First post of the year

[la_vie_noire]

Via ew_younerd: How racist is American anthropology?

Yes, Ntarangwi has conducted an anthropological study of American anthropology! An important undertaking. He has studied textbooks, ethnographies, coursework, professional meetings, and feedback from colleagues and mentors. He “reverses the gaze", he stresses: Whereas Western anthropologists often study non-Western cultures, he studies “the Western culture of anthropology".

He is especially interested in “the cultural and racial biases that shape anthropological study in general".

In the preface and introduction he writes:

If anthropology truly begins at home as Malinowski states, how come, as I had thus far observed, anthropology tended to focus on the “exotic"? How come only a small percentage of fieldwork and scholarship by Western anthropologists focused on their own cultures, and when they did it was among individuals and communities on the peripheries, their own “exotics” such as those in extreme poverty, in gangs, ad others outside mainstream culture? (…)

This book is a personal journey into the heart of anthropology; representing my own pathways as an African student entering American higher education in the early 1990s that I knew very little about. It is a story about my initial entry into an American academic space very different from my own experience in Kenya, where we followed a British system of education.

It is also a story hemmed within a specific discourse and views about anthropology that can be best represented by remarks from fellow graduate students who wondered what i was doing in a “racist” discipline. (…) Troubled by this label, I consciously embarked on a journey to find more about the discipline.

Fantastic.

And, randomly, I take the opportunity to wish you all a great 2011.

Comments

[salinea]

A very happy new year to you too ♥

I dunno in the Americas, but where I studied it, Anthropological teachers were very self critical issues of imperialism, power differential, racism etc. and how they've been embedded in the discipline's History. That's where I first learned how to start being self conscious about my own privilege, institutional ways that racism etc. work in ways we are not always conscious.
Which doesn't mean it was perfect and not with a lot of problem as well, of course; but I had never encountered any of those ideas or how to think them anywhere before (and outside of what I've learned on the internet not since). No other disciplines seem to be as self-conscious and to problematize themselves and their own position that much that I can see.

One of the main text we studied was about reversing the gaze. Favret Saada's Les Mots, La Mort, Les Sorts.

[la_vie_noire]

Thank you! &hearts

I'm obviously not an expert on the field, I've never taken an academic course about this, for the little I know, I can say a lot of sociology can be very illuminating, dissecting a lot about oppression. At the same time, my experience with "Anthropology-Sociology-etc" in everything about "customs, practices, tradition, etc" of cultures... well, a lot of it is extremely othering and racist. I don't know.