The Myth of Anthropology

I am most interested in Ulysse's use of anthropology as a political tool in a way that is antithetical to its original purpose. Rather than viewing the discipline as something of a science, of at least an objective study of humans, Ulysse enters the discipline with political motives. Ulysse addresses her struggle of working within the academic discipline of anthropology to challenge the status quo when she mentions Audre Lorde's idea that the "master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Ulysse is using anthropology, one of these tools of the master, to indeed try to dismantle the unchallenged "knowledge" produced by the field of anthropology. In Downtown Ladies, Ulysse switches between highly stylized & academic to conversational & creative prose, and this rhetorical tool in a book that is indeed marketed as an anthropology text leads the reader to question the discipline itself. Ulysse calls attention to this not only through her language but by devoting an entire chapter of the book to an "auto-ethnography." I was particularly interested in Uylsse's writing that "my performance highlighted how the research process is an embodies endeavor, one in which lived and felt experience, through all the senses is integral to both the data collection process and the knowledge produced." (128) This assertion clearly strips away any legitimacy from anthropology, and indeed all of the social sciences, as they are commonly understood-- as unbiased, objective, understandings of groups of humans. By acknowledging her complex and nuanced location as an anthropologist, and by making her own identity and her body transparent and such integral parts of the work, Uylsse calls attention to the fact that the social scientist is usually completely absent from the work, that we are trained to consume social research as fact rather than perception. If we are to take this assertion further, it points to the fundamental problems at the heart of any narrative, whether it be in the form of an ethnography, a history, news, etc.--that it all comes from the perception of the author, and when that author is so often a privileged, in multiple ways, individual, the consumer of the narrative is entirely informed by the author's privilege and not the proximity of the author to some concrete reality. I think the book, though, in all of its honesty, more clearly illustrates the epistemological problem of consuming information rather than any "truth" about ICI's, or about color and appearance and race and gender in Jamaica. When Ulysse makes assertions such as "it must be noted that heterosexuality need not equal submission to patriarchy," (42) she is not attempting to mask her opinions as objective researched truth; these assertions are reminders that there is an author present in the text, an author with her own opinions and political agenda. These moments in the text are an acknowledgement, to me, that the field of antrhopology, although Uylsse is working within it, cannot accomplish radical change without being radically changed itself, both in its methodological framework and in the way researchers create narratives about their subjects.