Decolonising anthropology from the margin: A postcolonial and feminist anthropologist from South Asia in Europe

Abstract

This article uses auto-ethnography to analyse the trajectory of an anthropologist and feminist from South Asia to Europe. Through analysing this journey it aims to turn anthropology's gaze from the margin to the centre. Tracing the trajectory, the article contrasts the dominant disciplinary frameworks for generating knowledge in the Global North and the Global South. This comparison suggests the need to focus on decolonial and feminist politics in anthropology in the Global North. To elaborate on the argument, this article historicises and problematises anthropology's discomfort with feminism, which contributes to a distance from political positioning and the obstacles to creating a solid foundation for feminist anthropology in the Global North. The article also analyses the forms of marginalisation practised in neo-colonial anthropology within the neo-liberal knowledge industry in the disciplinary sphere of the Global North, and the ways in which they could be challenged and reversed. It discusses the complex dynamics of gender, race, and colonial legacies, advocating for a reorientation within anthropology that acknowledges and searches for ways to resist the enduring influence of colonial power structures. In short, the article engages with anthropology's systemic, epistemological and methodological decolonisation as a discipline and practice.

Introduction

Living as we did – on the edge – we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both (bell hooks, 1984, Feminist theory: From Margin to Center, preface).

[B]oth feminist and halfie ethnography are practices that could shake up the paradigm of anthropology itself by showing us that we are always part of what we study and we always stand in definite relations to it. (Abu-Lughod, 1990: 27)

The first quote from bell hooks describes the marginal positionality of black people living in a small Kentucky town, where black and white spaces are divided by railroad tracks. She could enter the world of white people but could not live there; this marginality is part of the whole but outside the main body. She argued that this marginality gives black women a unique ‘vantage point to make use of this perspective to criticise the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as to envision and create a counter-hegemony’ (hooks, 1984: 15). Therefore, she proposed a feminist theory from this marginality, which gives a vision of the whole.

The second quote above, from Abu-Lughod, indicates what I want to offer in this article – being a halfie ¹ and a feminist anthropologist, my decolonial proposition is situated against coloniality, Eurocentrism, and exclusionary neoliberal anthropology and academia. With this marginalised positionality, I aim to turn the anthropological gaze to examine the centre.

Following bell hooks, this article aims to envision another kind of criticism of the dominant hegemony in academia from the perspective of myself: a perspective of a brown, migrant, woman scholar of the Global South. I am part of these identities but remain in the margins of each of these categorical identity boxes. I can be described with all of them together, yet still remain out of place. Each of the terms I used in the title is so complex that separate scholarship is demanded for each one. However, I do not have any other choice but to put them together as they reflect a complex version of ‘the matrix of dominations’ that constructs inequality between race, gender and class (Collins, 1993) by the ‘imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy’ (hooks, 1984). Putting those words together in the title is important to me. It is a difficult task because the connections between them are sometimes awkward. However, I aim to explain what I mean by these terms, how I make connections between them, and why combining them to situate the intersectional positionality is crucial.

My orientation with anthropology began in a place described with many names in my lifetime, i.e., the Third World, the Developing World, or most recently, the Global South. This reflects a continuing process of ‘otherness’ constructed by the colonial legacy of knowledge. So, what does a department of anthropology mean in a country where the people who live there are usually the objects of the study of anthropology and remain the ‘other’, not the subjects producing the knowledge? My inception with anthropology began with this question. In this article, I will address this question and its increasing complexity by discussing my trajectory as an anthropologist and feminist from South Asia to Europe through auto-ethnography. In describing this journey, I will first situate my positionality from the margin to the centre with a brief comparison between Bangladeshi and Irish anthropology to problematise this margin-centre binary based on my experience. In the second section, I will explore the epistemological foundation in creating the marginality of postcolonial and feminist scholarship in anthropology in the Global North, and suggest focusing on decolonial politics by reversing the relationship between the margin and the centre of anthropological knowledge. In that section, I will also historicise and problematise anthropology's discomfort with feminism, which contributes to a distance from political positioning and makes it challenging to build a solid foundation for feminist anthropology in the Global North. The article will then analyse how the neo-colonial trends in anthropology within the neo-liberal knowledge industry create endemic and intersectional marginalisation for scholars and critical scholarship. In the final section, the article will analyse the forms of exclusion practised in neo-colonial anthropology in the disciplinary sphere of Europe and the ways in which they could be challenged and reversed for a decolonial turn in the disciplinary sphere of anthropology. In short, the article will engage with anthropology's systemic, epistemological and methodological decolonisation as a discipline and practice. The aim of the article is to highlight anthropology's enduring colonial legacies and to advocate for the transformative influence of decolonial feminism on the field's approach.

From margin to centre or vice versa

My alma mater and the institution where I uninterruptedly taught for 9 years, the Department of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University (JU), was the first anthropology department in Bangladesh, established in 1985. My admission to anthropology as an undergraduate student was an accidental one. Initially, I started my undergraduate study in the Department of Archaeology. Although I had not heard the word ‘anthropology’ before I started my undergraduate studies, during the first few months, I learned about the Department of Anthropology's reputation as a feminist department. Despite this reputation not always being conveyed by my fellow students with a very positive tone, it turned positive for me and made me curious. Eventually, I switched from archaeology to anthropology, dropping a year because of the harassment I experienced from the head of the Department of Archaeology. In that crucial moment, I found that anthropology and the radical academic environment it provided became my saviour. I found my place of sanctuary in the curricula of anthropology that provided a critical, postcolonial and feminist lens for the everyday world around us. In the first year, we read Edward Said (1978), Talal Asad (1973), Rayna Rapp (1977), and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1988), as the foundational texts, among many other anthropologists, sociologists, historians, feminists and postcolonial scholars who are/were critical about class, gender, race and colonialism. Through these works, I situated myself within an intellectual sphere of feminist and postcolonial anthropology. When places like Bangladesh remain the object of the study of anthropology, for me to be an anthropologist, anthropology has to be self-critical of its colonial ties. Otherwise, anthropologists like us are not really considered ‘proper’ (i.e., male, white, western) anthropologists.

In addition, in my first undergraduate year in anthropology, I participated in one of the most vibrant anti-rape movements in the country, led by the female students of JU. Many of the faculty members of the Department of Anthropology, who later became my colleagues, played an instrumental role in that movement. As a result, from the beginning, my understanding of anthropology was a radical, feminist one. It should be noted that it was in the late 1990s when the critical turn in anthropology became influential, which had a significant impact on anthropology at JU.

My academic life in anthropology in Bangladesh started with the anti-rape movement and ended just when I became vocal in the public sphere against gender inequality. My own experiences with gender-based violence influenced my feminist political motivation to bridge the gap between the public and academia. Through these personal and political stances for a more equitable society, I achieved a voice of resistance and the confidence of a feminist anthropologist before I left the country with my 6-year-old daughter. While I was somewhat established professionally, with a tenured position at Jahangirnagar University, I had to leave the country due to many layers of insecurity and violence.

I went to Hungary to do an MA in the Department of Gender Studies, supported by two scholarships that would barely keep myself and my daughter alive. As a single mother/student with a 6-year-old girl struggling with attending school in a completely foreign language, our lives were not easy, to say the least. That was my first time being in a European city without being able to speak the language and having a child to care for. Due to a visa issue, I arrived late, a few days into the start of the semester. On my first day in Hungary, I had nowhere to put my daughter while attending the lectures, so I brought her to my first class, academic writing (in English), where my classmates silently passed their colour markers for my daughter to draw quietly, while I participated in the class. However, later, in an email from the instructor, I was asked not to bring my daughter to his class again, as it creates a distraction. This was contrary to what I had experienced in my country. Since I was my daughter's primary carer from birth, I took her everywhere in Bangladesh unapologetically. Although this unwelcoming reaction made me feel alienated, helpless and angry, in a foreign university in Hungary, without a support network similar to Bangladesh, I did not have the position and courage to stand against this androgenic exclusionary attitude in academia that does not consider the care duties of an academic. The idea of an implicit ‘carefree’ masculinist academic sphere is exclusionary (Ivancheva et al., 2019) for a single mother, and I felt that I did not belong. While studying for my MA at CEU in Hungary, I immensely enjoyed the vibrant debates in the class and the radically resistant texts I read. I thought that the curriculum of Gender Studies would equip me to increase my confidence to fight against all forms of inequalities. Nevertheless, the feeling of alienation and non-belonging weakened it instead. Yet, because of the informal support from my classmates and many other faculty members who were happy for me to bring my daughter to their classes when I did not have any alternative care arrangement, I managed to complete the programme as a single mother.

After finishing the MA programme, returning to Bangladesh was not a viable option for us at that time. I was desperately trying to get a PhD scholarship abroad, and luckily, I was awarded the prestigious Wenner-Gren Wadsworth scholarship to conduct my PhD at Maynooth University in Ireland. The Wadsworth International Fellowship programme aims to extend and strengthen international ties and global anthropological expertise. The awards are only given to students from countries where anthropology is underrepresented and where there are limited resources to educate students overseas. The rationale of the scholarship given to me was that anthropology in Bangladesh is underrepresented and has limited resources. Hence, the anthropology department at Maynooth University, a European university, has more resources to provide me with an international standard of education. It was indeed true in many ways. Despite its political edge, JU did not exist in the academic ranking of world universities then, whereas Maynooth University did. Here, I had the opportunity to hear directly from and engage with the anthropological giants I knew only through their work. Through this, I discovered an entirely different world of anthropology in Europe, where scholars constantly produce a steady stream of publications. A culture of ‘publish or perish’ (Amutuhaire, 2022) forces the scholars to produce numerous scholarly works, which I found overwhelming.

In Ireland, neo-liberal values have been incorporated into most universities since the early 2000s, leading to increasing inequality within the academic labour force between tenured professors and early-career researchers with precarious contracts (Ivancheva et al., 2019). This precarity was exacerbated by the growing competition for, and commercialisation of grants, further marginalising the already marginalised academics (Courtois and O’Keefe, 2015). The constant pressure to produce high-ranked publications and quantitative performance metrics to attract funding and survive, often left no time for the precarious academics to organise themselves, limiting their ability to commit to effecting radical change in their societies.

On the contrary, anthropology and, more broadly, academia in Bangladesh is arguably postcolonial, with its remarkably complex colonial character built on the foundation of two centuries of British rule. In principle, JU is a state-funded public university, a sovereign institution minimally controlled by the state. JU is one of the four public universities that were provided autonomy by the University Act of 1973 after the independence of the country in 1971. In practice, however, it is an open secret that political parties influence the policies and procedures of public universities. The faculties’ recruitment, promotion, and many other benefits are often determined by their connections to the dominant political parties rather than the publication matrix. Despite this, the job security of a tenured position allowed academics who chose to play their role in civil society to stand for social justice without fear of losing their jobs. However, in recent years, due to the current autocratic nature of the government and the threat of violence, resistant political voices have become more and more subject to repression.

Moreover, from the beginning of the twenty-first century, following policy suggestions from the World Bank, the funding body of public universities, the University Grants Commission (UGC), has been pushing neoliberal market values on the higher education sector. Nevertheless, this neoliberal agenda has been resisted by the student movements and the Public University Teachers’ Network (Ahmed and Iqbal, 2016; Kabir and Greenwood, 2017; Sultana, 2019; Sun, 2019). Another way the state exerts pressure for the neo-liberalisation of higher education is with the growing number of public and private universities not governed by the University Act 1973. Yet, the neo-liberal competition in Bangladeshi academia is considerably less compared to the academia of the Global North. From my experience, I observed that in Bangladeshi academia, the state and dominant political parties exert more control than the neo-liberal market, whereas, in the universities of the Global North, neo-liberalism is the dominant trend (Darder, 2012; Graeber, 2014; Fisher, 2022).

Therefore, despite the vibrant scholarly atmosphere I encountered, I felt a vacuum in European academia in general. Despite significant differences between European universities, my encounter with anthropology in Europe has, in general, been a depoliticised one. The anthropology I knew in Bangladesh was fundamentally self-critical with a feminist and postcolonial perspective on the world. This anthropology encouraged students to organise, protest and rally against sexual harassment and everyday injustice and to stand against coloniality. However, here in Europe, with some exceptions, the intellectually vibrant atmosphere of anthropology does not always translate into radical politics and practice. I felt hesitation and distance, and a kind of fear of being labelled as ‘too political’ and therefore being invalidated as a ‘proper’ academic.

In addition, I realised that my care responsibility as a single mother directly conflicted with the anthropological standard of long-term fieldwork. I reconciled these two by dividing my PhD fieldwork into two 5/6-month stints of ethnography spread over 2 years, to make it less disruptive for my daughter. When this research plan was initially rejected for not being anthropological enough, I felt for the first time that I, as a single mother who has sole care responsibility for a child, cannot fit into the image of an ideal anthropologist. However, this time, I had no choice but to stand by the plan that accommodated my care responsibility. As a result, I was given a chance to defend the anthropological and intellectual merit of my research plan, and after a lengthy review process and some administrative adjustments, I was permitted to continue the PhD programme with my research plan.

This experience of being pressured to mitigate my care responsibility for the sake of ethnographic rationale added another layer to the un-belonging of the feminist anthropological self within academia in Ireland. The question haunted me from then on: if there is a mismatch between the image of an ideal fieldworker and a single mother with care responsibility, has the male bias been adequately addressed in anthropology? For decades, I called myself a feminist anthropologist without hesitation, but more and more, I found it hard to see a common ground between them. It turned out that epistemologically and methodologically, it is not very straightforward to be a feminist anthropologist in the Global North, which I will elaborate on in the following section.

My academic trajectory from Bangladesh to Ireland was not only a geographical leap, but also historical in the sense of the intensifying neo-liberal transformation of academia in the Global North. That resulted in my deskilling as my publications and experience remain outside the academic ranking and journal impact metrics set by the neo-liberal and neo-colonial academia in the Global North (Amutuhaire, 2022). With despair, I realised that my teaching experience in Bangladesh and publications in Bangla could not produce much value for the hiring committees in Europe, and I would have to start my academic career from scratch.

When I look back, I realise that my decision to leave my country with my daughter to build my academic career in Europe was only possible because of a sense of tenacity and confidence to fight and make space for myself that I had achieved by being in the Department of Anthropology at JU, steeped in feminist and postcolonial anthropological knowledge and practice. However, during these years of living in European countries, 1 year in Hungary and 9 years in Ireland, I lost that confidence. Even though I have had unconditional support from numerous friends and colleagues, my migration experience created a loss of the sense of self and belonging on a much deeper level.

To summarise my experience, my academic journey from Bangladesh to Ireland is one from feminist and postcolonial anthropology to neoliberal anthropology. It is a journey from being a tenured faculty member of a postcolonial university to being a precarious researcher at a neo-liberal university. It is a journey that seems to be from the margin to the centre, but in reality, it is from the centre to the margin in a way that has marginalised me socially and professionally. I became a combination of a few marginalised identities: a brown, migrant, woman scholar from the Global South. Therefore, for me, the Global North as the ‘centre’ and the Global South as the ‘margin’ are not the given categories in a binary opposition, but instead, a continuum. This continuum of marginalisation is the enduring result of colonial history, gender discrimination, racialisation and neoliberalism. This marginalisation is constructed by a colonial-Eurocentric knowledge industry and its neo-liberal market value. However, to counter that epistemic and systemic neo-colonial and neo-liberal marginalisation, this position of marginality could be where the possibility of decolonisation may begin by turning the gaze from the margin to the centre to decentre the ‘centre’.

The constructed awkwardness of feminist and de/postcolonial anthropology in the Global North

As stated earlier, being a postcolonial and feminist scholar was the only way for me to be an anthropologist in Bangladesh, a position that disrupts the self/other, subject/object, and objective/subjective binaries inherent to classical anthropology and which has historically stirred up much debate within anthropology (Abu-Lughod, 1990). However, the epistemic contribution of de/postcolonial and feminist critiques is not always necessarily an inbuilt part of mainstream anthropology in the Global North; instead, it remains on the fringe. Contrary to my early orientation with anthropology, I discovered that the dominant anthropological trend in the Global North has an uneasy relationship with feminism and de/postcolonialism.

Marylin Strathern (1987) identified the awkward relationship between feminism and anthropology in her famous article. On having a common ground between feminism and anthropology, Strathern expressed her concern that feminism and anthropology should remain ‘neighbours in tensions’ with the ‘doorstep hesitation’ for the sake of their distinct disciplinary aims (Strathern, 1987: 286). Strathern's justification of keeping these two disciplines separate with this ‘doorstep hesitation’ has been challenged by many feminist anthropologists (Kirby, 1989; Abu-Lughod, 1990; Walter, 1995). Vicky Kirby criticised Strathern's inclination to prevent a dialogue between anthropology and feminism and argues that ‘Strathern wants to discourage both a rigorous feminist practice within anthropology as well as its inverse, a critical, anthropological approach within feminism’ (Kirby, 1989: 2).

Moreover, criticising Strathern's argument Abu-Lughod (1996) argues that the idea of the self/other binary is built into anthropology, and critiques of it could be the connections between feminism and anthropology. She argues that anthropology is,

[A] discipline built on the historically constructed divide between the West and the non-West. It has been and continues to be primarily the study of the non-Western other by the Western self, even if in its new guise it seeks explicitly to give voice to the Other or to present a dialogue between the self and other, either textually or through an explication of the fieldwork encounter. (Abu-Lughod, 1996: 467)

She continues, ‘the awkwardness Strathern senses in the relationship between feminism and anthropology might better be understood as the result of diametrically opposed processes of self-construction through opposition to others – processes that begin from different sides of a power divide’ (Abu-Lughod, 1996: 467). She argues that since feminists and halfie anthropologists are forced to navigate with their positionality as ‘others’, they have to have an uneasy navigation between speaking for and from, and therefore, reveal the ‘culture’ as a field of power relations. Therefore, anthropologists like me, trained mostly in the ‘other’ spectrum of the world that Lughod described as halfie, have only one way to navigate within anthropology: to situate the power relations of self/other within anthropology.

In addition to the difficult relationship between feminism and anthropology in the Global North, another layer of exclusion of feminist anthropology had been done by a canonical book in anthropology, Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). In the introduction, James Clifford admitted the exclusion of feminist anthropological texts and justified it as ‘Feminism had not contributed much to the theoretical analysis of ethnographies as texts’ (Clifford, 1986: 20) which is the focus of the book. He continued, ‘feminist ethnography has focused either on setting the record straight about women or on revising anthropological categories (for example, the nature/culture opposition). It has not produced either unconventional forms of writing or a developed reflection on ethnographic textuality as such’ (Clifford, 1986: 21). This book became an anthropological canon establishing anthropology's postmodern critical edge while erasing feminist scholarship and feminist anthropology. This infamous erasure provoked many critiques; amongst them, here, I discuss two criticisms, the book project Women Writing Culture (1995) and Lila Abu-Lughod's piece ‘Writing Against Culture’ (1996).

The first example of the resistance against the erasure of Writing Culture is the book project Women Writing Culture (1995) edited by Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon. The book project began its journey as a feminist response to Writing Culture, but it went much further in dealing with two major crises, the crisis of feminism and the crisis of anthropology, by incorporating the critique of white feminism with Gloria Anzaldua and Cherry Moraga's edited book The Bridge Called My Back (1983). The book could be considered a fantastic contribution to anthropology with a feminist edge. They argue that the sadness and anguish caused to the feminist readers by ‘James Clifford's uneasy statements justifying the absence of women anthropologists’ (1995: 4) is unprecedented in the history of anthropology. One of the editors of the book, Deborah Gordon argued that the essays of Writing Culture, were ‘emblematic of ineffective management of men's negotiation with feminism’ (Gordon, 1988: 8). Women Writing Culture, therefore, paid the appropriate homage to the ignored women anthropologists in the anthropological canon. For example, Louise Lamphere, one of the editors of Women, culture, and society (Rosaldo et al., 1974), which is considered one of the ‘bibles of feminist anthropology’ (McGuirk, 2018), in her contribution to Women Writing Culture, connected the rising of feminist anthropology in the 1970s with Elsie Clews Parsons, a Boasian anthropologist in the 1920s. Lamphere identified her as one of the early feminist anthropologists, one among many other women anthropologists who never had an academic position or significant recognition in the history of anthropology.

The second critique of the exclusion of feminist anthropology in Writing Culture that I want to discuss is from Lila Abu-Lughod. She argues, ‘Writing Culture (Clifford, 1986), the collection that marked a major new form of critique of cultural anthropology's premises, more or less excluded two critical groups whose situations neatly expose and challenge the most basic of those premises’ (Abu-Lughod, 1996: 466). While Clifford apologised for excluding feminist anthropologists, the halfie anthropologists’ absence was not even mentioned. Yet, she argues, that they are the ones who represent/face the dilemma that ‘reveals starkly the problems with cultural anthropology's assumption of a fundamental distinction between self and other’ (Abu-Lughod, 1996: 466). Abu-Lughod reminds us that women, blacks and people from the non-West have historically been constructed as ‘others’; as such, feminist and halfie anthropologists cannot avoid the question of positionality in this mapping of otherness. She argues that what Clifford claims as ‘partial truth’ is also a positional truth, that feminist and halfie anthropologists are dealing with, and showing that a coherent, timeless and discrete image of culture used as a central anthropological tool to make ‘other’ is indeed a relationship of power, for which anthropologists should consider strategies for writing against culture (Abu-Lughod, 1996).

However, despite their sharp critiques and profound intellectual contributions to anthropology, the feminist critiques of Writing Culture could not really challenge the book's canonical status in the mainstream anthropological sphere in the Global North. Therefore, the marginalisation of feminist anthropology, as well as the awkward distance between feminism and anthropology, remains so strong that it has been almost blasphemous to critique anthropology's canon and its trademark ethnography in its hegemonic form when it comes to addressing the gendered reality of the ethnographer. However, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) argues that research methods, in particular methodology to understand ‘other’ cultures, follow a Western epistemology that is inherently colonial and which assumes the researcher is Western, white and male. The idea of an ideal ethnographer and their reality, therefore, needs a decolonial investigation with a feminist lens.

Recent calls for a manifesto of patchwork ethnography (Günel et al., 2020) unapologetically draw our attention to the structural issues in traditional ethnography that excluded many anthropologists. They showed that the idea of protracted fieldwork taking place far from home is a hegemonic imagination only in the English-speaking world rather than a worldwide reality. They correctly show that, while ethnographers have been adapting to various fieldwork challenges through methods such as online research, multi-sited fieldwork, auto-ethnography, and archival ethnography, and by attending mobile or virtual research subjects, these innovations have primarily been based on the needs of research subjects. Not many methodological debates in anthropology considered the researchers’ own subject positions regarding multiple professional and personal commitments – care duties, disabilities, and structural, financial or geographic constraints. Indeed, these constraints are considered ‘personal’ and have never been considered a valid rationale for methodological and theoretical choices. Instead, there is a strong pressure to hide them to fit into the carefree, masculine, sovereign subject figure of the ideal ethnographer. The patchwork ethnography challenged the ideal idea of fieldwork and the fieldworker and gave validity to the research design not only according to the research subjects or topics but also personal circumstances, the intersectional responsibilities and the structural conditions of the academic labour (Günel and Watanabe, 2024). Through patchwork ethnography, they called for those innovations in anthropological research that are already happening in anthropology out of necessity but remain black-boxed, to be recognised as valid. Patchwork ethnography, therefore, provides a sense of belonging to my doctoral research plan and my care duties as valid intellectual rationale within anthropology. Furthermore, this innovative research manifesto linked itself with the decolonial movement in the academy.

Similar to the marginalisation of feminist anthropology, de/postcolonial anthropology also has an awkward relationship with mainstream anthropology in the Global North. While de/postcolonial critiques had established that mainstream classical anthropology had been sympathetic to it's typical subject, the colonised cultures, it often served the interests of colonisers in various ways. Classical anthropologists were the bridge through which the other cultures were translated-constructed and organised for the European-Western colonial knowledge empire (Asad, 1973). The colonial economy of knowledge was gathered from the colonies but framed and presented through the imperial and colonial-modern frame and disseminated back to the colonies for intellectual domination (Stevens et al., 2018; Connell, 2019). While anthropology had been particularly invested in learning about the colonised cultures, it was derived from a certain kind of functional and empiricist paradigm linked to the Western-modern episteme (Appadurai, 1993; Cohn, 1996).

The connection between colonial racism and anthropology has long been explored by many anthropologists, one of the first of whom was Diane Lewis (1973) who identified that anthropologists were contributing to constructing colonial racism by providing absolute differences between Western and non-western cultures and by promoting these differences for their own professional gain. Diane Lewis is amongst the earliest ones who suggested a view from the margin by the non-western anthropologist and activism for the purpose of societal change within anthropology (Lewis, 1973), yet, she is rarely cited as one of the scholars who identified the colonial problems in anthropology and encouraged radical political activism within anthropology (Rodriguez, 2018).

Moreover, Faye Harrison (1992) was amongst the first to call for decolonising anthropology in the 1990s by identifying that coloniality did not end with the end of formal colonial rule and that race, gender and class exploitation remain central to neo-colonial capitalist exploitations. Therefore, to call for decolonising anthropology was to be critical of the anthropological ties to colonialism and to identify and resist the epistemological and systemic cooperation between neo-colonial and neo-liberal capitalist exploitations. To resist this, one of the agendas is to understand the process of peripheralisation caused by multi-layered and intersectional oppression, resulting in the erasure of the radical political critique made by women and people of colour from the anthropological canon (Lutz, 1990; Harrison, 1992). While Faye Harrison proposed that decolonisation would be possible with ‘an alternative space as a post-core-periphery setting, a democratised and decolonised environment in which a diversity of anthropologists and kindred thinkers, whether academic or not, come together, productively engaging each other at the “crossroads of knowledge”’ (Harrison, 2012, 88), I am sceptical of such a dream since anthropologists and kindred thinkers cannot come together if the academic system remains heavily dependent on colonial knowledge extraction and neo-liberal corporate profitability. If the academic empire is built on the exploitation of precarious scholars, whose precarity is exacerbated by intersectional structural violence, decolonisation remains a metaphor rather than the reality.

Decolonising the neo-liberal knowledge empire

While the critique of epistemic and systemic colonisation has been integral to anthropology for some time, the recent decolonial curriculum movement is broader than anthropology, yet more specific to the curriculum within academia in general. The recent wave of decolonisation academia intensified in 2014/2015 with the ‘Rhodes must fall’ student movement, which started in Cape Town and spread to its colonial origin in the UK with the question, Why is My Curriculum White (Ahmed, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Charles, 2019; Scott, 2021; Daniel and Platzky Miller, 2022). It stirred up new debates regarding decolonisation in academia and knowledge production by turning the gaze toward Western neo-colonial knowledge production that privileges and carries the legacies of colonial white men. The new wave of the decolonising curriculum movement problematises the marginalisation of knowledge produced by scholars and students of the Global South (Phillips, 2005; Peters, 2015; Le, 2016; Charles, 2019; Barnard-Naude, 2022).

Many postcolonial nationalist narrations intended to re-invent authentic pre-colonial cultural pride to construct the anti-colonial nationalist identity, following the legacy of the colonial process of exclusion and selection (Gopal, 2021). Therefore, Priyamvada Gopal argues, ‘[d]ecolonisation now, as then, necessarily involves identifying these complicities and putting pressure on old tyrannies in postcolonial vessels covering themselves in the garb of nationalism, indigeneity and decolonisation’ (Gopal, 2021: 891). The process of decolonisation is not to dig up the ‘original’ cultural forms buried under colonialism; instead, it identifies the complicities with colonial forces that continue to exist and dominate the knowledge empire. With that in mind, decolonisation is about creating something new, an assemblage of imaginations with an epistemological departure from the colonial modern knowledge production. It is part of the scholar's conscious political and intellectual attempt to destabilise the dominant colonial narratives. As Gopal puts it, ‘any proper engagement with ‘decolonisation’ must involve a critical assessment not only of colonialism but also those other intersecting oppressive regimes from patriarchy and caste to religious chauvinism and bondage’ (Gopal, 2020: 748).

Moreover, the recent debates on decolonising academia must focus on contemporary neo-colonial and neo-liberal capitalist exploitation within and by western academic practice, which is a rather recent structural change (Giroux, 2010; Graeber, 2014; Fisher, 2022). This neoliberal market value in the universities, replaced the scope of scholarship and activism for structural equality and human rights with marketing policies to attract international high fee-paying students with promises of a diverse and inclusive educational environment (Darder, 2012). Moreover, new public management, austerity, undermining of unions and linguistic colonialism contributed to the epistemic narrowing of the knowledge within the Western centre. As Judith Butler argues, the neo-liberalisation of the universities:

[G]ave rise to at least three sorts of concerns: the first has to do with the broken promise of free education under neoliberalism; the second has to do with the colonial aspirations of the university's offerings – its disciplines, its texts, its canons. A third political claim quickly formed as well: why has the university, often understood as an open space, if not a sanctuary, become a site for security forces, trained in military methods, to block student movements, disrupt their organising, scatter their assemblies, and fault their expression? (Butler, 2021: 61)

Without challenging the neo-liberalisation of academia in the Global North, the radical political possibilities of the decolonising demands, risk being assimilated into the neo-liberal rhetoric of equality, diversity and inclusion, despite opening up some spaces for the scholars of the Global South and allowing it to look back on its own disciplinary practices and exclusions (Darder, 2012; Kidman, 2020; Barnard-Naude, 2022; Ferri, 2022). Therefore, Butler (2021) argues that decolonising the university in neoliberal times requires the dismantling of the system that transforms universities into a consumer option.

Demands for decolonisation in anthropology are neither new nor the radical political possibilities of anthropological scholarship. However, what is new is the increasingly growing academic precarity created by the neoliberal universities, in addition to the marginalisation of women, and non-elite scholars from the Global South. The increasing competition and hierarchy between the scholars create a cruel atmosphere where bullying and harassment are often used as career tools, maintaining the marginalisation of socially marginalised scholars. (Täuber and Mahmoudi, 2022). Precarity in academia is also a class issue and we need a class war to fight against it (Ivancheva, 2022). Bringing the discussion of class, race and gender into the centre of the fight for decolonising academia is vital since the intersectional inequality creates absolute precarity for these scholars (Meyers, 2013; Ivancheva et al., 2019; Nititham, 2022).

Decolonising, therefore, primarily needs to address at least three facets of the exclusion by coloniality and neo-liberalisation in the academy, but they must be addressed simultaneously. One is the exclusion of scholars critical of colonisation, neo-colonisation and neo-liberalisation. Second is the exclusion of the anti-racist and feminist scholarship critical of the neo-colonial trends in academia, and third is the exclusion of the politics and the practices to resist these.

The first facet is comparatively easy to address with a sincere Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) programme. However, EDI usually only addresses the quantitative presence of diverse scholars. The representation of marginalised scholars needs to come with their politics since representation without politics is just a form of tokenism that does not challenge marginalisation. As Moosavi (2020) argues, the current wave of decolonisation often remains limited to homogenising non white intellectuals by essentialising and appropriating the Global South. As a result, it risks tokenism in the academy of the Global North and elitism within the scholars of the Global South. Therefore, if decolonisation only focuses on the essential identity of the scholars and does not challenge the fundamental Western-modern colonial epistemology, it risks limiting itself as a stylish currency in academia without much substance. It would remain within the episteme of colonial modernity, which, Sujata Patel (2020) argues, transformed into ‘methodological nationalism’ incorporating the language of colonialism in many postcolonial contexts. In addition, the neo-colonial metrics of publications and impacts must be challenged radically to create an inclusive space for marginalised academics (Gruber, 2014). The citational politics, the politics of the star systems, professional networks, impact factors and many invisible barriers that prevent marginalised scholars and their work from being appreciated need to be challenged. In anthropology, the scholars’ representation must be addressed with epistemological decolonisation. The systemic erasure of the marginalised scholars needs to be resisted.

The good news is that the intrinsic superiority of knowledge produced in the Global North has not only started to be addressed epistemologically, but it has also started to be addressed within the disciplinary practice. For example, the World Council of Anthropological Associations, which consists of all of the associations of anthropology, worldwide, recently took a bottom-up approach to challenge the ‘West is best’ dogma in publication and employment venues (Publishing and Citation Practices – WCAA, 2024), which created the possibility to stand against the marginalisation of the anthropologists of the Global South. In addition, the systemic marginalisation of black, colonial and feminist anthropology in the mainstream anthropological discourse did not manage to stop the feminists, in particular, the black and WOC feminists, from reclaiming feminist anthropology to resist the inherent male bias in anthropology (Bolles, 2016). In 1988, the Association of Feminist Anthropology (AFA) was established as a section of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the journal, Voices: A Publication of the Association for Feminist Anthropology started its journey in 1995 (Wies, 2020). The publication stopped in 2018, and its successor journal Feminist Anthropology began its publication from 2019. With the rise of the marginalised feminist lens of anthropology, resisting the citational politics, as ‘one of the many battlegrounds where race, gender, and sexual politics play out in academia’ (Smith, 2022: 208) became salient. In the second issue of Feminist Anthropology, the statement of the movement ‘Cite black women’ (Smith, 2021) was published and the systemic erasure of the scholarship by black women was contested (Smith and Garrett-Scott, 2021; Smith, 2022). The ‘cite black women’ movement is an example that can be spread to all other intersectionally marginalised scholars in academia (Smith, 2021).

The second problem is the marginalisation of radical scholarship. For decoloniality, we must identify the systemic marginalisation of critical scholarship from the Global South and the scholarship situated in the Global North's margin that radically challenge the colonial knowledge empire within anthropology. Decoloniality must involve identifying and challenging all kinds of systemic marginalisation in anthropology. This marginalisation prevents a substantial and continuous transformation of coloniality within the discipline. Resisting and challenging that marginalisation needs to be addressed in the curriculum and the decolonising curriculum movement could be an ongoing platform for this goal.

The third problem concerns politics and practice in anthropology and academia. This is the most challenging side of decolonisation. In particular, in anthropology, as I discussed earlier, we often see that critical scholarship does not necessarily translate into the political positionality of the scholars. While many anthropologists have been vocal against institutional power abuse, we often notice that many of them tend to quickly support the established and influential scholars instead of the marginalised ones in cases of formal or informal accusations of abuse of power by established scholars. Moreover, while many anthropologists are critical of injustice in the real world, they often either remain silent or conform to institutional power relations with internalised neo-liberal competitive values in academia. This can be damaging in two ways. It provides support for the exploitative nature of the institutions, and at the same time, it exposes the lack of commitment to the anti-racist, feminist or decolonial theories that they produce in anthropology. Girish Daswani (2021) asked, how should we understand the inaction of anthropologists who do not engage with the violence of racism, sexism, and ableism in the world or their own departments but who expertly lecture about race, sex/gender and virtue ethics? One answer might be to keep our eyes not only on what the scholars are publishing but also on how they respond to contemporary political crises in an active way. We need to be aware of their political positionalities and what they are doing or not doing about contemporary political movements against academic precarity, fascism, anti-migrant sentiments, racism, transphobia, contemporary coloniality, genocide, apartheid and for academic freedom and racial, gender/reproductive justice. We need to recognise and remember the silence and conformity of those critical thinkers in the context of current political and humanitarian crises.

Last but not least, we have to deal with the apparent blindness of anthropologists who cannot see the violence within the walls of the academy (Welcome, 2022). We must address the unwillingness of members of the discipline to abandon extractive models of fieldwork, to explore white supremacy in their research, and to address racism, classism, ableism, hetero-patriarchy, sexual assault, labour exploitation, and other acts of oppression and harm within their department. I want to support Leniqueca Welcome when she argues that the only appropriate anthropology for our times is anthropology involved in dismantling our current white supremacist, imperialist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist formations and building a world where scholarship and activism against the like are no longer necessary. And if we are prepared to see ethnography as a form of extractive practice and, therefore, create alternative ways to do research or to think outside our received canon under the terms of what Ryan Cecil Jobson (2020) has called a ‘patchy anthropology’, we might see the hope for creating a path to decolonisation in anthropology.

Conclusion

Since decolonisation is a process (Bolles, 2023), a means, much more than an end; I am not too interested in discussing whether decolonising anthropology is possible. Decolonisation creates a path to constantly challenge the extractive power structure in the academy and anthropology. It starts with building solidarity between the marginalised scholars for a radical change that decentres the centre (Burlyuk and Rahbari, 2023). It involves centring those ignored and marginalised scholars who have already been doing the work but remain outside of anthropology's star system. It involves bringing the de/postcolonial, feminist, queer, and black scholarship to the centre by reversing the traditional anthropological gaze from the margin to the centre, creating alternatives to the extractive higher education system and the depoliticisation of anthropology. And if, for that matter, we need to be the undutiful daughters of anthropology and build something new, I am willing to do so. All I am advocating is that we keep looking for ways to continue doing the work. My early academic career in the Global South supported me to be a feminist, and being a feminist taught me that we must resist, using whatever tools we have. If we think that the colonial/imperial system is too powerful and exclusionary and that we cannot do anything to change it, then we are already defeated. Without decolonial politics, as a brown, halfie woman anthropologist, I do not belong here. Therefore, decolonising anthropology is a politics of belonging and a platform to connect with many other marginalised voices in anthropology.