ABSTRACT
This new chapter derives from a paper delivered to an Anthropology seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1995, subsequent to which I wrote an article in French for the interdisciplinary journal Genèses (1996a). My brief for both performances was twofold: to provide French scholars and graduate students in Anthropology with an introduction to recent critical trends in Anglophone postcolonial and feminist writings; to outline and illustrate my ethnohistorical method, particularly techniques for against-the-grain critique and exploitation of colonial texts. The chapter tackles the second of these tasks, elaborating and applying general epistemological and methodological concerns, the genealogy of which was sketched in the Prelude. Though the chapter might sit a little awkwardly between two exemplars of earlier, less reflective, more realist modes of historical enunciation and narration, nonetheless its politics and strategies were already implicit in the assumptions and convictions underpinning Chapters Three and Five. In politics, theory and method, this chapter is the pivot on which the whole book turns.
