The Girl-Geek Anthropologist

I just received a request for papers for an upcoming anthropology conference. The person who sent it is trying to put together a panel on reciprocity in research. The abstract sounds good, and, certainly means well. But it points to the debate about our roles in the field, and our work.

The abstract notes that:

Commitment to working on community issues would establish our credibility as social science collaborators with community leaders and reinvigorate the discipline's commitment to social change.

What bothers me about this statement is that there is still a definition between the "us" and "our informants". We are the authority. We are the ones who are being consulted on THEIR problems. We are the ones who give them a voice.

The dialectical relationship will invariably continue as long as we fail to recognize our "informants'" agency and their own voice. The arrogance of my discipline is starting to get to me.

Yes, Boaz had a lot to do with it, and the recent uproar about anthropologists being embedded with the military in the Human Terrain Team (HTT) just goes to show that we learned nothing from our colonial past, or our involvement with the US internment camps, or physical anthropology's participation in the holocaust. We have a very dark history, and it's unfortunate that as a discipline we have not learned all that much from our past. The more we keep the us/them division, the easier it will be to participate in such atrocities.

I'm having a love/hate relationship with my discipline right now.

I know I'm not the only one who thinks this way. There's plenty of us out there. But, the problem is, there seems to be more debate than active change these days, and I have to deal with the here and now, and the finishing of my dissertation.