Savaging civilization: Michel-Rolph Trouillot and the anthropology of the West

Abstract

Given the risk of a diminishing interpretation of the accomplishment and ambition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, his scholarly project can be profitably framed as a subversively ironic “Anthropology of the West.” Formal affiliation with Caribbean studies aside, Trouillot increasingly directed his versatile and formidable intellectual talents toward challenging the universal conceits of the “North Atlantic.” Especially in the publications that appeared in the wake of the Cold War (namely, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, and Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World), he undertook a knowing interrogation of the narratives, concepts, and knowledge-making procedures that have legitimated the worldly power of this geopolitical province. A potently witty and learned critic of the tales that the West has told the world (and itself) about itself, Trouillot undertook the near “unthinkable”: conceiving of North Atlantic centers of “civilization” as fields—however powerful—inhabited by “natives” of a kind, he intellectually savaged Western “civilization.”