Introduction

Positioning theory:
An introduction

Anthropological Theory
2016, Vol. 16(23) 133145
! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1463499616663792
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Nina Glick Schiller

University of Manchester, UK

Abstract
What is theory? Who does theory? And what can theory do? Is theory important as
humans strive to explain, understand, and speak to the nature of their lives? For the relaunch of Anthropological Theory, Julia Eckert, Stephen Reyna, and Nina Glick Schiller, the
new editors, challenged members of the Editorial Board to offer their understanding of
the nature of anthropological theory. In response, 12 contributors discussed the central
theoretical questions and debates that are confronting anthropology, which they collectively understand as a project that explores what it means to be human and whether
the human project can survive. Contributors highlight the importance of positioning
theory in relationship to the historic project of decolonizing anthropology, current
debates about southern theory and the ontological turn, and the need to place
theory in relationship to structures of power. In Positioning Theory: An
Introduction, I note the way each contributor approaches the question of who is
theory for and whose voice it represents, examining theory as both tool and vision
in struggles to understand the world and in transformative struggles for social justice.
Keywords
decolonizing anthropology, positionality, approximate truth, reality, power, southern
theory

What is theory? Who does theory? And what can theory do? Is theory important as
humans strive to explain, understand, and speak to the nature of their lives? As the
new editors of Anthropological Theory, we invited members of our Editorial Board
to speak to their understanding of theory. We (Julia Eckert, Stephen Reyna, and
Nina Glick Schiller) asked them to write short articles that spoke to the decisive
theoretical questions and debates facing a discipline committed to exploring what it
means to be human and whether the human project can survive. The result is
Positioning Theory, a re-launch issue that initiates our call to build theory from
and for everybody.
Corresponding author:
Nina Glick Schiller, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: nina.glickschiller@manchester.ac.uk

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In the project of Anthropological Theory, the concept of everybody represents a

rejection of the idea that one begins with an achieved body of theory and then just
expands it so that new voices become members of the club. Of course to argue this
position is to raise the further question of how can a theory for everybody be built,
and who will be the theorists? The task at hand is to continue the eorts of postcolonial scholarship, to move beyond what Veena Das, an Editorial Board
member, has called the monopoly [on] intellectual framing (quoted in Harrison,
this issue). Such a project can build on Decolonizing Anthropology (1991), the historic intervention of Faye Harrison and her interlocutors. At that time, Harrison
asked: Can a genuine study of humankind arise from dialogues, debates, and
reconciliation amongst various non-Western and Western intellectuals both
those with formal credentials and those with other socially meaningful and appreciated qualications? (quoted in McGranaham and Rizvi, 2016). Harrisons current intervention, Theorizing in Ex-Centric Sites, contemporizes this discussion,
and the other contributors to Positioning Theory join the conversation by putting
aside embedded assumptions about the social binaries of the Euro-American centric project: self/other, the developed world and its others, North and South,
native and foreign, universal and particular.
Contributors strive to forge an anthropological theory that analyzes and transcends categories of dierence by locating domains of commonalty without failing
to theorize dierential and unequal power and the positioning of place, racialization, gender, and class that accompanied the colonial project and that remain
central to colonialities of power (Quijano, 2000; see Julia Eckert, this issue). If
such theorizing is situated within contemporary geographic metaphors, it emerges
a dialogue with southern theory (Connell, 2007) as glocal theory (Fakouhi, this
issue). The term glocalization, coined by Roland Robertson (1995), remains a
useful way to refer to the multiscalar mutual constituting of the local, national,
regional, and global domains of power.
As Harrison (this issue) reminds us, theory is not produced for the sake of
theory and academic celebrity. Her concerns resonate with those of Editorial
Board member Frances Nyamnjoh (2011: 702), who has stressed the importance
of a desire to take the discussion of research beyond the ivory tower to the very
people whose daily predicaments are at the heart of scholarly work (cited in
Harrison, this issue). Or as Ellen Hertz (this issue) asks in her apt prose:
How can anthropologists justify writing incomprehensibly when our mission is to
make the world more comprehensible? How can we promote the social relevance of
what we do when our texts often take the form of coded language, intelligible only to
the initiated? Finally, how can we challenge forms of organized, oppressive authority
while reproducing standard hierarchies such as the imagined topography of knowledge that places theory above applications, description and case studies? . . . As I
read top journals, including this one, I nd it hard to avoid the conclusion that theres
an awful lot of u oating around in the anthropological conversation today,
accompanied by preposterous amounts of posturing. Furthermore, it is impossible

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not to acknowledge the emperors-new-clothes syndrome that so eortlessly fuels this

obscurantism: who wants to admit in public that she just doesnt understand?

Hence, a theory for everybody is also a theory written so that everybody has a
chance of understanding it. Theoretical analyses must enter into realms that are not
metaphysical exotica but emerge from the hurly-burly of life with the goal of
making a dierence in the sense of improving the human condition (Eckert,
Glick Schiller, and Reyna, this issue).
But what is theory anyway? Hertz (this issue) provides a denition:
Theory is careful generalization and parsimonious abstraction, on the basis of observation of, and interaction with, concrete social situations, which are then systematized
through comparison with the generalizations of other social scientists and through a
historicized examination of how our own ideas develop [. . .]. It is through theory that
we can move from singular, commonsensical apprehensions of the social world to
more general, critical understandings.

Several aspects of this denition are taken up by the various contributors, including
the notion that there is a world to be understood and that it is a social world that is
always framed by the human understandings and actions and interactions it
encompasses. Moreover, comparison, generalization, abstraction and the historically specic context of an idea must all be part of the development of theory.
This stance toward theory is, of course, only one of an array of contemporary
responses to the nature of anthropological theory. In the current emerging historical conjuncture anthropologists have answered renewed calls to decolonize their
discipline in several disparate ways. Many current debates about anthropological
theory have been shaped by the variants of post-modernist theory that emerged
and owered in anthropology in the 1980s90s (Cliord and Marcus, 1986;
Rosaldo, 1989). Over the years, invaluable insights into reexivity and multiplicities often were transmogried into neoliberal celebrations of disjuncture and difference. As a result, not only was the global perspective and potency of the
decolonizing project undercut (Allen and Jobson, 2016) but anthropologists were
often convinced of the impossibility of theory (Santos, 2004; see Narotzky, this
issue, for further discussion).
Some anthropologists have responded to the delegitimization of theory with a
reiteration of anthropologys historic penchant for the ethnographic within a xed
and readily visualized locality, privileging what Sherry Ortner (1984: 143) calls the
view from the ground (see also Stewart, 2007). These anthropologists argue that to
analyze and theorize is to impose on someone elses reality. Recently, other anthropologists have taken an ontological turn in theorizing how we are to understand
the question of what constitutes evidence and analysis (Blaser, 2013; Viveiros de
Castro, 2013 [2002]). In this reading of theory, one discards the Euro-American
project not by discarding the construction of the cultural other but by articulating
separate mutually exclusive visions of being.

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Positioning Theory provides an alternative approach ex-centric theory

(Bhabha, 1994: 6; see also Harrison, this issue). Rather than imposing Europes
historic universal categories, rather than giving up on a comprehensive theory, and
rather than positing the incommensurability of dierent ontologies, theory for
everybody addresses the larger questions of force and power including the power
of analysis, which congures human experience. Thus, Positioning Theory also
asks: if the heritage of anthropological theory as primarily a Euro-American project is set aside, what understandings of evidence, analysis, and reality come to the
fore? The theory we seek is formulated with the assumption that underneath contending views there is a shared human capacity to experience, understand, and
communicate with others that has not been articulated by Euro-American universalisms (Eckert, this issue; Glick Schiller and Irving, 2015).

Theory as a tool for making connections/Theory as vision

In developing theory that is useful, and in making use of theory, Ghassan Hage
(this issue) advocates theory as an encounter in which a theory is a set of tools.
Most of the other contributors to this issue agree with Hage that theory should not
be something one exhibits but rather something that one uses. The question,
however, of how the utility of theory should be evaluated is answered somewhat
dierently by each author, but within a common conversation.
Hage believes one can pick one particular tool from the set without being
committed to use the whole set, as long as one understands the ramications of
the particular tool one is using. He oers the standards of the generative conception of theory, in which the utility of the tool is judged by its explanatory yield.
For Hage, because the quest for explanation is shaped by the question at hand, the
student or scholar can happily browse in the commons of diverse theories, taking a
bit of this and a sample of that as long as the resulting mix of tools proves to be
useful for analyzing the problem at hand. The analyst establishes the compatibility
and incompatibility of dierent theories by ascertaining whether the tools work
together to construct and explain, thus accounting heuristically for the theoretical
ramications of the dierent theoretical tools employed.
While most of our contributors require a coherency of theory that extends
beyond Hages pragmatism, all in all, contributors theories endeavor to ascertain
the best possible understanding and approximate representation of reality. This
does not mean, according to Xing Biao (this issue), that theory can be reduced to a
statement, formula, or a model. Rather, theory reveals the underlying connections
among dierent aspects of life.
Julia Eckert (this issue) also is interested in theory as a tool that elucidates
connections. She critiques relationships of unequal power that, by making reference to the culture norms of others, essentialize dierence. Eckert instead identies commonalities which we share that shape our everyday human experience.
Hertz makes a similar argument about the critical stance that emerges when the
analyst makes connections within an analysis of power. She argues that the

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ongoing critique of normalized reality . . . contributes to the struggle for social

justice. For Hertz (this issue), the aim of the tool of theory is prying open possibilities of emancipation for the dominated.
For Biao, the connections made by such a critical stance can best be understood
as a vision conceived consciously from a particular vantage point and with a
purpose. It contains messages and answers to the why questions people ask.
Biao also chooses the term vision to emphasize that theory is future oriented in
that it draws special attention to possible openings where things may fall into crisis,
crash, or transform. . . . [It] explains why things are as they are and at the same time
shows how things could be dierent from what they are.

Theory as a pathway to approximate truth

Validation of theory is a concern of several of the contributors, including Reyna,
Hertz, and Biao. They maintain that there is a real world, a shared something,
which is Reynas term for reality. This stance is contested, intersected by debates
about whether or not anthropology is a science that should have any concern with
evidence of the real, no less the concept of a single reality (Tyler, 1986; Carrithers
et al., 1990; Wade, 2010). The counter argument to theorizing the real maintains
that humans reside in radically dierent worlds [that] are being enacted in front of
our noses (Blaser, 2013: 559), and which are best approached through processes of
worlding (Blaser, 2013: 558).
The contributors to Positioning Theory think dierently. While they dont
believe that reality is simply out there for us to capture through our mere presence
in the eld (Hertz, this issue), the project of examining inter-subjective evidence
cannot be abandoned. Instead, Positioning Theory proposes that we share a
common world, although relating to it through dierent and multiple positionings
that are constituted within dierent structures and representations of power.
In order to build theory that can help us successively approximate an understanding of this common world, Stephen Reyna oers an extended essay on validation. He agrees that humans can never fully grasp the reality of which we are a
part, since we must approach it through our sensations. But he argues that we can
work to understand it better through creating theories about reality and working to
validate them. Reyna approaches anthropological theory as a scientic practice
built on evidence. He is, of course, aware that science is built within the gap
between what exists and what humans perceive and that these perceptions vary
across time and space. Within this framing of anthropological inquiry, Reynas
article discusses the following questions: What is validation? . . . Is getting the facts
important in validation? . . . How do you get the facts? . . . What about objectivity in
a biased world, especially one congured by ongoing dierential power? . . . Why
are intersubjectivity and representativeness important? Finally . . . if you do validate, can you get to the truth of something? (Reyna, this issue).
Working in a domain often imagined by others in the discipline as on the science
side of debates about the truths of anthropology, Jon Marks, a biological

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anthropologist, provides an object lesson on the dialectic between the creation of

analytic categories and the constant need to reect on their construction within
relations of power, changing epistemologies and the struggle for validation. Marks
uses, as an example, the concept of speciation within studies of human evolution,
reminding us that there are other variables at stake (such as national pride, funding, and publicity) when you study who we are and where we came from, as
opposed to what fruit ies are and where they came from (Marks, this issue).
Marks article thus serves as a warning for those who would abandon the
anthropological focus on the human. Marks also elucidates why, as a science,
anthropology rejects the biological mode of classication that, in the name of
being scientic, allocates past and present humans into bounded and dierentiated
categories. In our times, when once again the category of race is increasingly
treated as a scientic fact rather than a form of political dierentiation, Marks
stipulation that human identities (race, ethnic group, linguistic family, nationality,
continent-of-origin) are not biological facts, but anthropological facts co-constituted by elements of ancestry and geography, and also by shared beliefs, political
histories, power and status dierences, and perceptions of meaningful similarity
and dierence are apposite. His summary of human identities is linked to his
critique of the nature of evidence presented in the Human Genome Diversity
Project. Marks positions anthropological theory at the juncture of the human
narrative and the real world in which we all are embedded and which we recongure through our praxis.
Positioning Theory maintains that there is never just simple observation but
always a dialectic of engagement (Hertz, this issue), whether the topic is genetic
or ethnographic analysis. Seeing and hearing is not validating (Reyna, this issue).
Both Biao and Eckert invoke holism to encompass the processes of ethnographic
engagement. According to Biao, a holistic approach to social phenomena can be a
powerful means of theorization if we use it not only as a method of description but
simultaneously as a mode of analysis. This is theory as envisioning, based on
detailed observations about dynamics internal to practices, not an imposed understanding of these dynamics. As such, a vision is very dierent from propaganda or
a moral model that assigns praise and blame (DAndrade, 1995) rather than
causation (Biao, this issue). At the same time, research involves methodological
cosmopolitanism (Reyna, this issue) to obtain and validate evidence. Reyna argues
that the call for validation does not set aside calls for dialogue, multivocality and
political practice, but does insist that we need ways to deploy multiple methodologies to validate propositions.
But how do we validate propositions and get the best possible approximation of
reality when we are all subject to multiple sources of bias, including the regimes of
truth (Foucault, 1980: 131) that constitute the domain of normative knowledge in
any one place and time? How does anthropological theory address the existence of
multivocality, but remain wary of multiple forms of unequal power with vested
interests in maintaining their truth claims? It is one thing to say, as Reyna does,
that while it is not sensible to claim absolute objectivity, it is credible to recognize

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that some knowledge is more objective than some other knowledge. It is another
thing to nd ways to establish approximate truth, as he and the other contributors
acknowledge, in a world of global and national knowledge industries, continuing
imperial penetrations, corporate social media, and nation-state building with its
racializations, ethnicizations and gendered and class distinctions.
Hertz (this issue) enters into this discussion by noting that there is a continuing
contradiction between the process within which humans construct reality and the
processes that constitute the world, and theory sits at the heart of this. Hertz
argues that we need normalization because without some consistency we would
be incapable of perceiving the world at all, much less acting on it. However, any
specic naturalization is not inevitable, nor is it good, for it is through naturalization that dominant classes in society justify and lock in their domination. Hertz
builds on Boltanskis (2011) contribution to the sociology of emancipation in
order to articulate this contradiction within the concept of reality and argue for
the necessity of theory addressing the question of dierential power.
Eckert (this issue), also building on Boltanski (2010), emphasizes the importance
of speaking to situated knowledge as an aspect of relational theory building that
speaks to the analysis of power. She deploys an analysis of situations and their
structured contingency in order to overcome the pitfalls of both methodological
individualism and structural determinism (Boltanski, 2014). If we take Boltanskis
notion of situation seriously, it is about micro-analyses of the contingent encounter
of dierent logics of action in situations structured by historical gurations. Thus,
it opens up the possibility of the micro-analysis of macro-relations and of those
processes that establish and transform historical gurations. It oers conceptual
frameworks [. . .] that could put into play causal relations grasped on dierent
scales at the same time (Boltanski, 2014: 266). That is to say, Eckert articulates
positioned theory in terms of a multiscalar conjunctural analysis (Glick Schiller,
2015) that credits dierent logics and situated knowledge without resorting to
perspectivism or worlding.

The heuristics windows of positioned theory

Several contributors specify that anthropological theory-building for and from
everybody must necessarily be founded on insights generated from within the
respective milieus of the theorists to position themselves within a project of
glocal theory (Harrison, this issue). As Faye Harrison (this issue) notes:
. . . Africa, Latin America, and other settings within the Global South provide useful
heuristic windows on the world. This perspective departs from the purportedly radical
alterity of indigenous peoples and the distinct, incommensurate ontologies that a
recent anthropological trend, namely the ontological turn, addresses.

Instead, Harrison surveys indigenous theory and the South as a locus of theorymaking to provide an overview of what anthropological theory looks like when it

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is formulated in these contexts. At the same time, Harrison recognizes that past and
present erasures of theory-building include North Atlantic metropolitan anthropologys centric and ex-centric sites, particularly the peripheral zones where critical
intellectual trajectories have been sustained (Harrison, this issue; see also
Harrison, 2008, 2012). Building on, but looking further than, southern theory
allows Harrison to highlight a number of theory-making practices, the multivocal
and dialogic character of some of them, and eorts being made to converse across
salient dierences, divides, and disparities of power and knowledge. Indeed, the
aim of these theorizing practices is to eventually dismantle the entrenched disparities of power that have been integral to hierarchies of intellectual labor as they
operate within local, national, and global contexts. This unequal structure of
knowledge production, exchange, and circulation ultimately implicates the growing
structural inequities, dislocations, and dispossessions within global capitalism
(Harrison, this issue).
Harrisons contribution resonates with those of Nasser Fakouhi and Deborah
Thomas, who speak to the challenge of theory for everybody by engaging with, and
reformulating notions of, southern theory (Connell, 2007; Comaro and Comaro,
2011). Writing from within the endangered and endangering world of Iranian social
and historical scholarship, Fakouhi reminds us of the real life urgency of the task of
contesting Euro-American intellectual and political hegemony. Noting the diversity
of southern theory, he assesses the signicance of the dierent time/spaces of the
South, which in eect means that the South does not exist at all as a whole.
Moreover, Fakouhi questions whether a locational label is what is needed to dene
an approach to non-European social thought since the 19th century (Fakouhi, this
issue). Fakouhi describes the historical and contemporary conditions in Iran,
including Islamization and localization, that have mediated against the development of any sense of a critical southern theory yet which could, if reexively
approached, produce a glocal theory that would be integral to struggles for
social and economic justice.
Fakouhis reexive turn, based on his close reading of Iranian historical and
contemporary contestations, produces an anthropological theory positioned
beyond a Euro-American and southern divide. Acknowledging the colonial origins
of what has been considered non-European social thought, he refuses to celebrate
Iranian scholars who romanticize and dehistoricize an Islamic past. He is equally
wary of scholars in the new Iranian diaspora who, replacing the orientialist of
previous generations, display a scientic diaspora syndrome by not only writing
but also thinking through the medium of a European lingua franca, generally
English, and uncritically embracing Euro-American theory (Fakouhi, this issue).
Deborah Thomas provides a further example of what the glocal theorizing
proposed by Fakouhi oers those who struggle to think from the positioning of
alterity, without locating otherness as other-worldly or without agency. She
explores the possibility that alterity would not presuppose a condition of being
prior, outside or marginal, but instead would be fully embedded within modernity
(see also Eckert, this issue). Thomas oers this mediation on alterity and ontology

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by exploring the pressures and inequalities of modern time within the context of
Plantation America with a focus on the role of violence. In a fully developed
ethnographically-illuminated article, she provides a critical understanding of relationships among labor, race, politics as a way of answering the question of what it
means to be human, which motivates her anthropological theorizing.
Speaking specically from the theoretico-ethnographic space of the Caribbean,
Thomas hypothesizes that the violent construction of blackness occupies a foundational priorness to all constructions of the modern. She demonstrates this
through her historical analysis of Jamaica and its contemporary permutations of
concepts of community and sovereignty. Thomas (this issue) concludes that foundational histories can reorient our understanding of the relationships between temporality and sovereignty in ways that challenge both modern universals regarding
time, and the idea that temporal alterities must exist outside modern frames. She
notes that by theorizing from the Caribbean, an area and positioning traditionally
excluded by anthropologists because it wasnt a bounded, culturally-delimited indigenous world, anthropologists can formulate historically situated theory that is
simultaneously an analysis of globally unequal past and present interconnections.
The insights into blackness, temporality, and power that emerge from Thomas
positioned theorizing resonate and complement the critique of concepts of nativism
generated from the North as parsed by Nicholas De Genova. As De Genova
demonstrates, if we approach anthropological theory-making as a tool for successively approximating an understanding of reality, and if this approximation necessitates reexively analyzing the positioning of humans as theory-makers, then it is
important to address how those in the North, that is, those positioned within the
institutional structures and power of Euro-American whiteness, move beyond these
constraints.
De Genova calls on all of us to not only confront the politics embedded in the
anthropological concept of culture, with its imperial lineage of global capitalist
encompassment, but also to articulate a post-nationalist politics. To move beyond
the politics of culture is to set aside the subjectivity that creates othering, whether it is
embedded in Marshall Sahlins culturalist rubric, dierent cultures, dierent rationalities (1995: 13, 14), or it is reborn in the guise of (pseudo-) ontological notions
of irreducible and essentially incommensurable dierence.
De Genova builds on Ralph Trouillots exposition of the concept of the native,
tracing conceptual links between the anthropological penchant for the native point
of view and its entanglement with the symbolic world upon which nativeness
is premised, [a world that] is a fundamental product symbolic and material of
the same process that created the West (Trouillott, 1991: 40). He sets as an urgent
task for anthropological theory the need to address the increasing prominence
of diverse manifestations of nativist political impulses, and the deep anities
and possible complicities between such nativism and the anthropology of
migration, rooted as it is in anthropologys disciplinary fetish regarding the
natives point of view (for a related critique see Glick Schiller, 2013; Wimmer
and Glick Schiller, 2002).

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Theory within historical conjunctures: Theorizing

and reflecting time-space-power
Various contributors to Positioning Theory situate their understanding of the constraints
and challenges of theory building within an awareness of not only dierential power but
also political contestation. Jose Luis Escalona Victorias essay (this issue) speaks directly
to anthropologys changing reframing of the domain of the political and to the anthropology of politics. He begins with the following denitions, distinguishing:
. . . power as widespread dierential capacities to produce society by relations of domination, exploitation or subordination, and politics as forms of the actuation of power
relations in particular space and time (and not only referring to the state). (emphasis
in the original)

Although in his essay Escalona Victoria does not himself use the concept of changing historical conjunctures (Clarke, 2014; Glick Schiller, 2015, 2016), his analysis
actuates this concept by highlighting the need to situate changing anthropological
theories of power within the ongoing processual restructuring of uneven, globally
interrelated social relationships.
By documenting the changing stance of anthropology towards the study of politics,
power, and the state over the decades, Escalona Victoria (this issue) is able to ask
questions that those concerned with anthropological theory must address, including
whether their interventions produce a dierent understanding of politics and power.
For example, do the non-state anarchist-oriented views of moral economy reveal
something about how states are and are not actually functioning? Does this position
escape from the state-centric perspective? Or are postcolonial epistemology, subaltern
studies, the ontological turn, and the cultural anthropology of everyday power just
dierent expressions of the dominant world order based on the opposition between
rational nation-states and the others that is, between nation-states and societies
considered not yet submitted to those states, or not yet incorporated into them? Are
these perspectives best understood as outcomes of the ambivalence of modernity
(Wade, 1999), which needs the image of contrasting primitive worlds as a key part
of its self-representation as modern?

From theories of cultural difference to theories

that make a difference
In her contribution, Narotzky continues the discussion of the necessity of
anthropological theory to address congurations of power by examining how the
forceful expansion and institutionalization of particular knowledge constructs are
linked to the power that disciplines and constrains our possibilities for decent lives.
She argues that:
The more conscious we are of the power eects of models [. . .] and the more we are
able to consider them as constructed objects that can be analyzed, the more we can
treat them as ideology and begin to challenge them. The less conscious we are of the
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power eects, the more the models have become part of our habitus and we lack
distance to challenge them as mere intellectual objects.

In her search for theories of transformation Narotzky makes several points that
resonate with the call to decolonize and reconstruct anthropological theory.
Narotzky (this issue) reminds us that:
Dierent knowledges (or singularities) coming from dierent histories and cultural
understandings need to be valued equally (equality) on their own terms (dierence)
but especially in terms of their potentiality to produce a structured, coherent, and
powerful alternative that makes sense in a connected world. We are struggling against
an enemy that has as its strongest weapon a hegemony that pervades our lives to the
core in the West and increasingly all over the world. Admittedly, it is possible that the
creative imagination of an alternative society will come from spaces not yet totally
subsumed to capitalism that exist everywhere (Williams, 1977). But in order to accomplish durable change this vision needs to become an ideology of sorts where the many
feel represented and willing to act. This ideology should be able to explain the experiences that most people have in their various forms of existence all over the world, and
be able to propose an alternative that makes sense to the many all over the world.
Indeed, in order to rehabilitate ideology as an oppositional instrument we need to pay
attention to what people are doing and saying, and here the sociology of absences
(Santos, 2004) and the emphasis on knowledges otherwise (Escobar, 2007) is crucial to
overcome the blindness that a hegemonic project has created. But we also need the
courage to make connections and create logical paths, proposing a general theory . . .

Narotzkys call for the courage to build an anthropological theory that speaks to
the displacements, dislocations, and disempowerment shared by so many around
the world resonates with many of the other essays. Thomas (this issue) asks:
How, then, do we address the question of what it means to be a human capable of
acting in and on a world that hides the ontological entanglements of the violences that
have been foundational to its formation? How do we mobilize a transformed apprehension of temporality and prior-ness toward the project of repair?

Thomas builds on Keeling (2005: 240) to speak to the need and possibility of a
futurity without the saturation of culture by the logics of Capital, the temporal
rearrangements that accompany that process, and the philosophical implications of
deconstruction. This presents us with an historical constellation in which black
cultural insights and innovations are especially important to a general exploration
of a possible cultural politics that might support innovative and egalitarian alternatives to existing hegemonic relationships. Escalona Victorias concluding questions (this issue) respond to related concerns within his call for theorizing power
relations as we create a glocal theory.
Can our analysis demythologize and make visible all current forms of human domination and exploitation in ways that would help to contribute in the search of more
humanized forms of social power as part of our political engagement? Is this the kind
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Anthropological Theory 16(23)

of theoretical/social labor (in a kind of political epistemology perspective) toward

which we should be working?

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no nancial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

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Nina Glick Schiller, is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University

of Manchester and an Associate of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology,
Halle/Saale. Her writings address the relationships between migrants and cities, the
transnationality of cities and migrants, diasporic and cosmopolitan sociability, methodological nationalism and the critique of the ethnic lens. She has published over 100
articles and nine books. Her co-authored books include Nations Unbound:
Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized NationStates (1993) and Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-Distance Nationalism and the
Search for Home (2001). Among her recent co-edited books are Whose
Cosmopolitanism? Critical Perspectives, Relationalities, and Discontents (2015) and
Regimes of Mobility: Imaginaries and Relationalities of Power (2013).

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