This article uses a reading of Collingwood’s concept of a logic of ‘question and answer’ to reflect upon Talal Asad’s challenge to anthropology that it should alter the ways in which it has been thinking about the problem of colonialism. Essentially Asad urged a shift in preoccupations, from writing histories of colonial anthropology to writing anthropologies of Western hegemony (or what will be called, historical anthropologies of the postcolonial present). In particular the article spells out something of the discursive context or conceptual-political problem-space in which Asad’s challenge ought to be understood — the context of the collapse of the nationalist/liberationist project of Third World sovereignties (the Bandung project) and the singular importance of a more systematic understanding of the forms of modern power that have made our present what it is. The concept of an historical anthropology of the postcolonial present is illustrated with some remarks on the problem of understanding post-emancipation history in the Caribbean.
