Native like me: Confessions of an Asiatic black anthropologist

Abstract

There has been a great deal of debate among anthropologists over the use of the term ‘native anthropologist’ and whether it continues the discipline’s history of ‘othering’ non-white people (both as researchers and as the researched). Yet what has gone relatively untouched are the persistent assumptions behind the term that a non-white anthropologist is by definition a native anthropologist who is helping to decode his or her people of a similar skin tone or cultural identity, done for non-native (presumably white) anthropologists. In order to truly rethink the problematics surrounding the researcher and research subject, academics must directly confront the unspoken patterns and assumptions that are at the heart of the expectations placed upon non-white anthropologists. Although there are few non-white, non-natives who do not study ‘their own’, and instead focus on other ‘others’, we represent a necessary shift in how future anthropological knowledge should be conceived and produced.