Academic Paper: “Anthropology Beyond the ‘Savage Slot'”

Prompt: Explain what is meant by “the savage slot”. Describe an anthropological project premised on an alternate conception of the object of study.

Length: 8 pages

In Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness” (2003), Trouillot critiques anthropology for neglecting to address the Western “geography of imagination” (8) in which it operates, and argues that only by excavating these discursive roots and attending to how anthropology arose to fill the “Savage slot” can the discipline become a proper “anthropology of the present” (28). This paper seeks to define and explain the “Savage slot,” and describe an anthropological project premised on an alternate conception of the object of study. Firstly, it will define the Savage slot and analyze its thematic correspondence to utopia as part of an underlying structural relation to order. Secondly, this paper will examine how this slot is embedded in anthropology across the past century, comparing the work of Bronislaw Malinowski to that of Tim Ingold. Finally, it will consider alternative anthropological approaches which have the potential to disrupt the Savage slot, examining the propositions of Liana Chua and Nayanika Mathur alongside Trouillot, and anchoring them in the example of John Langston Gwaltney’s Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. Taken together, this paper proposes an approach to the anthropological subject(s) that centers them as specific historical individuals, as voices of indigenous analysis which challenge the symbolic construction of nativeness, and as theorists of their own lived realities. While such a project does not necessarily conceive of the subject of study outside of the Savage slot, I argue that this kind of subject-centered approach moves away from the framing of others as valuable only in their discursive relation to the West, and nevertheless helps expand our horizons of possibility when it comes to envisioning an anthropology beyond the Savage slot.

To begin, the Savage slot is part of a structural relation of the West to the Other (or the Rest). Within this relation, the Other can be characterized in degrees of utopia or savagery, positioned variously as a threat or an ideal, as an argument for or against particular visions of Western order. Therefore, the “Savage slot” is part of a thematic trilogy of Savage-utopia-order which reduces the non-West to devices in a debate, used for the “advancement” of the West. It has endured in ever-updated forms from the Renaissance through the eras of early colonialism, the Enlightenment, chattel slavery, “modern” colonialism (from the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War) (Trouillot 2003:19), twentieth-century liberalism, and now postmodernism at the turn of the twenty-first century. It was in the nineteenth century that Savage and utopia, as the two faces of the Other, were artificially separated by disciplinary specialization, creating the definitive “Savage slot”, and studies of the so-called Savage’s existence became the purview of anthropology (ibid:18). Anthropology was institutionalized within this symbolic order, to study a face of the structural opposition of the West to the Rest. The Savage slot is anthropology’s reason for existence.

To contextualize this, we must, like Trouillot, briefly historicize the West, and by extension the Other. The symbolic construction of the West began in the late 1400s, with the parallel events of Spain’s defeat of Granada and Columbus’ voyage to the Americas. Trouillot contends that the Spanish victory over the Muslim kingdom—and the subsequent expulsion of Jewish people from Spain—established Christian Europe as a conceptual entity, and through the colonial encounter, this entity discovered “its still unpolished alter ego, its elsewhere, its Other” (Trouillot 2003:14). The West was mutually constituted by what it was not, an “‘us and all of them’” dichotomy that attempted to condense the specific, historical differences of other peoples into the category of Other (ibid:27). This dichotomy underpins the entire Western symbolic order, the discursive geography by which the West becomes knowable. And it is through these events that the Savage—and its counterpart, utopia—are created, as the two faces of the Other.

In Trouillot’s words, “the symbolic transformation through which Christendom became the West structures a set of relations that necessitate both utopia and the Savage” (2003:14), or the “ideal state” and the “state of nature.” These are arranged in a structural relation, in which utopia is the condition of existence of the Savage, and Savage either proves or disproves the existence of utopia. But utopia itself only matters in its relation to order, which is its own condition for existence; Trouillot contends that utopia exists only as a counter-project, a projection of the West which is used to prove or disprove particular visions of universal order (ibid:20). In the imperial expansion of the West, “order” provided the grounds for the West’s “universal legitimacy of power”, the justification for the conquest and assimilation of those classified as Other (ibid:22).

Therefore, the Savage’s reason for being is to serve as evidence for a particular type of utopia, to defend a particular vision of order. To further quote Trouillot, “The Savage is only evidence within a debate, the importance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very existence” (2003:22-23). The importance of the Savage lies in what it signifies for the West’s place in the world against the Rest, Here against Elsewhere, culture against nature, history against story, the Observer against the Other (ibid:25). As such, in the pursuit of Western universalisms (of power, of truth), the Savage and utopia were discursive means to an end, invented to legitimize the order by which the West legitimized itself.

Furthermore, tracing anthropology through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, we can observe how it has largely continued to operate within this discursive field, reproducing the Savage-utopia relation as the signifier of order (Truillot 2003:22). The specific manifestations of this structure vary, with the Savage positioned positively or negatively with or against utopia (for example, as “barbaric” or as “noble” savages), and utopia itself positioned positively or negatively as an argument for or against order, but the underlying structural pattern has persisted (ibid:17). This can be briefly outlined in a comparison of Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1922 ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, to Tim Ingold’s 2018 book, Anthropology: Why It Matters.

Firstly, we can turn to Malinowski’s (1922) foundational ethnography on the Trobrianders of New Guinea. Even as his work strives to demonstrate how the Trobrianders have their own complex social system and modes of organization, explicitly opposing assumptions of “the native as a distorted, childish caricature of a human being” (Malinowski 1922:8), his work still operates within the Savage slot; it is presented as a window into the lives of the Other, to be gazed through by Europeans. This can be seen in an appeal to imagination in his first chapter: “Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch of dinghy which brought you sails out of sight” (ibid:3). The you in this rhetorical image, the imagination to which he appeals, is a distinct European audience—the “we” of the West gazing at the “them” of the Rest. His observation of the Trobrinaders still serves the utopian imagination of the Western gaze, holding the Trobrianders as rational but still apart, still defined as Savage in their relation to the West. The particular content of the Savage slot has shifted, but the slot has remained intact.

In comparison, jumping forward ninety-six years, we can see that the slot still haunts contemporary anthropology. In the first chapter of Anthropology: Why It Matters, Tim Ingold (2018) views anthropology’s relation to subject as one in which they “learn from those who, in a world fixated on the advance of knowledge, might otherwise be dismissed as uneducated, illiterate or even ignorant” (12). He continues the tone set forth by the likes of Malinowski, asserting the subject’s worth against notions of them as inferior, but still within the discursive slot which takes them as Other in the first place; this time, the content of the slot is the “wise” Savage from which to learn. Ingold’s approach, stating that “[w]e have so much to learn, if only we allow ourselves to be educated by others with experience to share” (ibid), frames the hypothetical subject as Savage in a positive correlation to utopia, which here is positioned as an ideal for Western order. This exemplifies the notion that “[t]he space within the slot is not static, and its changing contents are not pre-determined by its structural position” (Trouillot 2003:23).

Malinowski and Ingold are only two examples of many who demonstrate the persistence of the Savage-utopia-order trilogy. The subject is always assessed in relationship to the anthropologist and their audience, remaining a “Them” which derives its value from how it speaks to an “Us” (and which speaks to “Us” by exhibiting a particular kind of savagery in relation to utopia, to signify the mediation of Western order). Chua and Mathur express this point well in their chapter, “Who are ‘we’?” (2018), stating that “‘[t]heir’ social and cultural lives were noteworthy not merely for what they were, but for the way they differed from and (potentially) illuminated ‘our’ own” (6).

Finally, with the structural nature of the Savage slot now established, this paper seeks to describe an anthropological project premised on an alternate conception of the object of study, focusing on John Langston Gwaltney’s book, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (1980). Situating Gwaltney’s approach within suggestions by Trouillot as well as Chua and Mathur, I argue that positioning the subject(s) in their first-person specificity, reconceiving of nativeness as the grounds for indigenous analyses, and centering the subjects’ own analyses to dislodge anthropological authority presents a model for disrupting the Savage slot.

To start, one of the first moves Trouillot proposes is to approach subjects as the products of specific histories, in specific otherness. Grounding this specificity in history can side-step the Savage slot “because history itself always involves irreducible objects” (Trouillot 2003:27) which cannot be subsumed by universalisms. In presenting the historical subject, he continues on to say that “there may be something irreducible in the first person singular” to which even quotations, let alone external narrations, may fail to do justice (ibid). Therefore, restoring the historical, specific otherness of the subjects of study is paramount for disrupting the metanarratives inherent in the Savage slot, and grounding a project in first-person perspectives furthers this end. This can be seen in Drylongso, where Gwaltney explicitly sets out to be “an acceptable vehicle of the transmission of [his subjects’] views” (Gwaltney 1980:xxii). His use of ‘vehicle’ here is significant, and frames his entire approach: his position in the text is more of an editor than the author, referring instead to his subjects as the authors (ibid:xxix), and transcribing their first-person analyses of their own lives in the place of his own analysis. Aside from his preface and introduction, as well as brief descriptions of his interviewees, this ethnography is not told in the ethnographer’s voice at all. He restores the “first person singular that has been overwhelmed by the voice of objectivity or by that of the narrator”, placing the people at the core of their own stories as specific and irreducible historical subjects (Trouillot 2003:27-28).

In extension of this, Trouillot calls for ethnographies which “offer new points of reentry” to otherness by interrogating the epistemological grounds on which nativeness is premised (2003:28). This can be seen in Gwaltney’s intervention in native discourse, reframing nativeness to discuss the specific, unique potential of subjugated populations to generate and share their own analyses of their experience (Gwaltney 1980:xxx). This is what he calls native anthropology, an indigenous analysis which centers the “perspectives, philosophies and system of logic generated by populations which are usually expected to produce only unrefined data for the omniscient, powerful stranger to interpret” (ibid). For Gwaltney, ‘nativeness’ is not Otherness marked by its deviation from the Western norm; rather, he means nativeness as the specificity of otherness— that “there is not one of us who is not a native somewhere” (ibid:xxx)—in line with Trouillot’s view that “there is no Other, but multitudes of others who are all others for different reasons, in spite of totalizing narratives” (Trouillot 2003:27).

In continuation, Trouillot’s propositions align with Chua and Mathur’s challenge to the anthropological “we”. In “Who are ‘we’?” (2018), they advocate for a reformulation of binary analytical frameworks, and hold that the anthropological “we” is premised upon global inequality in which the Other—“Them”—do not have sufficient resources “to speak back or unsettle this ‘we’” (Chua et al. 2008:13-14). I argue that Gwaltney attempts this, destabilizing the boundaries between anthropologist and subject by centering the subject not just as the source of information, but also the source of its analysis. He argues that his subjects are theorists in their own right, foregrounding their analytical agency (Gwaltney 1980:xxix). Moreover, by presenting Drylongso in the voices of his interviewees, the “we” of this ethnography sits definitively outside the hierarchical “we” of anthropology. In removing the authoritative voice of the narrator and demonstrating the rich analyses of working-class Black people outside the walls of academia, he challenges traditional anthropology’s monopoly on studying “culture”, defying not just the Savage slot and the position of the anthropologist overseeing it, but the binary framework underpinning it, as well.

Therefore, when it comes to considering alternative conceptions of the subject of study, I propose that Gwaltney’s book, Drylongso, serves as a useful model for disrupting the Savage slot. This is not to say that his approach is perfect—Trouillot himself would likely critique his use of the culture-concept in the notion of a “core Black culture” (Trouillot 2003:121; Gwaltney 1980:xxv). But I argue that his method effectively demonstrates many of the propositions outlined by Trouillot, as well as by Chua and Mathur, demonstrating the disruptive potential of anthropology for challenging the discursive field within which it operates. Furthermore, Gwaltney’s approach was shaped by his experience as a Black American man, and I argue that African-American Anthropology more broadly holds significant potential for disrupting the West’s geography of imagination (Trouillot 2003:8).

In summary, this paper has defined and historicized the Savage slot as part of the thematic Savage-utopia-order trilogy that arose with the invention of the West, demonstrating that the concept of the Savage is a device of the Western gaze, through which it seeks utopia as an argument for universal order; moreover, it has outlined how anthropology arose to fill the Savage slot of this symbolic terrain, drawing upon examples from Malinowski and Ingold to demonstrate the structural persistence of the Savage-utopia correspondence in anthropology; finally, it has described an anthropological project premised on an alternate conception of the subject, anchoring the propositions of Trouillot and Chua and Mathur in the example of Gwaltney’s Drylongso. I argue that an approach to the subject which is centered on their historical specificity in the first-person, which reconceives of nativeness as a specificity of otherness containing critical indigenous analyses, and which focuses on the subjects’ own analyses of their lived realities presents a strong model for disrupting the Savage slot.

References

Chua, Liana, and Nayanika Mathur. “Who Are ‘We’?” Who Are ‘We’?: Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology, 1st ed., vol. 34, Berghahn Books, New York, 2018. Methodology & History in Anthropology.

Gwaltney, John Langston. Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. New Press, 1980.

Ingold, Tim. “On Taking Others Seriously.” Anthropology: Why It Matters, Polity Press, Oxford, 2018.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. “Introduction: The Subject, Method, and Scope of This Inquiry.” Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, G. Routledge, London, 1922, pp. 1–20.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, 2003.