This volume raises questions about two inter-related aspects of historical process and academic production. It aims to contribute to ongoing debates about the degree to which the developments of the latter decades of the 20th century represent the advent of a new historical era.

In confronting this question, the contributors have assembled a range of materials that place the present period of reconstruction in the context of a broader history and geography of other restructurings. "Locating Capitalism in Time and Space" also raises questions about the degree to which the scholarship of recent decades represents a qualitative break with that of the past. At issue here is whether one understands the history of academic production as a linear process of intellectual growth punctuated by major breakthroughs in understanding, or as a political process structured by the same kinds of inequalities and struggles that characterize the social worlds that are the object of anthropological analysis.