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This introduction briefly retraces the career of anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle, whose critical enterprise ever since his first fieldwork in Mali has been to deconstruct certain traditional categories and dichotomies of the discipline for the sake of an anthropology of identities and powers that accords due importance to history and politics as well as to the connections between the local and the global. In the foregoing interview, Amselle discusses the next stage in his undertaking: reflections on postcolonialism and subalternism based on his tricontinental “fieldwork”.