Racialized positionalities

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the ways ethnography – both as a mode of conducting research and a genre of writing – becomes destabilized in moments when race is ever more relevant as a historical fact and system of meaning that informs everyday life and the distribution of resources and power. Based on fieldwork with migrant Haitian women looking for work in Chile – a “white-mestizo” country – and their encounters with Chilean nationals in the city of Santiago, I explore the affordances of racialized positionalities in ethnographic research. By looking at how anthropologists can become implicated in perpetuating systems of oppression, I analyze how the dislocations between the anthropology of race and the effects of white supremacy impact how difference and otherness are thought of as integral to anthropology’s epistemic hierarchies and the ways it can transform ethnographic practice. I consider the challenges imposed by racialized positionalities as part of the responsibility of interrogating anthropology’s involvement in systemic forms of racism and white supremacy. In doing so, I propose racialized positionalities as useful ethnographic devices to navigate highly unequal fieldwork settings and examine white supremacy and racism as heterogeneous and relational objects of study that have profound consequences on people’s lives.