Anthropology

In this essay, I will argue that one of the insights we can glean about ontology from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean has to do with what its foundational histories can tell us about the relationships between time, temporality and sovereignty. Drawing from an ethnographically derived creative project I am currently developing in collaboration with musician Junior 'Gabu' Wedderburn and psychologist Deanne Bell, I will show that recurring moments of exceptional violence, themselves emerging from ongoing, everyday patterns of structural and symbolic violence, lead to an experience of time neither as linear nor cyclical, but as simultaneous, where the future, past, and present are mutually constitutive and have the potential to be coincidentally influential. This ontological alterity does not rely on a condition of being prior, outside or marginal, but instead is fully embedded within the violences of modernity. As a result, exploring the relationships among labor, race, politics and what it means to be human from the space of the Afro-Caribbean allows a critical reorientation of modern ideologies of tem-porality that are inexorably linked to linear teleologies of progress, development, and improvement, and which therefore require the erasure of the forms of racial prior-ness that have been central to the making of the Caribbean as a material and ideological space.

Recently, there has been an upsurge in the critical attention directed toward the area studies research paradigms that were institutionalized after World War II. This upsurge comes at a time when anthropologists are also developing increasingly sophisticated accounts of the intersections of global and local processes. Yet there has been less engaged consideration of the agendas propelling global studies over area studies curricula. In this essay, we argue that an analysis of the Caribbean and Caribbeanist anthropology allows us to trace the global in the local, thus illustrating the benefits of local area analyses for understanding global dynamics. We draw on theoretical assertions regarding global-local interactions in order to assess the relation of anthropology to Caribbean studies and to explore the implications of analytical trajectories and theoretical developments within Caribbeanist anthropology for social and cultural processes on a global level.

Over the past 20 years, there has been considerable anthropological investigation into the processes that many have come to label globalization. Although attempts within the social sciences have considered globalization processes in relation to articulations among ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, processes of racialization have only recently been taken up as central issues. In this article, we observe several new strategies of governance that emerged in the late twentieth century and onward and their implications for approaches to and understandings of race in the twenty-first century. These strategies have created new institutional spheres through which processes of racialization have proliferated, while still recalling earlier organizations of social division and classifications of human value. We reflect on significant spatial and temporal moments in an attempt to reanimate the way that economic and political processes not only have been managed through ideas about race but also...

If the Caribbean was (and remains) central to modern processes of extraction, labor organization, and racial hierarchy, and if it has also been a space of conceptual mining, then it is worth asking about the status of the Caribbean (in anthropology) today. As anthropologists continue to reorient the field away from "coloniality" (Wynter 2003) and toward something like "radical humanism" (Jobson 2020), what might research in the Caribbean teach us? In this essay, I will focus on recent work on sovereignty emerging from ethnographic research in the region in order to argue that focusing on the ephemeral, the performative, and the affective charts sovereignty as something that is constantly in process, something that emerges through dialogue and practice. In doing so, contemporary ethnographies raise questions about the afterlives, and new lives, of imperialism and slavery, and about the potential for reparation and repair. [sovereignty, affect, afterlives of imperialism, coloniality, repair] R e s u m e n Si el Caribe fue (y sigue siendo) central en los procesos modernos de extracción, organización laboral y jerarquía racial, y si también ha sido un espacio de búsqueda conceptual, entonces vale la pena preguntarse sobre la situación del Caribe (en la antropología) hoy. A medida que los antropólogos continúan reorientando el campo lejos de la "colonialidad" (Wynter 2003) y hacia algo como el "humanismo radical" (Jobson 2020), ¿qué nos puede enseñar la investigación en el Caribe? En este ensayo, me enfoco en trabajos recientes sobre soberanía que emergen de la investigación etnográfica en la región, para argumentar que centrarse en lo efímero, lo performativo y lo afectivo traza la soberanía como algo en constante desarrollo, algo que emerge a través del diálogo y la práctica. Al hacerlo, las etnografías contemporáneas plantean preguntas sobre las vidas posteriores y las nuevas vidas, del imperialismo y la esclavitud, y sobre el potencial de reparación.

As a discipline, anthropology has long been subject to the scrutiny of critical race theorists and to questions of ethical practice with regard to ethnicity and representation. This dialogue features critical Black visual anthropologists discussing their approach to the discipline, and crucially asks, "What are the key lessons from 2020 in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests?" Each participant responds to photographs and film clips, offering provocations that challenge how we think about the discipline today. The dialogue is edited from a discussion that took place for the Royal Anthropology Institute Film Festival in 2021.