Paper Short Abstract:

My presentation explores situations arising from the anthropologist’s age, gender, class, ethnicity, and language. I connect these to the dichotomies of insider and outsider, home and field, stability and mobility, and through them I discuss broader hierarchies between East and West in anthropology.

Paper Abstract:

Starting out from three personal memories of situations that took place during fieldwork or in academic institutions in different locations, in Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Norway, my presentation and paper explore some of the difficult and often unspoken/unwritten tenets of anthropology as a discipline: age, gender, class, ethnicity, and language. Through discussing how the researcher’s stance in these respects position them vis-à-vis the choice of the topic, the objects of the research, and the methodologies used to explore it as well as to interpret the data, I aim to unpack the (false) dichotomy of the insider and the outsider position, the distinction between the “home” and the “field”, and the (in)visible opposition of stability and mobility as key aspect of anthropological research and/or neoliberal academia. Through reframing researchers’ individual/private experiences, opportunities, and limitations into narratives of collective and structural positions in academia, the broader object of the presentation and the paper is to (un)write (about) issues of knowledge hierarchies between East and West in anthropology.