Surprises in a Minor Key: Doing Anthropology in Post/Socialist Modernities

Abstract (English)

What are the epistemological strategies of anthropology as a globally decentered discipline? How do anthropologists work beyond the colonially inflected geopolitics of surprise, in which knowledge supposedly emerges from a serendipitous encounter between the modern Western liberal subject and the non-modern Other? Anthropologists working in regions with historical experiences of socialist modernity have engaged with different modalities of surprise, only some of which have been theorized as relevant to disciplinary epistemology. Thinking through surprises in a minor key, I suggest that places with historical experiences of socialist modernity can be understood as a ‘third element’ in the anthropological production of knowledge—not as the location of a specific epistemological standpoint but as a site that destabilizes the conventional anthropological distinction between “modernity” and “Otherness” and complicates the implicit colonial geopolitics on which this distinction is based.