Ethnography and the politics of silence

Abstract

This article traces a few elements of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s critique of anthropology, which was, I argue, part of his broader anthropology of the West. The article first considers Trouillot’s analysis of the conditions of possibility for anthropology’s emergence as a field formation, including the asymmetries and silences produced by academic disciplines like anthropology and history. It then attends to Trouillot’s attempts to remake and redeem anthropology from within, focusing in particular on two approaches: distinguishing between one’s object of study and one’s object of observation, and taking seriously the epistemological status of what he called the native voice. Finally, the article fleshes out these two approaches through a consideration of my own work on Islam and secularism in France, discussing persisting ethical, political, and epistemological quandaries that may—despite ethnographers’ best intentions—be constitutive to anthropology’s status as what Trouillot termed the Savage slot.