Abstract
Anthropology, with its troubling colonial legacy, has faced the call to be decolonized for a long time. Beyond interrogating the historical, epistemological, and methodological grounds on which anthropology was built, questions still loom on how to practically distance the discipline from its colonial roots. In this chapter, I draw from Judith Schlehe’s insightful work on collaborative methodologies to demonstrate one of the responses to this call for anthropology to practically decolonize. My points of focus are on key features of anthropological theorizing and method: decolonization, positionality, and reflexivity.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to its colonial legacy, Cameroon is made up of former British and French territories.
- 2.
Bushfaller is the term used to describe transnational migrants in Anglophone Cameroon. To capture this vividly, think of someone going to the bush where there is greener pasture and game and then coming back later with the booty/harvest.
- 3.
Further addressing the topic of attention in this patriarchal setting, it could be emasculating for a black man if a restaurant bill were given directly to a white woman (in some cases, these bills were hesitantly offered to me, albeit with close watch on my tandem partner to see if she would take the bill instead).
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Tazanu, P. (2023). On Decolonizing Anthropology: Postcolonial Theorizing and Collaborative Methodologies. In: Lücking, M., Meiser, A., Rohrer, I. (eds) In Tandem – Pathways towards a Postcolonial Anthropology | Im Tandem – Wege zu einer postkolonialen Ethnologie . Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-38673-3_2
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