 . . . Fall 1997
TURNING THE FIELD The University�s Department of Anthropology has been ranked at or near the top of its field in official and unofficial rankings for a number of years. Among the reasons for its prominence is its openness to diverse approaches to theory and fieldwork. Last spring, at a forum for the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, several African American students in the doctoral program described how studying anthropology was changing their views of the field and how their presence ought, in their minds, to change the field, itself. Three of the students adapted their presentations for Michigan Today.
I see dangers of at least three sorts in being a Black anthropologist: the threat that we pose to the discipline; the endangered nature of our presence in the academy, and the danger we potentially face in the field unprotected from the benefits of white privilege. Let us examine the dangers in more detail. Danger One: By our mere presence we threaten what I call the "bordering" of anthropology�its traditions of tourism, colonialism, travel and so forth. Barbara Tedlock characterizes traditional anthropology as comprising four archetypes, none of which has been inclusive of Black anthropologists. They are: � The amateur observer�the explorers, travelers, medical doctors, colonial officers, missionaries, the idle rich and all of those who provided accounts for the second archetype. � The armchair anthropologists of the late 19th century who confidently provided out-of-field synopses of usually "Third World" areas. � The professional ethnographer who emerged following World War I as individuals began to conduct intensive fieldwork in distant places to reconstitute order out of disorder. � And the "gone-native" fieldworker who, in order to understand the "primitives/savages/natives," was encouraged to think, feel and behave as closely as possible to the "native."
Anthropology is often called the child of imperialism because it is the only discipline that derives most, if not all, of its theory from the West, while gathering all of its data from developing "Third World" countries and the "internal US colonies." Some say, in fact, that anthropology, in studying "the other," shares a thin boundary with conquering "the other." Anthropology has yet to wholly recover from its condescending craze of studying isolated "primitive" peoples. Even to this day, it is more acceptable in anthropology departments to "go away" to study someone else than to study your own or to stay close to home. So what happens when those people who usually constitute the data suddenly become researchers in the discipline? There is disruption. All of a sudden, we begin participating in places and spaces, dialogues and discourses, where we are not used to being seen and heard and therefore are not used to joining in. Danger Two: extinction. It is not uncommon when one of us shares with people outside of the discipline or outside of the academy that we are in anthropology, for inquirers to react with surprise confusion, or curiosity: "Are there really Black people in anthropology?" Or: "I didn�t know there were Black people in anthropology." This question is more informed than it appears, as it attests to the low numbers of Black graduate students in the discipline. Since 1974, the University of Michigan has produced seven Black PhDs in anthropology, and U-M is one of the nation�s leaders. Only 28 Blacks have enrolled in the department in that time span, and 11 of us are here now, hoping to finish. The Research Doctorate Programs in the United States reports, however, that U-M also has the lowest percentage of minority graduate students out of the top five departments. Danger Three: the field. Fieldwork provides the core for anthropological research. Unlike most other students in anthropology, Black students in anthropology disproportionately study their "own," what we call "native anthropology," especially in the African Diaspora. But some of us are more native than others, depending not only on where we study or where we are from, but also on how we are perceived wherever we go. For example, I�m Black here in the US, but when I go to Jamaica, I am perceived as Chinese or Guyanese, and these differences�how they impact our work�are not necessarily appreciated at "home," meaning here in the academy. Because in the academy, though I may be seen as some sort of ethnic "other," it is never first assumed that I am "fully" Black. I am often mistaken as being mixed or Latina or some sort of ambiguous ethnic other. At home or in the field, the kind of "blending in" that we do is not necessarily an advantage. The question we keep coming back to is: who is supposed to be an anthropologist? The answer we keep arriving at is: not us. We do not want to believe that being a Black anthropologist is inherently contradictory. However, the statistics, experiences and dangers we endure make this seem so. The next question for us is not: in spite of all of this, do we become anthropologists? The more relevant and perhaps more difficult question is: considering the odds against us, how is it that we succeed in becoming anthropologists, anyway?
 In 1988, I was one of 20 college year abroad students at the American University in Cairo. That year was eye-opening to a radical Black teenager who imagined she was returning to Africa, the motherland. I learned that most Egyptians do not consider themselves African and, even less so, Black African. I learned that some Egyptians do not even consider themselves Arab; they have a home-grown notion of identity: Egyptians are Egyptians. Who was I to tell them differently? That year, my Afrocentric dreams were crushed by an Egyptian reality. I was shocked to learn that many Egyptians refused to consider me African. They counted me as one among many neo-colonizing Americans readily imposing their politics, scholarly knowledge and culture on other people. I realized that neither present day nor pharaonic Egypt is my African motherland. Nonetheless, I returned home with a deep appreciation for most of the Egypt and Egyptians I had come to know. Now that I�m in graduate school I�m interested in how people who have left their homelands to settle in other countries form their identities. For my dissertation, I focus on the experiences of Sudanese refugees and exiles in Cairo. In Sudan there are 19 major ethnic groups based on notions of heritage and culture, and these are further divided into more than 600 ethno-linguistic subgroups. Broadly speaking, however, the Sudanese place themselves in one of two groups�the Arabized Muslims of the North, whose mother-tongue is Arabic, and the Africans of the South, who are Christians or adherents of indigenous beliefs and whose mother-tongues are various African languages. More than 40 years of armed civil conflict between these two camps has driven Sudanese refugees and exiles to Egypt and elsewhere. The current phase of civil war pits the National Islamic Front and Sudanese military regime that took power in 1989 against the National Democratic Alliance, which includes both the Sudanese People�s Liberation Army composed primarily of Black African southerners and the Arab groups opposed to the government. Discovering greenness at a festival Arab Sudanese recognize seven "racial" categories. Abyad (Arabic for White) refers to non-Sudanese Arabs. Asfaar (Yellow) refers to light-skinned Sudanese Arabs. Akhmaar (Red) describes skin tones a bit darker than light brown. Asmaar (Brown) is reserved for most Sudanese Arabs. Akhdaar (Green) refers to dark-brown Arabs. Azreg (Blue) describes the skin color of very dark-skinned Arab Sudanese, whom it is unacceptable to identify as Black. Arabs also consider Blue a polite term with which to refer to the deep blue-black coloring of African Southerners. Aswad (Black) is the term for the color of African peoples of southern Sudan. Arab Sudanese use the word for slave (Abeed ) interchangeably with the word for a Black person (Aswad). Ethnographers further report that whiteness to Arab Sudanese stands for a noble heritage, cleanliness and honor. Blackness stands for evil, dirtiness and disaster, and for the humiliation of defeat and the shame of being a descendant of African slaves. My beautiful green darling Talal�s voice crooned the lyrics, "My Green One, in our affair my Green One shuns me. My Green One dries me out . . . . As long as passion dawns and love becomes ripe, leave me in the shapely sofa, leave me. My Green One shuns me." On one level the song cries out about the heartbreak of unrequited love, but the lyrics suggest multiple meanings of greenness. Is the green one actually a dark-hued beauty? Or is greenness actually Paradise, as the words conjure up images of oases and botanical gardens promised in the Qur�an as heavenly rewards? Perhaps greenness signifies sexuality and fecundity�the fruition of life. Or does the imagery recall the lost "salad days" of youth or symbolize the beloved homeland that Sudanese exiles and refugees left behind? Ambiguity furnishes the symbolic power of green. One can never fully harness its range of meanings. The multiplicity of greenness suggests to me that scholars and lay persons alike should search for understandings of identity beyond surface explanations and simple dualism. It�s not easy being green "Samaara." The word reminded me of how trying it has been at times to be a Black/Brown female in Cairo, facing sexual harassment in streets from Egyptian men. They would yell or whisper something like, "Pssst, pssst. Ya, Samaara! Ya, Samaara!" Which essentially means, "Pssst, pssst. Hey, Brown Sugar! Hey, Brown Sugar!" Evidently, to the average Egyptian man, I fit their stereotypes of either African woman as prostitute or Western woman as sexually liberated swinger. No matter how conservatively I dressed or how much I avoided eye contact with men, I would quite often hear on the streets "Ya, Samaara! Pssst, pssst. Ya Samaara!" I asked Afaf, who is darker than I am, if she considered herself a Green person. Conventionally, Arab northerners who are, like her, just as dark as many African southerners would identity as an Ikhdaarani or Azregi, that is, as a Green or Blue person, but not as a Black person. However, virtually all Sudanese exiled in Cairo�whether Arabs or Africans�are Black to the minds of many Egyptians. After all, the place name al-Sudan translates as "Land of the Blacks." In reply, Afaf challenged the conventional definitions of Arab Sudanese by also declaring herself a Black and African. On hot summer afternoons drinking hot spice tea, Afaf and I would commiserate about our related challenges of being Black and female in Egypt. Numerous occasions served me a taste of how it feels to be African or Sudanese in Cairo, subject to ordinary Egyptian ethnocentric behavior like intrusive stares, finger pointing and laughter. I told her about a crowd of summer school students who yelled at me, "Congo!" "Congo!" as I walked by. I figured Congo conjures up images of apes and primitives to the Egyptian imagination. Afaf told me how Egyptian men boldly look at her and chat her up while riding elevators. She explained that such behavior is disrespectful and would never be directed toward Egyptian women. Afaf is trying to forge social and economic co-operatives between Arab and African Sudanese in Cairo. In her endeavors she walks a fine line between the Arab identity that conditioned her formative years and a Black or African identity internally or externally imposed upon her via experiences in exile. On one hand, to the Sudanese Southerners, Afaf is a "white" Arab, a member of the oppressive group still ruling the Sudan. On the other hand, to the Egyptian host society, Afaf is from the Land of the Blacks. I also shift between multiple aspects of my self in the course of my ethnographic encounters with Sudanese and Egyptians. Arab Sudanese, noting my nationality, class background or educational status, identify me as a "Brown" person and emphasize the American part of my Black American identity. But when I�m with African Sudanese, I am readily claimed as a fellow Black; they also attempt to discourage my fieldwork with Arab Sudanese. Still at other times, when dealing with Egyptian officials for instance, I capitalize on the privileges afforded me by my United States passport and affiliation with a world-class university Wherever I am, however, I find myself more aware of complexly shaded realities in Egypt that are by definition more profound than my less nuanced visions of not so long ago. I will never forget the time an Egyptian cab driver defined my identity in his terms: "Michael Jackson, yes," he said. "African, no."
 When I began my graduate career in 1991, I was interested in Caribbean migration to Scandinavia. I was one of two Black women in the program. Given my darker skin and Leo rising personality, I was always visible. I remember lingering eyes when I dared to speak in class, my stifled frustration and anger when readings and classroom discussions were less and less about people and the politics that affect our lives and more and more about written words. As I began to realize that I had romanticized the discipline, I wanted to leave many times. Partly because of the political intensity of my own country, Haiti, I turned my attention to the Caribbean. When I expressed an interest in researching in Haiti, however, I was told that I would not have the detachment necessary for scientific inquiry and that my work would never be taken seriously. As a "native" or insider, fieldwork would be "too easy." In any event, the Haitian military coup of 1991 deterred me from pursuing fieldwork in Haiti, and I became interested in Jamaican female market vendors who illegally entered the import/export trade in the 1970s. Although the Caribbean has not been incarcerated by "gatekeeping concepts," the region is still plagued by simple and derogatory perceptions as [a] tourist destination, [by] US invasions and [by] 'third-worldism'. Images of blue sea, all-inclusive flamingo-painted hotels, Rastafarians, spliffs and reggae, Black people fleeing macoutes in makeshift boats, and banana-leaf-covered shacks tend to cloud outsiders' opinions of the region. The images invoked by the categories I mentioned earlier are not at all exclusive; some are more prominent than others depending on the specific country. The fact is, as a field site the region is, according to anthropologist Michel Rolph-Trouillot, "neither Western nor native enough' for anthropology and its pursuit of the 'other.'" They were denying the Caribbean its heterogeneity. They were still in the grip of simple and derogatory perceptions of the Caribbean as a tourist destination. Images of blue sea, flamingo-painted hotels, Rastafarians, reggae, spliffs and banana-leaf-covered shacks still tend to dominate outsiders� opinion of the region. I also noticed that some faculty assumed that when we Black anthropologists work in the field, we do not face as many hardships or sacrifice as much as white anthropologists do. The truth is, I found that in Kingston I embodied more identities than I knew how to negotiate�outsider/insider, feminist/half-anthropologist, native. How was my experience different from that of a European, a Chinese or an East Indian male or female in Jamaica? There are several responses to this question, but they all arise from Jamaica�s history. By the time Jamaica gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962, it had been a British colony for 307 years. Social differentiation among black Jamaicans was created and maintained by colonial administration primarily on the basis of bodily characteristics. The offspring of a white man and a black woman was a "mulatto"; a mulatto and a black produced a "sambo"; from a mulatto and a white came a "quadroon." A quadroon and a white produced a "musteefino," who was free by law and ranked as white, and thus could inherit capital and property. Hence color, manifested as class, became the most important index of a person�s worth in Jamaica. Currently, color gradations in Jamaica range from black to brown to red to high brown to �yella.� Even among whites distinctions are made between whites (an unambiguous white from abroad), Jamaica whites (a white with acknowledge partial Black ancestry) and white Jamaicans (locals of European ancestry. When I began fieldwork in Jamaica in 1992, I was reminded that Jamaicans of my skin tone do not seek the sun. I became more aware of uses of umbrellas and hats to avoid getting darker. Buju Banton�s song "Brownin"�about his desire for brown-skinned as opposed to black women�had caused an uproar prompting a response from Nardo Ranks. Ranks�s song titled "Dem a bleach" is about the extensive use of skin-bleaching creams among "brown" women.
At that time, my hair was straightened or "colonized"� a term I used often, much to the shock of the women I encountered. In Jamaica, I decided to stop "processing" my hair after a self-loathing experience at a beauty salon. Several months later, I got my hair cut off completely. A female hairdresser asked me if I was going to "texturize" it (that is, apply a permanent/relaxer chemical). She didn�t understand that I had cut it off because I no longer felt the "relaxed" hair on my head was mine. Many people were offended by my short, natural hairstyle. Women couldn�t believe I had cut off all that hair. Most men reacted with verbal violence to women with hairstyles like mine. I was often asked, "Why did you do that to your head?" That question was often followed by, "Do you have a man?"�suggesting that I was a lesbian. Back then, before "low hair" became fashionable, the middle-class women who wore this style were often artists or "yardies" (Jamaicans who went abroad and came back) or working class women who do not adhere to social norms, known as "rebel-women." My love for the sun and this cropped hair gave me another identity in Jamaica. People assumed I was African. When asked, at times, I would answer, "Aren�t we all?" which often discombobulated the inquirer. That my natural appearance was equated with Africanness is more than ironic, since many Africans, themselves, also suffer from that perverse "white bias." The Afro-phobia�fear of blackness�that pervades Jamaica is among other things bound up with a fear of economic and in some cases social poverty. The lessons I learned in 1993 informed my preparation for dissertation fieldwork. On some grant applications, I requested funding for certain status symbols. I wanted to document the fact that as a dark-skinned woman in Jamaica, I had special research requirements because I had neither the political nor social luxury of whiteness. As a "native" of the region, I would be expected to know better than to "dress down." Before my return in 1995, I shopped for my status symbols, a "lady�s" wardrobe�jewelry and designer glasses that said "foreign" or "money"; clothing that included tailored pieces for the interviews with officials, lots of high heels, perfume, make-up and a pair of Adidas for those days when Kingston got to be too much. At the arcades�the markets where the women I was researching worked�I wore long floral skirts and linen shirts or blouses that covered my arms, which got me the respect of the older men around, who dubbed me their African Princess, but annoyed the women vendors, who thought I must be either pregnant or spineless, because I did not accentuate my body as they did. When I did wear shorter clothing, I dreaded going to the field site without my survival clothing kit because the markets are filled with the testosterone of the "goose-killers"�young men the market women hire to steer customers to their stalls�who would grab me and demand that I talk with them. All in all, the process of living against the culture was helpful for me, since this approach forced me to "see out of more than one eye." And that is what an anthropologist is supposed to learn how to do. |
Many of us Black anthropology students and students from formerly colonized countries say that we are trying to "decolonize anthropology." We mean that we are trying to extend the field beyond the regional area where we conduct our research to include the academy, itself, as an object of anthropological inquiry. 
What happens when, because of color and class barriers, your background has included neither the leisure nor the privilege of travel and tourism like the amateur observer? What happens when you do not have a historical motive of imperialism or a mission of religious evangelism? What happens if you are an anthropologist who does not subscribe to the remote "confidence" or detachment of the armchair archivist or analyst because you do not have faith in these traditional analyses? What happens when you do not have the compulsion to "order" the Third World as traditional ethnographers do? And what happens when you cannot "go native" because you are "native"? 
One of my main data collection sites is the annual Sudanese Cultural Festival in Cairo, where African and Arab Sudanese collaborate. During one festival, I met singer Talal Abu Zein, thanks to my field collaborator, Afaf el-Bakri (pseudonyms protect their privacy). Both Afaf and Talal come from northern Sudan, home of the Muslim Arabs, and they were curious about my interests in color symbolism and prejudice within Egyptian and Sudanese cultures. 
In 1993, I returned for predissertation fieldwork. I lived in a working class area near a market. I became aware of how differently Jamaicans from various backgrounds treated me at various sites�the streets, the arcades where the women traders I studied worked, the University of the West Indies, the gym, the bus or the shopping mall I frequented. It dawned on me that in Jamaica, with my Social Science Research Council grant, I was economically upper class, though I seldom behaved as such for several conflicting reasons.