Poder, história e coetaneidade: Os lugares do colonialismo na antropologia sobre a África

Abstract

This article explores Johannes Fabian’s well-known thesis about the politics of time in anthropological representation and reviews critically the carrier of coevalness in the anthropology of Africa. It departs from the anthropology produced under colonialism, focusing on the British structural-functionalist school, and arrives at the anthropology of colonialism emerging in the 1990s, passing through the robust temporal disjunction imposed to the discipline by the African independent states that start flourishing in the late 1950s. This trajectory is followed by a growing theoretical awareness about the formative impact of colonial power in African societies. As a conclusion, I question Fabian’s prescription of an “actual confrontation with the Time of the Other” by recurring to contemporary perspectives about the post-colonial condition in Africa. I highlight the ambiguous and elusive nature of subaltern time, and defend a more ethnographically grounded approach to the vicissitudes of peripheral temporality.