Read: Trouillot, Global Transformations

1. What is the "Savage slot"? How has its creation shaped anthropology? Why doesn't postmodernism address the Savage slot? What does Trouillot propose instead?

2. How has anthropology, according to Trouillot, been implicated in North Atlantic universals and the silencing and documentation of the past? With what implications for understanding globalization and modernity?

3. How is the world economy spatialized?

4. How has the praise of difference or the "eulogy of alterity" created the Savage slot?

5. Trouillot writes, "globalization thus authenticates a particular approach to the anthropology of the state, one that allows for a dual emphasis on theory and ethnography" (80). What is the approach? What are "state effects" and how should they be studied?

6. Why has the popularity of the concept of culture created a paradox in which the word is "lost to anthropology for the foreseeable future" (115)?

7. What is Trouillot's critique of Geertz's discussion of the Balinese cockfight? What implications does it have for how one should do ethnography?

Question for Response Paper #9: The Savage Slot and Anthropological Moral Optimism
Trouillot's work is a critique of the empiricism and essentialism implicating anthropology in a particular geography of imagination that constructed the Savage slot and which worked in concert with a geography of management to fuel North Atlantic world power. Yet it is also a work that calls for a recouping of the moral optimism that Trouillot claims lies at the heart of the discipline and is hence the source of the field's greatest appeal. In this response paper, provide an overview of Trouillot's critique of anthropology and his vision of what anthropology needs to be through concrete discussion of two examples from his book. The first example should illuminate some aspect of the problems of the Savage slot. The second example should illustrate the kind of ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical analysis that Trouillot proposes. (Note: this second example can occur as a negative case, one that Trouillot analyzes as flawed in order to show what approach might have been better, as in his discussion of Geertz's account of the Balinese cockfight. In this case, then perhaps the same example can illustrate both the problems of the Savage slot and Trouillot's vision for a better anthropology.) Be sure that you use this discussion to develop your own assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, or significance of Trouillot's analysis.

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