, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

'As in much of his previous writing, Trouillot enlightens us here by broadening the context for understanding large-scale processes, such as globalization and the functioning of the world system. By insisting that we test each word in our code - including such terms as 'the West' - against those realities which it may obscure or conceal, he helps to bring the darkened half of the world into brighter light. In this broadening of the field of play, the author makes an eloquent plea for more history - one might even say for more serious history. But his book is also a plea for more serious fieldwork, based on a methodology that is distinctively (though not uniquely) anthropological. In its own way, then, this book is a gauntlet thrown down to challenge familiar ways of knowing. Its innovativeness rests partly upon urging us to do what we had been doing before - but to do it more thoroughly, more honestly. Trouillot's gift for sketching an emergent synthesis, which draws repeatedly on the asking of harder questions, comes through. Above all, he makes us think.' - Sidney W. Mintz

MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of numerous books, including Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon 1997), Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, and Peasants and Capital : Dominion in the World Economy (Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture).