David Scott is Professor of Anthropology and Fellow in the Institute for Research in African American Studies, Columbia University, New York. He is the author of a number of scholarly articles and three books,Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), and co-editor with Charles Hirschkind of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). He is also the editor of the journal Small Axe and director of the Small Axe Project, which is involved in a number of special initiatives around visual, translation, literary, and historiographical issues.