Description
Book SynopsisSuitable for anthropologists and historians, but also for scholars in colonial, postcolonial, and globalization studies, this book gathers essays that seek to challenge the limits of discrete disciplinary epistemologies and conventions, gesturing instead toward a transdisciplinary understanding of the emergent relations between archive and field.
Trade Review“There is a great deal of talk in academia about the promise of interdisciplinary work, but the dialogue between anthropology and history is one of the few cases that already exhibits a substantial payoff. This volume corroborates that dialogue as vital, fruitful, and very much a site of innovation.
From the Margins, thankfully, does not represent yet another ‘normal’ discipline.”—Dan Segal, Pitzer College
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From the Margins exemplifies the best of current thinking in anthropology. It cuts through a haze of recent theoretical developments in the discipline and opens the way for new syntheses. With this exemplary piece of intellectual history, Brian Axel and the authors he has assembled also provide the conditions for a renewal in the dialogue between anthropology and other discursive fields."—Achille Mbembe, author of
On the PostcolonyTable of ContentsPreface vii
Introduction: Historical Anthropology and Its Vicissitudes / Brian Keith Axel 1
Part 1 Ethnography and the Archive
Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History / Nicholas B. Dirks 47
Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power / Talal Asad 66
Part 2 Colonial Anxieties
New Christians and New world Fears in Seventeenth-Century Peru / Irene Silverblatt 95
The Kabyle Myth: Colonization and the Production of Ethnicity / Paul A. Silverstein 122
Developing Historical Negatives: Race and the (Modernist) Visions of a Colonial State / Ann Laura Stoler 156
Part 3 Marginal Contexts
Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context / Michel-Rolph Trouillot 189
Race, Gender, and Historical Narrative in the Reconstruction of a Nation: Remembering and Forgetting the American Civil War / Bernard S. Cohn and Teri Silvio 211
Part 4 Archaeologies of the Fantastic
Fantastic Community / Brian Keith Axel 233
Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony / John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff 267
Contributors 303
Index 305
