How “Native” Is My “Native Anthropology”? Positionality and the Reception of the Anthropologist’s Work in Her Own Community – A Reflexive Account

Abstrakt

The paper problematizes the issue of the positionality of an anthropologist and the resonance of her or his work. It is argued that this is especially challenging when an anthropologist is a “native”, and it is his or her own minority community that reads the research results and reacts to them. The paper offers analyses of these issues using the example of the author’s own long-time study of the community she comes from and the resonance her work has gained there. The paper also presents the results of reflexive work about the political relevance and ethical obligations of the author’s work in the situation of the cultural hegemony of national culture over the minority she has been studying and comes from.