Edited volumes rarely succeed in going beyond the effectiveness of individual contributions. The success of an edited volume largely depends on the editor’s ability to provide an insightful introduction and a rigorous framework that encourages the reader to gain better insights from the volume as a whole than those afforded by individual contributions. Locating Capitalism in Time and Space, edited by David Nugent, is a very good example of a collection that succeeds in this regard.

The restructuring of the world economy since World War II has contributed to a “general and marked acceleration in the ‘globalization’ of material forces and cultural messages accompanied by equally strong countermovements in which ‘localism’ of multiple kinds have asserted themselves with great force” (p. vii). Encouraged by these observable processes, many scholars have heralded the advent of a new historical era, the understanding of which, it is argued, requires a new set of epistemological frameworks and new ethnographic imaginations and tools. In recent years, many anthropologists have focused their efforts on rethinking the ideas and concepts that constitute the very foundation of anthropology. Nugent, in his thought-provoking introduction, states that these tendencies more than anything else, “serve as mechanisms that simultaneously empower and delimit: they claim agency, creativity, and subjectivity for one’s reference group even as they disempower, objectify and ultimately dismiss other groups” (p. 2). This has largely distorted understanding of history and of the politics of anthropology, contributing to an intellectual stagnation that needs to be urgently addressed.

The objective of this volume is to address “two inter-related aspects of historical process and academic production” (page viii) with the hope of shedding critical light on the positivist intellectual histories that dominate anthropology and social sciences, in general. The 11 contributors weigh in and critically inform the ongoing debates related to the validity of viewing contemporary globalization as a qualitative rupture with the past and “seek to raise questions about the degree to which the scholarship of recent decades represents a qualitative break with that of the past (p. viii).

To achieve this goal, Nugent advances an approach that erodes the emphasis on the intimate relationship between knowledge and enlightenment and encourages a shift to an understanding of anthropology as a discipline emerging from the historical articulation of power and knowledge (p. 2). The focus is on exposing the “political processes that have allowed select dimensions of the past to be represented as ‘the past,’ while other dimensions of our history have been effaced from memory” (p. 3). The attempt therein is to advance a different approach to understanding the continuities and discontinuities in global political economic processes and to develop an alternate remembrance of the historical development of anthropology during the 20th century. In so doing, Nugent seeks to establish a “deeper history for an anthropology of the global arena than is currently acknowledged in the discipline’ (p. 3). The attempt is more fruitfully served when one reads William Roseberry’s contribution as an extension of the introduction. Roseberry’s critique (pp. 61–79) of a Eurocentered model of capitalist development provides a clear understanding of capitalism as a continuously emerging spatially and temporally defined set of relations that is not necessarily European or U.S. centered. The arguments presented by Nugent and Roseberry constitute a well-developed framework for the creative understanding of other contributions to the volume, which discuss the development of capitalism as evidenced in localized issues such as state and nation formation, ethnicity, and class and gender conflict in various parts of the world. Each essay has its individual strong points and, when read within the framework of Nugent’s introduction and Roseberry’s contribution, poses more critical and relevant questions that are crucial to address today. Additionally, Nugent’s extended discussion of the development of social sciences during the 20th century enables one to read new relevance into the ethnographic analysis evident in different contributions to the book.

Intellectual provocations such as those evidenced in this volume play a critical role as necessary irritants that lay bare the power structure that defines the intellectual landscape of anthropology. This volume has the potential to create the necessary environment for creative interaction between anthropology and the intellectual challenges posed by postcolonial studies.