Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology

6. A New Pardigm for Twenty-First-Century Anthropology?

6 A New Paradigm for Twenty-First-Century Anthropology? What is the future of anthropology in a world that is becoming increasingly connected by new forms of globalization that hinge on a neoliberal economic model? What is the role of anthropology in highlighting and analyzing this global neoliberal condition, especially as it reflects not only anthropology’s quintessential research subject—the Other—but American anthropology’s relationship with other anthropologies? Faye Harrison offers an important starting point in Outsider Within (2008) for answering these questions by providing what she calls in her subtitle a “reworking of anthropology in the global age.” She then goes on to provide nine critical objectives toward this reworking of anthropology. Her ninth objective of “developing a commitment for decentering Western epistemologies and promoting a genuine multicultural dialogue in the study of humanity” greatly informs the discussion I undertake in this chapter.1 In order to exemplify how the future of anthropology is tied to reworking relationships that exist between the AAA and other world anthropologies, let me start by contextualizing my own academic identity as an Africanist anthropologist. Coming to America in the early 1990s to study anthropology also meant my entering into a formal area of study commonly known as African studies . As an African who had lived all my life (before coming to America) in Kenya, studying and conducting research and writing about things African, I never at any one time considered myself an Africanist. What makes one an Africanist anyway? And what are the specific research tools that constitute an Africanist research approach? These and other questions would occupy me in much of my academic life in America as I entered an arena in which my previously taken-for-granted Africanness demanded to be reflexively considered. The fact that I did not consider myself an Africanist does not mean that when I entered into anthropological training in America, I ceased to be African; rather, I had a new set of eyes and new discourse through which to regard that reality. I found myself, for the first time in my academic experience, entering into a conversation about Africa—its identity and its inhabitants. The first academic home for anthropology in Kenya was the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nairobi, which until the early 2000s was heavily regarded as the “anthropology program” home at the institution. Today the Institute reflects its anthropological identity in its name, the Institute of Anthropology, Gender, and African Studies—clearly establishing that anthropology , gender, and African studies are independent spheres of knowledge production and study. When it was started in 1966, the institute (known then as the Institute of African Studies) “was charged with the responsibility of promoting and conducting original researches in the field of African prehistory and history; musicology and dance; traditional and modern arts crafts; religion and other belief systems”—clearly placing anthropology within a multidisciplinary context.2 At Kenyatta University, where I trained for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, there was no institute or center for African studies, and it remained so into the 2000s. But we did attend to research grounded in what I now know as African studies. Maybe all I needed was to come into anthropology to finally be legitimized into my own academic identity as an Africanist.3 Intrigued by this new academic identity as an Africanist when I entered American higher education, I decided to spend some time looking back at the history of my “new” field of study. In this historiography of African studies, I also wanted some answers to explain why I had sensed some hostility toward anthropology among some fellow graduate students in disciplines such as sociology and political science. Coincidentally, these fellow students were all in the field of African studies. Renowned American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein would provide for me a much-needed historical context for a discussion about African studies. Wallerstein argues the following in relation to anthropology’s interest in the Other and especially the African: The fact that the study of Africa was thus limited of course reflected the division of intellectual labour that had been carved out in the late nineteenth century, among whose features was the division of the world into three geographical zones: modern European and European-settler states, which were a new paradigm · 127 studied by economists, historians, political scientists, and sociologists; nonWestern areas with a long-standing written culture and...