Theories have histories and spatial locations. Certain foci of anthropological or historical reflection are, unsurprisingly, beholden to specific regions: spirit possession and postcolonialism gathered in relation to Africa, and India; revolution, to France, the U.S., Haiti, and Russia; territoriality and spatial semiotics to indigenous groups of the Americas or Australia; “ethnic nationalism,” to Germany and Eastern Europe; creolization and transculturation, to the Caribbean. These geo-theoretical productions inflect and act recursively on and in the lives of social actors who inherit them in those sites, and who live in their sediment.
