Epigraff

“In defense of a particular vision of order, the Savage became evidence for a particular type of utopia.  That the same ethnographic source could be used to make the opposite point did not matter beyond a minimal requirement for verisimilitude…But now, as before, the Savage is only evidence within a debate, the importance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very existence.

Just as utopia itself can be offered as a promise or as a dangerous illusion, the Savage can be noble, wise, barbaric, victim, or aggressor, depending on the debate and the aims of the interlocutors.  The space within the slot is not static, and its changing contents are not pre-determined by its structural position…a critique of anthropology cannot skirt around this slot.  The direction of the discipline now depends upon an explicit attack on that slot itself and the symbolic order upon which it is premised.  As long as the slot remains, the Savage is at best a figure of speech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and the universe, about being and existence - in short, an argument about foundational thought”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan Pg. 22-3.)