Anthropology is concerned with studying human beings, both in the past and present. From another perspective, Anthropology is the study of the “Other” or of populations whose culture is different from one’s own. The questioning of these differences in prior centuries led to theories of inherent biological distinctions between Westerners and non-Westerners as well as divisions in evolutionary characteristics of their cultures. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in a chapter of his book entitled “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness”, argues that Anthropology as an academic discipline acquired these theoretical outlooks before its emergence as an actual discipline. As a result, “Anthropology fills a pre-established compartment within a wider symbolic field, the ‘Savage’ slot” (Trouillot 2003:9). By utilizing the resource of Trouillot as well as Moberg, Perry, and Moore, I will illustrate that the Savage Slot and the “Savage” or “Other” are theoretical concepts fashioned with the creation of the West and consequently the field of Anthropology.
The study of the (non-Western) “Other”, defined by Trouillot as the Savage Slot, commenced before Anthropology became a discipline. Thus, Anthropology did not fashion the concept of the “Savage” or “Other” (Trouillot 2003:28). Instead, it is initially associated with the accounts of travelers and explorers and literature of the sixteenth century and seventeenth centuries. In 1516, Thomas More composed a fictional account of the island Utopia, which became “the prototypical nowhere of the European imagination” (Trouillot 2003:14). The appeal of the “Elsewhere” to Europeans was fulfilled by travel accounts that portrayed the savage, such as those of Jean-Baptiste Du Tertr...
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...Other, here and elsewhere, is indeed a product-symbolic and material-of the same process that created the West” (Trouillot 2003:28).
References Cited
Connell, Raewyn
1995 Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Moeberg, Mark
2013 The Prehistory of Anthropology. In Engaging Anthropological Theory: A Social and
Political History. Oxon: Routledge
Moore, Jerry D.
2009 Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. 3rd edition. United Kingdom: AltaMira Press.
Perry, Richard J.
2003 Five Key Concepts in Anthropological Thinking. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph
2003 Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness. In Global
Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. 1st edition. Pp. 7-28. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
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