Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology

Preface

Preface 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 to study a discipline 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. This story, woven through a series of mini-stories, explores the practice of American anthropology at home and presents a side of American anthropology often absent in books and journals. When I started the journey into anthropology through which this story is woven, I was not conversant with American academic politics, especially the perceptions of anthropology held by other scholars and students. Consequently, I became quite disturbed by the “racist” label placed on anthropology by fellow graduate students in other disciplines, particularly those in sociology and political science. Troubled by this label, I consciously embarked on a journey to find out more about the discipline. Other than the glimpse I got into the subject after reading an introductory textbook, I had little knowledge of anthropology as a discipline—how it worked, where it came from, or how it related to other disciplines with which I was familiar. Yet I knew that Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, had had a brush with some form of anthropology that enabled him write his treatise titled Facing Mount Kenya, in which he chronicled the life of his viii . preface Kikuyu community. Renowned anthropologist Branislow Malinowski added legitimacy to Kenyatta’s book with an affirming introduction that emphasized the value of “native” perspectives in anthropology. Malinowski’s emphasis on “native” perspectives came at a time when anthropology was continually facing the paradoxes and contradictions that other social sciences had been dealing with. On the one hand, the discipline was following a rigorous scientific study of human societies and cultures, while on the other, the discipline was being used to advance notions of social Darwinism that regarded nonWestern cultures as inferior. In this regard, Malinowski was championing the fact that Africans such as Kenyatta had something important to contribute to the discipline. Kenyatta’s philosophy of self-governance and a respect for traditional cultural practices is not far from many anthropological principles that I have now come to embrace as a trained anthropologist. Interestingly, despite Kenyatta’s book being one of the very first ethnographies written by an African in the colonial context, he did not promote anthropology as a discipline in Kenya even after becoming the country’s first president.1 My journey into anthropology was by all standards an adventure. I entered into graduate school in America to study anthropology in the fall of 1992 and graduated in spring of 1998. Even though my anthropology department in graduate school followed the four-field approach (having cultural, linguistic, archaeology, and physical anthropology subdisciplines), I focused on cultural anthropology. Studying in such a context allowed me to acquire a richer understanding of the discipline. And now, in retrospect, I see that it gave me an advantage as a professor who was introducing undergraduate students to the discipline. I was in graduate school at a very dynamic phase in the discipline of anthropology in general and in American anthropology in particular. Even though I took courses that allowed for a glimpse into the history of the discipline , I almost felt as though I were entering into a movie theater when the feature film had already been running for a while. How else could I explain having to read E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes on the one hand and George Marcus, James Clifford, and Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres on the other? I was reading about British social anthropology and its functionalist approaches while also reading about challenges directed at the authority of ethnographic representation of social reality or of White feminist projects’ insensitivity to the plight of women of color.2 It was a time of questioning the authority of the grand narratives that had shaped much of Western anthropology for the first six decades of the twentieth century. I was in graduate school during the postmodern phase in anthropology, where [18.218.234.83] Project MUSE (2024-04...