Paper short abstract:

: In this paper, I talk about some tactics that I employed from the beginning of my doctoral studies to deal with the colonial roots of anthropology as a discipline. Specifically, I explore some of the choices I made as a brown anthropologist working on whiteness in Europe.

Paper long abstract:

During my fieldwork in Berlin among non-governmental actors working with refugees on sexuality, I have encountered various difficulties for which I was not prepared. While the interlocutors usually have little time to talk to me, my access to their working environment as a participant-observer has not been a real possibility so far. Moreover, they usually looked confused even when I explained my research to them in detail. After all, I was an anthropologist, shouldn't I better talk to refugees themselves about what they think of the topic of sexuality? In this paper, I will talk about how my fieldwork experiences have been teaching me the very present colonial entanglements of the discipline of anthropology. Although there are many examples of other sorts, the "archetype" of anthropology (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) remains, to a large extent, white anthropologists going "elsewhere" (Trouillot 1991) and working "on" people of color. On the other hand, anthropologists of color are expected to work on "their own communities" (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Some of the difficulties I have been encountering throughout my fieldwork are partly due to the fact that brown anthropologists working with white interlocutors do not fit into this categorization. I will discuss the choices I have been making in relation to these issues. I will conclude by referring to the challenges that arise from such choices and the need for calibrating our ethnographic gaze to better "anthropologize" white subjects without assuming their worlds to be better known to others.