Trouillot and the 'Savage Slot': A Short Review (2015)

Trouillot (1991) identifies a crisis of epistemology and disciplinary legitimation in anthropology as a social science and academic discipline.  Such a crisis is by no means limited to anthropology, though in many ways it is most acutely located and pronounced in the epistemological domain assumed by its objects and methods of inquiry, or rather its putative ‘object’ of inquiry—namely, the savage ‘Other.’  This crisis of course is nothing other than the crisis of the postmodern condition, a condition of knowledge ruptures and “an ongoing collapse of metanarratives in a world where reason and reality have become fundamentally destabilized” (20).  Trouillot’s purpose here is to historicize anthropology and specifically with respect to the causes and conditions of its formation as an academic discipline.

According to Trouillot’s analysis, anthropology arose in response to ongoing colonization projects which began in force during the early modern period and continued into the 19th century and of course, in some corners of the world, on into the present day.  Anthropology developed its disciplinary scope and apparatus by exploring and cataloging the conditions of the ‘savage’ or ‘native’ other, the non-Western ‘other’ who became an object equally of fascination and revulsion according to various colonialist agendas.  This is Trouillot’s account—although of course it is not entirely accurate and does shortchange much of the good that anthropologists have done in the interest of preserving the cultures and languages and lifeways of the rapidly disappearing natives whether due to colonialist expansion projects or simply cultural disintegration or destabilization from, as it were, the ‘inside.’  Setting such concerns aside, Trouillot is quite reasonable to suggest that within the discipline of anthropology, there is great need to reexamine epistemological premises and methodological assumptions about the nature of the science and the ‘objects’ of study (and what points of significance and grounds for legitimation exist for carrying forward a research program, and one which would take anthropology into more productive purpose and beyond the ‘savage slot’).

Trouillot suggests a redirection of disciplinary focus both in terms of epistemology and in terms of semiology (that is to say, in knowledge systems and symbolic structures).  The postmodern crisis is in many ways at its core a crisis of the very nature of knowledge and the very nature of what it means to be human, and how the human has been conceived and constructed and deployed in various rhetorical contexts to myriad political purposes over the centuries—and indeed, from the very beginnings of all of human evolution.  Anthropologists will need to take this situation much more seriously and will need to reevaluate their position vis-à-vis systems of knowledge production and political networks of power, however situated in contemporary terms or constructed from an historical perspective.

Trouillot calls for a critical re-envisioning of the scientific, sociopolitical, and historical project that anthropology by definition and in every term of practice is (as “the most humanistic of sciences and most scientific of the humanities,” a characterization hopefully not altogether out of fashion to our postmodern ears).  This, in short, is what Trouillot means by conducting a critical reassessment, “an archaeology of the discipline” (17).  To this purpose, Trouillot implores anthropologists “to find better anchor for an anthropology of the present, an anthropology of the changing world and its irreducible histories” (40).

Much indeed has changed in the discipline and in the world since 1991.  The critique that Trouillot advanced, and a more carefully examined epistemological basis for anthropological work, is if anything more necessary now than ever.  Trouillot at least points the direction to possibly productive lines of inquiry towards this effort.

The crisis of legitimation remains.  What anthropology can hope to bring to the crisis will depend in large measure on how clearly it is able to understand its own position within that crisis, and how well it can articulate a reasonable solution, however limited by its approach and circumscribed by conditions of the times.  Anthropology should be well poised to address matters of history and matters of epistemology.  In a real and vital sense, these are the very bedrock issues in any human social science.

References

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox. School of American Research Press.