Pieces for Anthrohistory: A Puzzle to Be Assembled Together

IN HOMAGE TO MARX'S AND BENJAMIN'S THESES ELEVEN

There are many people adept in those diverse disciplines, but few capable of imagination — fewer still capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan. The plan is so vast that the contribution of each writer is infinitesimal.

— Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

1

The chief defect of all hitherto existing academic disciplines is that they conceptualize discipline as their mode of being, seldom as an object for being. Taking into account perspectives from borders and margins, since the 1980s several scholarly fields have developed critical evaluations of the history, premises, and politics of Western knowledge — its teleological narratives, disciplinary classifications, and complicity with eurocentrism, racism, sexism, elitism, and other modalities of dominative knowledge. As the offspring of these fields, anthrohistory shares with them genealogies, concerns, and products. As an academic project devoted to producing knowledge betwixt and between disciplines, anthrohistory seeks to educate scholars in anthropology and history by transgressing their limits and tending to their impact. Insofar as it is capable of subordinating imagination to a rigorous and systematic plan, it becomes a questioning discipline that undisciplines the disciplines and educates the educator. Through this critical practice, discipline is subordinated to its object.

2

Growing out of disciplines implicated in Western understandings of the world and dominion over it, anthrohistory, like kindred critical ventures, occupies an open-ended space oriented toward making sense of the world and of sense making. In its openness to possibilities, it interprets being, what was and what is, as forms of becoming. Through its recognition that what can be inhabits what is, it pursues knowledge for a world that can become home to multiple worlds.

3

Of this world but not at home in it, anthrohistory resists being disciplined in existing institutions or contained by definitions. As long as this planet is not home for all, this project must roam as an exile, witnessing what has been made of it and reflecting on the work to make it habitable. For to the extent that winning entails domination, no one — not even plants — can be safe from the enemy, for who would inherit the earth's energy and care for our collective legacy? Brushing history against the brain, its task is to examine what has been recorded and uncover what has been silenced, bringing to light possible histories.

4

As an ensemble of practices for examining human practices through ever changing prisms, anthrohistory acquires form as a never-ending puzzle whose pieces are crafted and pieced together by these practices. Assembled as a labyrinth whose exits become entrances into an expanding labyrinth, its arrivals are points of departure and its answers pose new questions.

5

"If a place on the map is also a place in history," any representation simultaneously encloses time and space. There is no space outside time or time without space; together they form the medium through which our world is constituted and brought into awareness. At a specific scale, a map represents a place in space at a moment in time, whether a grain of sand or a whole country. Just as in an account of the cosmos "the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens" could be a single point, in a chronicle of the battle of Borodino Napoleon's head cold and the action of a "most humble soldier" could mark two significant moments. Macrohistory and microhistory are two scales of the same history. Anthrohistory seeks to produce representations of the world as fragments of an unfolding totality, itself a fragment of other totalities. Any totality is partial.

6

Points on maps make a point. Like lines in a play, they become meaningful by being joined to each other by the authors and publics who join them. These lines form not just texts about the world, but the texture of the world. They represent an external reality from within it. Their truth is measured by their exactitude as models of the world they image, but it is realized by the world they help create. The point of a map defines its points. Our journey is guided by a compass; our destination defines our destiny.

7

Imagine a discussion about truth in a Jorge Luis Borges story written by Italo Calvino and illustrated by M. C. Escher. In a magnificent square called "Paris 1945–2000," Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Derrida argue in French about how best to explain human history through forms of reasoning associated with "dialectical materialism," "structuralism," and "poststructuralism." Through a crack in its foundation, a path suddenly opens into a larger square called "Europe," where Kant, Hegel, and Marx animatedly discuss the nature of universal history in German while Heidegger listens. Unbeknownst to them, "Europe," their assumed center of world history, is located atop a grain of sand, minutely drawn by William Blake's mind. Trapped in a convent built upon Aztec ruins located inside this granule, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz reflects on faith through Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist theologies. From one of the convent's secret doors, a labyrinthine path one hundred years long leads us to an elongated islet, "Saint Domingue, 1791–1820," where the rebel Boukman, a slave who had learned from his African ancestors the power of spirits and plants, places his...