Paper short abstract:

Anthropology often maintains that the native anthropologist is intimate with the culturally unsaid yet practised, and is more capable of an interior appraisal of native moral/social order than is the interloper anthropologist. Yet is this so? This discussion explores this contrast.

Paper long abstract:

It is still something of a truism in Anthropology that the native anthropologist studying the native moral and social order of which he or she is a member, will be more reflexive, someone whose reflexivity will be more augmented by native knowledge, than will the interloper anthropologist who comes from elsewhere and must learn just about everything from scratch. The reflexivity of the native anthropologist will enable her/him to generate ethnographic knowledge that will be deeper, more comprehensive, more nuanced, of greater intimacy. The native anthropologist is intimate with the culturally unsaid yet practiced. Therefore the native anthropologist is more capable of an interior critical appraisal of that moral and social order than is the interloper anthropologist. Yet is this so? Reflexivity is grounded in practice. Practice is grounded in the common sensical taken-for-granted moral and social order. These premises are practiced into existence over and again. Thus there is a loop of tacit knowledge (to use Michael Polanyi's idea) between the premises and practices of social existence, one that natives and native anthropologists likely master early on in their lives. This loop between premise and practice establishes tacit parameters of comprehensible discourse for natives and for the native anthropologist. This is common-sense knowledge which sets taken-for-granted 'limits' on expectations, patterning, and consequences of practice, thereby dampening and occluding native reflexivity. The interloper anthropologist, though he or she likely will come to know far less than the native anthropologist, may discover these tacit parameters, and so understand something of how native practice limits its discourse in common sensical ways, even as natives (and the native anthropologist) may feel that this is not so or makes no sense.