This introductory article outlines the general orientations of the Wenner-Gren Foundation's 158th symposium held in Sintra, Portugal, in the autumn of 2018. It summarizes and reflects on the various communications and teases out how the entanglements of Atlantic slavery, knowledge production, and colonization shaped the modern world. It then contemplates a more equitable future through alternative problem-solving anthropology. On October 12-18, 2018, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research hosted its 158th symposium at Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal. The symposium gathered scholars from different disciplinary and geographical homes and was convened by Deborah L. Mack and Ibrahima Thiaw. It was designed to be an intellectual challenge to academic traditions within anthropology and offer models of what anthropology could become in order to have greater impact in policy, public culture, and action. It was intended to engage an uncomfortable and painful past whose buried memories continue to linger in the present. To do that, it was structured to accommodate a broad spectrum of cultural sensibilities and political subjectivities that lay bare the positionality of the researcher. The ultimate goal was to provoke, revisit, and redirect debates on Atlantic slavery and modernity across racial, cultural, class, and gender, as well as methodological and theoretical, boundaries for the twenty-first century and beyond. Following the statement of the goals and orientations of the symposium, all participants were asked to prepare papers that were circulated prior to the meeting. Paper presentations during the meeting were followed by thematic focus group discussions. The history of Atlantic slavery is tightly linked to that of European colonization of the rest of the world that went hand in hand with the production of Eurocentric knowledge. European global voyages, ca. 1400, were largely motivated by commerce and later colonization that meant economic and political control over new resources, territories, and their inhabitants. That colonial expansion was built on unequal relations legitimized by Eurocentric views of the world in general, elevating European over different others, particularly Black Africans and Indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere. Physiological, biological, and phenotypical differences were translated into discriminating racial, ethnic, and national distinctions that were naturalized first on the basis of religion and physical appearance and later by way of anthropological and historical knowledge that, by the nineteenth century, became a powerful medium for representing and controlling non-European others (Cooper 2005; McClintock 1995; O'Brien 2010; Pratt 1992; Schlanger and Taylor 2012; Stoler 2002a). Eurocentric knowledge was strategically mobilized to intrude, search, analyze, dissect, and ultimately consume Black bodies according to European demands, needs, and standards (Curran 2011). Anthropological gaze born of modernity is a direct outcome of that colonial h...
