The Evidence of Arrogant Experience: Boomerang Anthropology and Curdled Otherness

Abstract

I write this chapter with primarily Third World/people of color in U.S. anthropology in mind: foreign-born, diasporic, and U.S. born. I will refer to them as anthropology’s Curdled Others who have consciously and variously marked their practices, realities, and identities as hyphenated, virtual, native, halfie, or hybrid.³ They are atypical Others in that they are academics within the U.S. anthropological and educational establishments. Most identify as persons of color and many exist at multiple intersections of marginalized racial, sexual, gendered, classed, and national citizenship. This conscious marking of oneself as hyphenated, hybrid, halfie, and virtual has been the most evident by those racialized Curdled Others who have confronted the realities of themselves working with or studying traditionally ethnographically witnessed communities—often increasingly seen as one’s “own.” Additionally, many of these Curdled Others are variously placed along the privileged spectrums of research and teaching schools and tenured-status, degree granting institutions, and citizenship. I use the term Curdled Otherness to highlight a dialectic. First, taking my queue from feminist ethnographers I recognize the potential limitations of using insider versus outsider in any pure organic sense.

Experience is, in this approach, not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain.

(Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience”)¹

A discipline in which “experience” is so central has been surprisingly unfriendly to the notion that “experience” is constantly refigured by memory. If an anthropologist can “write up” an ethnography based on data collected during doctoral fieldwork twenty or thirty years ago, why should it not be possible for “natives” to “write up” an ethnography based on their lives?

(Gupta and Ferguson)²