E hoʻolono i ka ʻike pāpālua o loko a me ka ʻike pāpālua o waho

Try to listen to extrasensory knowledge that you posess and that exists beyond you. 

March 7, 2021 

I'm feeling much better today after some rest and natural medicines. This weekend was a tough one, but we made it through. Now it's time for recovery and more rest.

Caregiving has taught me so much about humility, compassion, and caring for those who are unable to care for themselves. It has also reminded me of the importance of family, self-care and mental health, things that I think our communities here in Hawaiʻi nei are only starting to come around to.

I've also been going through a process of trying to unpack my family's history, both the good and the bad. For most of my life, I've had a romantic vision of my mother's and grandmother's lives and of their relations before I was born. Stories of lūʻau, parties lasting into the wee hours of the morning, and of kūpuna being beacons of aloha and a connection to our past was something I frequently heard. These are all true of course, but there's so much more to these stories. They are also coded with stories of pain, violence, and trauma, stories that, at least in my mind, illustrate just how violent the process of Americanization was for our people. The impact of the near extinction of Hawaiian language on the psyche of our kūpuna is not the only story.

I'm grateful for my ʻohana for shielding me from these stories growing up. I am thankful that my mother made the choice to break these cycles of violence within our family and modeled what it meant to live aloha, to compromise where needed, and to value empathy. I am at a point in my life where I can reflect on these stories in a more robust way, in ways that grapple with the realness and the rawness of our lives. I also know that me saying this is a privilege; we still have so many of our ʻohana who struggle with alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence. I think about this often, on how we can better kōkua our communities and cultivate new ways (or perhaps adapting ancestral ways) of relating and caring for one another that isn't misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic.

ʻO ke aloha kai mea ʻoi aʻe. Have a good evening friends and family

In her hands, I saw the world anew 

A single-life, torn into hundreds of fragments

How time became 

Meaningless 

When we danced in 

endless loops  

March 10, 2021

The world seems 

Right once more yet 

the world is not more right 

Anthropologists Anonymous (2018)

I wrote this blog post for a class that I took at UH-Mānoa. The class was Indigenous Feminist Theory, taught by Dr. Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua. 

Anthropologists Anonymous of Hawaiʻi is a Hawaiʻi-based mutual aid fellowship whose stated purpose is to enable its members—both native and non-native—to recover from their experiences in anthropology in order to live a decolonial and anthropology-free life. Their members meet once a month in an undisclosed location on Oʻahu far from their ethnographic field sites. This is one of their stories.

I’m a recovering anthropologist. I first learned about anthropology as a seventh-grade student in a Hawaiian culture-based charter school. My kumu, a Hawaiian woman, told us about anthropology and the study of culture. I thought it was cool. She was a recent anthropology graduate from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo (UHH), and she took my classmates and I on huakaʻi across Hawaiʻi Island. We worked in the loʻi of Nāpoʻopoʻo in Waipiʻo, and woke up early to chant to the rising sun at Kumukahi. This was all done with the purpose of (re)connecting to our ʻāina and thus to our Hawaiian identity.

Five years later, when I was about to graduate from high school, a Hawaiian anthropologist came to our school to talk to me. She was the daughter of one of our school’s board members and was the first person from my community that I knew of who had a Ph.D. She recently moved home to Hawaiʻi because she accepted a position in the Department of Anthropology at UHH. Through her encouragement, I enrolled at UHH and became an anthropology major at a time when the department had an unusual number of Hawaiian students (mostly women). We supported one another and navigated our way through a discipline that always seemed slightly distant and foreign to our own cultural upbringing.

I graduate from UHH in 2013. Immediately thereafter, I studied anthropology at the University of Denver (DU). I was the only Hawaiian student in the department. I was one of twelve graduate and undergraduate students out of a total population of 11,778 who identified themselves as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.

At DU, classes that focused on Indigenous cultures and histories typically framed Indigenous peoples within comparative frameworks that examined culture before and after contact with the West. The colonial legacy of anthropology, as well as the reflexive turn in the field, were both discussed by the professors in theoretical rather than applicable terms. Indigenous politics were gestured to, but never adequately dealt with.

Within this context, I completed my master’s thesis. Instead of looking towards contemporary anthropological theory as the foundation of my scholarship, I drew significantly from the works of Indigenous women on Hawaiian epistemology and decolonizing methodologies, as well as the work of native male anthropologists on the indigenization of anthropology by Indigenous peoples themselves. I am grateful that my graduate mentors supported my framework—perhaps because they were ill-equipped to provide critical feedback on methodologies and histories that they lacked experience in. In 2015, I graduated from DU.

At that point, I seamlessly moved through anthropology for six years, developing a romantic sense of an indigenous anthropological praxis, albeit the stories that I heard from other colleagues with regards to their isolating experiences in the discipline and in their respective academic departments.

Today, I am a graduate student in American Studies. The move to not pursue a Ph.D. in Anthropology, but rather in American Studies, was not a critically-informed decision. But within the first semester of taking courses in American Studies, the protective walls that I built around anthropology began to crumble.

My courses critically engaged with anthropological texts, pushing back against the idea of an Anthropology that was “the most obsessively self-critical discipline in the academy” (Linnekin 1991, 173). My advisor, a Hawaiian woman trained in studying rhetoric and literature, criticized anthropologists in her own writings, highlighting how anthropologists poached Hawaiian knowledge and silenced native authority. Through various readings on race, gender, sexuality, and Indigenous sovereignty, I became aware of the continual structures of power and oppression that reified anthropological knowledge over other forms of knowledge production. One of my fellow cohort members in the department, another recovering anthropologist, shared with me her traumatic experience as a woman of color who was constantly gendered and racialized as a native informant and spokesperson for people of color within her department.

Through all of this, I remained skeptical of the continual issues that pervaded the discipline. When reading works such as Haunani Kay Trask’s “Native and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle,” I acknowledged the colonial origins of the discipline, but secretly tried to find sympathy for the anthropologists that she chastised. I thought of Trask as the Angry Native Woman, whose political woes were detached from a lived reality.

It was at that point that I realized my complicity in anthropology. My lack of critical understanding reflected my depoliticized movement through the discipline. I needed to change. 

At the start of my recovery, I considered that my experience in Anthropology at UHH (and to some degree, DU) was atypical. The reality for many minority students is that they are one of a few students within a sea of whiteness—both in terms of students and faculty members—in anthropology and other academic departments. For instance, the Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology, formed by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, reported in 2010 that anthropologists of color (AOC), the majority of whom were women, experienced racism and marginalization within their department. The report also included statements made by AOCs about experiencing sexism, elitism, and classism. Closer to home, the Association for Social Anthropology of Oceania, “an international organization dedicated to comparative studies of Pacific topics,” was called out for their failure to support Indigenous Pacific Islanders in the field. What these examples reveal is a discipline fractured by racial and hierarchal tensions. Although some work has been done to address these issues, there is still clearly much more work to do.

In light of these issues and in recognizing my problematic notions of Anthropology, I became motivated to learn more about why Native peoples and other minorities continued to face issues with the discipline. One particularly salient discussion within a Hawaiʻi context is the Trask-Keesing-Linnekin debate that occurred in 1991 in The Contemporary Pacific. Although the debate is 27 years old, the issues that were raised continue to be pertinent today—evidenced in the fact that I have to read this debate for a class at UHM at least once a year.

The Trask-Keesing-Linnekin debate originated in an article by Roger Keesing published in The Contemporary Pacific in 1989 titled “Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific.”At the core of the debate were the issues of academic privilege, the characterization of the use of tradition within the context of Indigenous nationalist movements as “invented,” and the power of anthropologists in defining culture. In response to the essay, Haunani Kay-Trask wrote “Natives and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle,” in which Trask confronts Keesing on his positionality and power as a white male anthropologist, whose career was built off of the cultures of Native peoples, and his inappropriate use and representation of the Hawaiian nationalist movement within his own essay. Keesing responded to Trask in “Reply to Trask,” as well as Jocelyn Linnekin's “Text Bites and the R-Word: The Politics of Representation Scholarship,” who was compelled to write in response to Trask’s critiques of her work.

In the past, I read this debate with a critical eye towards Trask but not towards the anthropologists. The notion of “invented traditions,” as described by Keesing and Linnekin, was compelling in understanding the process of cultural transformation. Today, however, after reading more of Haunani Kay Trask’s work alongside the work of more recent Indigenous feminist scholars, I have a newfound appreciation for the critiques that Trask raised. Trask reminds me of what I need to do as a recovering anthropologist in order to decolonize my own perceptions of the field, and perhaps, to leave anthropology behind altogether.

In reading Trask’s response, I started to further consider her audience and her rhetorical strategy. Here are two of my takeaway points after my most recent review of her essay:

Trask reverses the anthropological gaze to critique the privilege and power of white anthropologists in the academy.

After reading through Trask’s response to Keesing, it is clear to me that she strategically employs anthropological tropes of describing culture in generally static terms as a strategy for critiquing the power and privilege of anthropology, and of making apparent the artifice of anthropological knowledge. The rhetorical question she posed mid-way through her essay is indicative of this: “If Natives must be held to Keesing’s criteria, why should he be allowed to escape them?” (1991, 160). So is her hypothetical statement about Hawaiians digging up the ancestral bones of “haole anthropologists...for osteological analysis” (162). In describing anthropologists, as if they themselves were their own subculture, Trask states that “anthropologists make academic careers and employment off of Native cultures”(162). She continues, adding that “anthropologists who secure tenure by studying, publishing, and lecturing about Native peoples are clearly ‘profiting’ through a guaranteed lifetime income” (162). I will return to these issues in the second point. In their replies, neither Keesing nor Linnekin choose to thoroughly address these isues and reflect on their privilege. 

Trask’s points on the poaching of Indigenous knowledge for career gains continue to be valid concerns with regards to anthropology and other social science disciplines, even twenty years later. Recently, Tatah Mentan, in Unmasking Social Science Imperialism: Globalization Theory as a Phase of Academic Colonialism(2015),describes the domination of institutional American anthropology. His evidence of this is “the sheer quantitative dominance [of anthropology] in terms of numbers of scholars, number of university departments, associations, conferences, journals and research funds, a dominance that is so massive in quantitative terms that it acquires a qualitative value “(82). A more specific example of this is the American Anthropological Association, the U.S. national professional organization of the field, which roughly consists of more than 10,000 members. Clearly then, Trask tells us that one should look first at their own position of privilege and power before critiquing the power and “mythmaking” capabilities of others.

Trask reminds us of the political stakes and material consequence of our scholarship.

In her response to Keesing, Trask calls out anthropologists for their collusion with “the colonizing horde” that has sought “to take away from us the power to define who and what we are, and how we should behave politically and culturally” (162). She expands on this point in a footnote where she specifically discusses the power of anthropological knowledge production in settler colonial politics and in courts of law. The full excerpt is included here because of the layered meanings that are contained within:

In a colonial world, the work of anthropologists and other Western-trained ‘experts’ is used to disparage and exploit Natives. What Linnekin or Keesing or any other anthropologist writes about Hawaiians has more potential power than what Hawaiians write about themselves. Proof of this rests in the use of Linnekin’s argument by the US Navy that Hawaiian nationalists have invented the sacred meaning of Kahoʻolawe Island (which the US Navy has controlled and bombed since the Second World War) because nationalists need a ‘political and cultural symbol of protest’ in the modern period (Linnekin 1983, 245). Here, the connection between anthropology and the colonial enterpriseis explicit. When Natives accuse Western scholars of exploiting them, they have in mind the exact kind of situation I am describing. In fact, the Navy’s study was done by an anthropologist who, of course, cited fellow anthropologists, including Linnekin, to argue that the Hawaiian assertion of love and sacredness regarding Kahoʻolawe was “fakery” (Keene 1986). Far from overstating their case, Native nationalists acutely comprehend the structure of their oppression, including that perpetuated by anthropologists(emphasis added, Trask 1991, 166).

Although Linnekin responded to Trask by stating how she “wrote a lengthy critique of that (the Kahoʻolawe) report in a letter to the Navy at the request of the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana” (175), and describing her own work in support of Hawaiian communities, she missed a major point that Trask attempted to make: Anthropological knowledge about Indigenous communities, whether it be ethnographic, archaeological, or linguistic, is valued moreas objective truth by settler societies and academies than the voices of Indigenous peoples themselves. As a field that enjoys a position of privilege within academic, legal, and public spaces, anthropologists possess real-world power when it comes to describing and defining the cultures of Indigenous communities. Those writings, regardless of the context and spirit in which they were written, can and do have the potential to detrimentally imapct the lives of native peoples.

One need not look too far from Hawaiʻi to find evidence of this. The translated works of Samuel Kamakauand John Papa ʻĪʻī, for instance, translated, (re)organized, and published explicitly for analysis by anthropological eyes, continue to be seen as authoritative texts on Hawaiian culture and history, albeit the recent critical work of scholars, like Marie Alohalani Brown, who stress the importance of returning to the original source material, and of knowing about the biographical context of these Hawaiian scholars. Anthropology, therefore, has shaped (and continues to shape public knowledge around “authentic” Hawaiian traditions and what is constitutive of those traditions in the first place.  

Closely reading through the Trask-Linnekin-Keesing debate made me realize just how depoliticized my trajectory within anthropology was. I read about politics as they manifested around issues of repatriation and authenticity, and I was somewhat versed in the reflexive literature in anthropology, but I never once thought to interrogate my own discipline’s continual complacency in academic imperialism. I am learning to let go of my previous romantic assumptions of anthropology in order to make room for a more decolonial and critically-informed life.

On my path as a recovering anthropologist, I’ve made great new friends and have ventured into new forms of literature and scholarship. Most recently, I’ve started reading more of Haunani Kay Trask’s work alongside those of Indigenous feminist scholars like Joanne Barker and Aileen Moreton-Robinson that are keen on addressing the pervasive issue of racism and patriarchy within and beyond our communities—academic (and Indigenous) or otherwise. So far, they’ve taught me the importance of considering gender as a construct that is on par with issues of Indigenous sovereignty and critiques of settler states. They also keep me in check with regards to the stakes of our scholarship.

Although I still dabble with anthropological theory and methods in my own research, I am more concerned with creating alternative pathways, or perhaps escape routes, for native students who find themselves in anthropology. This is my commitment to anthropology now.

As a recovering anthropologist, the threat of relapsing back into a state of ignorance is always present. To avoid this, I must continue pushing myself to learn more about forms of oppression that face our communities today, as well as the politics of our scholarly production. I must remind myself that anthropological knowledge is not produced inside of vacuum but has real-world material consequences that should be considered prior to engaging in a research project. I must continue seeking decolonial approaches to scholarship and life. Thanks to the support of friends and colleagues who remind of the stakes of our scholarship, who keep me in check when it comes to my anthropological tendencies, and who constantly express the issues that continue to exist in anthropology and other disciplines, I am hopeful that a decolonial future for me beyond anthropology is possible.

The work has just begun, but the journey is full of possibilities.

Are you a recovering anthropologist?

These five steps are crucial as you work towards living an anthropology-free life. Disclaimer: Although the process of recovery here seems straightforward, it is, in reality, messy. Completely overhauling one’s disciplinary training and recognizing one’s privilege in the academy and society writ large takes time and commitment.  

5 Stages of a Recovering Anthropologist

Adapted from the “5 Stages of Addition Recovery” framework by CRC Health

1. Awareness and Early Acknowledgement

This first stage is marked by a growing awareness that there is a problem. In some cases, this realization results from conversations with family members, friends or co-workers. Few experiences are as essential to an anthropologist as the moment when he or she shifts from denial to a willingness to make a change.

2. Consideration

The second stage of the recovery process involves a shift from awareness to action. In this stage, the anthropologist learns more aboutsystemic racism, academic colonialism, and issues of power and representation within their discipline. This is when the anthropologist begins to look beyond himself/herself and to understand that friends, family members, and colleagues have been negatively affected by his/her choices and behaviors.

3. Exploring Recovery

The third stage of recovery is when the anthropologist is motivated to overcome his or her anthropological mindset. He/Shebegins taking small steps by consultingwith friends or colleagues who have been through similar experiences. This is when when the anthropologist makesthe critical decision to decolonize their scholarship and/or leave the discipline entirely.

4. Early Recovery

The fourth stage of recovery involves the process of abandoning people, activities, and behaviors that have been significant parts of the anthropologist’s life. They have yet to completely establish the foundation of their newly free lives outside of their former discipline.Slipping back into anthropology during this period can be particularly problematic, because recovering anthropologist may not yet have developed the knowledge and skills that will prevent them from backsliding into full-blown objective and depoliticized anthropology.

5. Active Recovery & Maintenance

The last stage of recovery is when the anthropologist has learned that they will need to continue to work hard for the rest of their livesto guard against relapse. This will require active monitoring of their thoughts and behaviors, ongoing practice of new skills, maintaining a support system, and staying alertof their privilege and position.Recovery is about much more than overcoming one’straining as anthropologist. It is a complete transformation of mind, body and spirit.

Posted September 24, 2018