The Anthropology of “What Is Utterly Precious”

Abstract

Emerging from the long Black intellectual tradition, radical Black lesbian feminist work anticipates (and to some degree mitigates) some of the thorny epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic questions that anthropologists face, and have critiqued, since at least the early 1980s. This chapter assays a genealogical inquiry following their social-cultural methodologies, analyses, and theorization—arguing that this work inaugurates a redefined, revised, and “reworked” vision of how to conceive, carry out, and narrativize embodied social-cultural experience—which is the bread and butter, or ends, of the enterprise of anthropology. Here, our orientation turns toward the “discipline” or project Marlon Riggs called “anthropology . . . the unending search for what is utterly precious.”