Global Identifications: The Social Identity Behind the Globalised Sociocultural Anthropologist

Abstract

My social identity as a diasporic Korean American male sometimes engendered doubts about my competency as a cultural anthropologist of South Korea. Such ethnonational gatekeeping by my ‘native’ Korean colleagues laid bare broader critiques of ‘the West’. Paradoxically, they also prompted re-entrenchments of nativeness (and implicitly, non-nativeness) by my colleagues despite their increasingly ‘non-native’ transnational identities. These embodied cultural boundaries are less visible (and arguably less consequential) to those viewed as recognisably non-native Asian (for example, white, Euro-American) or native Asian. But they are markedly visible and relevant to diasporic subjects who fit less comfortably within both boundary-enforcing classifications. The figure of the diasporic anthropologist reveals presumed racialised and gendered markers of difference—chiefly the unmarked but organising role of whiteness—conveniently subsumed under categories of ‘the West’ and ‘Asia’. Consequently, recent calls for ‘global anthropology’ against ‘Euro-American academic hegemony’ that fail to address this essentialising tendency, although important, remain inadequate.