What! Me a Spy?

Abstract

This article describes and attempts to analyze an incident in which the author, an anthropologist conducting research on the Solar New Year's festival in Zanzibar, is suddenly and without warning ordered out of the country. Like all human beings meaningfully engaged with others, practicing anthropologists are politically positioned within the local and global contexts in which they live and work. But the consequences of such positioning, whether intentional or not, can be most keenly experienced in the context of polarizing political situations. And such situations can substantially influence the collaborative process that shapes an anthropologist's persona in the field. Linking personal narrative, Bourdieu's theory of habitus, and postcolonial studies, the author suggests that the events described and his response to them, which followed an election crisis in 1995, have important implications for anthropologists conducting fieldwork in the postcolonial milieu.