An Anthropology of Epochal Shift; or, What Leith Mullings Teaches Us about Global Transformation

Abstract

This article draws from Leith Mullings’s insights about the changing dimensions of racism, a “relationship of accumulation through dispossession” (2020, 250), to think through contemporary realignments of global capitalism spawned by the intensification of Chinese investment overseas. I frame my analysis within the concept of epochal shift in order to draw attention not only to the novel dimensions of power within a changed global political economy, but also to the ways these novel arrangements are fitted into people’s previous understandings and experiences of sovereignty and security in Jamaica. I will argue that thinking through the frame of epochal shift requires that we reconfigure the forms of intimacy and notions of scale that have been normative within anthropology, and that we reevaluate our methods and the forms of evidence we mobilize. Ultimately, I suggest that the new organization of global political power must draw our attention both to the new dimensions of racism that are emerging and to the ways people are demanding new forms of accountability.