At home to the other: the racialising and deracialising of anthropological research in South Africa

Abstract

There is an older and even more enduring split in South African anthropology than the erstwhile division between ‘English’ and ‘Afrikaans’ anthropologies, but it is never acknowledged. This is the racial split between whites who privilege the Other, usually the black African Other, in their field research, and blacks (in the general sense) who generally select ‘subjects’ in the same racial, linguistic and ethnic categories as themselves. In a discipline whose core identity depended for a large part of its history on alterity in research orientation (among other distinguishing features) the tendency of black anthropologists to do auto-anthropology both expressed and reinforced their subaltern position relative to white anthropologists. With reference to personal experience, I show how this pattern has been changing and suggest ways of encouraging the recent tendency towards a plurality of ‘subject’ choices among both white and black researchers. The outcome would be a local anthropology in which equality of opportunity in ‘the field’ mirrors the situation in the wider non-racial society. However, as I argue, the first step is to acknowledge the racially differentiated legacy in anthropology as in the larger society that we confront.