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Part One: Ethnographic Meaning Making and the Politics of Difference
- University of Texas Press
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Part One Ethnographic Meaning Making and the Politics of Difference The moment the insider steps out from the inside she’s no longer a mere insider . She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition, her intervention necessarily that of both not quite an insider and not quite an outsider. She is, in other words, this inappropriate other or same who moves about with always at least two gestures: that of affirming ‘I am like you’ while persisting in her difference and that of reminding ‘I am different’ while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at. Trinh t. Minh-ha, Not You/Like You Arrival Scenes I n the summer of 1925, Jovita González discovered J. Frank Dobie, the “father” of Texas folklore studies, at the University of Texas where she briefly enrolled as a Spanish student. Before that moment of discovery, she recalled, “the legends and stories of the border were interesting, so I thought, just to me. However he made me see their importance and encouraged me to write them.”1 González found folklore studies at the very moment of its emergence as a regional scholarly practice, and she quickly rose to prominence in the field as one of its most charming and “authentic” scholarly voices. But folklore studies gave González something more than a high profile career: it supplied her with an analytic tool through which to reexamine the stories of her childhood, as well as the perspective or, perhaps more precisely, the intellectual distance from those stories that was 24 Native Speakers necessary for her to really see them and understand their significance within a broader social and historical context. Zora Neale Hurston made a similar discovery in 1927, in the “marble halls” of Barnard College where she took introductory classes in anthropology with Gladys Reichard, and later with the “father” of modern anthropology , Franz Boas.2 For Hurston, like González, this was a double discovery. She later recalled that it was the “spy-glass of anthropology” that helped her to see African American folklore in a new light. Before Hurston found anthropology, the folklore that she had heard “from the earliest rocking of [her] cradle” was, she famously wrote, “fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment.”3 Remarkably, that same summer, Boas rediscovered Ella Cara Deloria, a Dakota Sioux whom he had initially met in 1915 while she was a student at Columbia’s Teachers College. Boas found in Deloria an ideal Native collaborator , and through Boas, Deloria was able to craft a professional career out of what, since childhood, had been her overriding passion: listening to the stories of her people. Anthropology gave Deloria not only the tools, but also the language to talk about the Dakota in a way that did not romanticize them or relegate them to some vanishing past. Anthropology also provided her with a powerful forum through which she hoped to challenge public perceptions of Indian peoples and thereby transform the public policies that had so deeply impacted their lives. These scenes of discovery and rediscovery, clustered as they are within a few years of one another, suggest a provocative pattern of contact—a heretofore hidden history of the involvement of women of color in the project to identify and describe marginalized communities in the United States. But Deloria, Hurston, and González’s early involvement with the recognized fathers of anthropology and folklore studies also raises some questions with respect to the politics of knowledge production in the early twentieth century. How is it that three women of color from relatively remote social spaces and with little money or power came to play such central roles in the production of knowledge about their communities? To what extent did they collaborate with what Chandra Mohanty has termed the “fundamentally gendered and racial nature of the anthropological project”? And in what ways did they contest the “centrality of the white, Western masculinity of the anthropologist”? How did their own elaborations of ethnographic knowledge replicate or repudiate those of their White male and even their White female counterparts? And...