Course Details

What is Alter/Native Anthropology? Alter/Native is a concept in search of a definition. That is part of our work for the quarter. The term Alter/Native Anthropology comes from the much-debated concept “native anthropology.” Native Anthropology refers to the spectrum of ideas, insights and projects of individuals and groups engaged in the study of their own “home” – the place or places from which they claim to originate, or in which, because of an intimate connection, they might be considered or consider themselves “insider,” “indigenous” or “native.” In its original conceptualization, native anthropologists was used to refer to people whose “home” has been the site of oppressive power relations and struggles, coercion, violence and exploitation, people whose societies, communities or cultures were the targets of colonial domination and the objects of anthropological inquiry, not the subjects or anthropologists.

Today we suspect that the dichotomy between native and anthropologist is fundamentally flawed. As “hybridization of cultures, languages and media becomes the rule, any notion of purity has disappeared” (Halleck and Magnan 1993:161), and the boundaries between observer and observed, oppressed and oppressor are known to be blurred, overlapping, mutually constituting, shifting and variable over time and space. Yet there is still a critical need to examine the theoretical, epistemological and practical contributions of the “counter-discourses”, the “narratives from the borderlands” of alternative historical voices.