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This chapter situates Haitian studies in a multivalent and dialogic border space by analyzing the work of Fernando Coronil, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Sidney Mintz on peasant culture from a new perspective. More specifically, it reflects on the problem of thinking Haiti through anthrohistory by drawing on Mintz's writings on Haiti. The chapter begins by considering one of the central tensions surrounding anthropological work on Haiti: that of seeing it, on the one hand, as a product and expression of a unique history and, on the other, as fully integrated within a diagnostic of broader global histories and processes. It then examines how and why the question of gender has found itself pushed to the edge of much theorizing despite its acknowledged importance in understanding Haiti. It also discusses Mintz's 1964 description of the deployment of capital by Haitian market women in relation to anthropological work and to the future of Haitian anthrohistory.

This chapter examines the link between anthropology and the public sphere, focusing on the multiple genealogical strands of the discipline. Taking a longue durée approach as a contextual frame for understanding more recent developments in the field, the chapter considers the various, often conflicting or troubling transatlantic paradigms that have been applied to Haiti in the twenty-first century. After discussing the place of ‘race’ in anthropology with respect to Haiti, the chapter considers a particular set of political, economic and geopolitical interests embedded in the institutional foundation of anthropological knowledge production, including what the chapter calls ‘anthropological imagination’. It also comments on Sidney Mintz's comparative study of the Caribbean region and his role in the institutionalization of Caribbean studies, along with his influence on the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Paul Farmer. The chapter concludes with a series of questions for those working in the arenas of both anthropology and humanitarianism.

Chapter 5 leaves behind van Eechoud, de Bruijn, and their friends and colleagues and fast-forwards to the late 1950s when the social anthropologist Leopold Pospisil conducted fieldwork in the Wissel Lakes. Pospisil’s voluminous and engaging depictions of his work among the Kapauku Papuans offer evidence of how one anthropologist deployed sympathy as a tool. They also offer a glimpse of how the Kapauku might have experienced Pospisil’s fieldwork. Drawing on Pospisil’s academic writings and interview data, the chapter begins with a discussion of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the “savage slot” before describing how Pospisil ended up conducting research in the Wissel Lakes. The following sections analyze the striking comparisons that both Pospisil and his informants drew between Kapauku practices and forms of personhood and those associated with the west. The chapter then takes a closer look at a passage from the author’s interview with Pospisil in order to reflect on the dynamics that might have given rise to these results. The chapter ends with some impressions from the author’s 2003 field visit to Enarotali, where she met people who had found creative ways to talk back to the fantasy that would have them chained to a Stone Age past.

This chapter talks about the local narrators’ replacement of the Indian peoples through crafting a historical account invalidating prior Indian history as a dead-end civilization, and replacing it with a New England history of property agreements and fair relations that authorized their claims to the land. This message of replacement was also evidenced in other settings such as historical commemorations, relics and ruins, place-names, and the land itself. According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, this kind of memorialization contributes to the creating, altering, and sanctioning of the public meanings attributed to historical events. Through these inaccurate perpetuations, local accounts demolished the complex history of Indian and English relations, and established the idea of rightful English replacement of Indian peoples.

Drawing on a sample of texts from around the Atlantic world and across the Age of Atlantic Slavery—J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s, Letters from an American Farmer, Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga’s Sab, Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno—this chapter offers a preliminary structuralist analysis of the narratological-theological complex of Atlantic fictions of slave rebellion. Fictions of slave rebellion tend to rebel against their own narrative forms, reflecting but also reflecting on what Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called the “unthinkability” of large-scale slave revolt. This undoing typically occurs around tableaux of a black Prometheus. In their auto-deconstruction, these texts register the metaphysical disruption slave revolt effects in the global immanence.

The author tours Dighton Rock Museum as it appeared in 2013. He shows how the arrangement of interpretive options and the overwhelming amount of Portuguese material such as ship models lead a visitor to the inescapable conclusion that the Corte-Real theory is the correct one. He cites Michel-Rolph Trouillot: “Celebrations straddle the two sides of historicity. They impose a silence upon the events that they ignore, and they fill that silence with narratives of power about the event they celebrate.” As an interpretation of interpretations, the author argues, the museum is a crowning exercise of that power.