Paper short abstract:

The contribution reflects my journey as an anthropology lecturer working as a short-term consultant for a development organization in Bangladesh. It scrutinizes how careers are made at the intersections of academia and the development industry.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed contribution will reflect on my journey as an anthropology lecturer working as a short-term consultant for a development organization (INGO) in Bangladesh. I wish to discuss how that experience, outside anthropology/ academia, contributed to my subsequent work and thinking in anthropology on questions of indigeneity and identity politics at a time when people ordinarily held up an essentialist view of what constitutes an indigenous people. My role as a reviewer (along with some grassroots activists holding high positions in the development industry) of a “development” project targeted to the marginalized “indigenous” people living in some northwestern parts of Bangladesh, (increasingly labeled IPs or Adivasis with capitalization in various NGO project documents), was limited to the see and evaluate the effectiveness of the project (in relation to some expressed objectives and goals). But it opened up the possibilities for me to witness a process of identity construction that I wouldn’t have known, had I not been involved with the project. The work outside academia, at a rather early stage of my career, provided me with the problematique of my doctoral dissertation. My subsequent engagements with the development field culminated in several research agendas and publications that dealt with both academic debates and public debates/ activist concerns/ engagements on indigeneity. The contribution will scrutinize how careers are made at the intersections of academia and the development industry and what it may involve theoretically, methodologically, and ethically.