Studies in Social and Political Thought Page 53 Anthropology and Post-Colonial Thought: The Paradoxical Quest for

The class, race, culture and gender assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors of the researcher her/himself [must] be placed with-in the frame of the picture that she/he attempts to paint (Harding 1987: 9). The injunction in the above epigraph is now a professional obligation for those practitioners of the social sciences, for whom the self is the instrument of research, as is the case with anthropologists, and indis-pensably so. Indeed, as one practitioner rhetorically asked, ‘What sort of scientists are they whose main technique is sociability and whose main instrument is themselves?’(Geertz, 2000: 94). Therefore, it has become a pre-requisite, if only to reassure one’s audience about the credibility of the product being offered to them, that a discursive space be reserved, in whatever forum or means of communication being used, for a kind of confessional about one’s vital statistics – that is, about one’s biological imprint, birth circumstances, intellectual propen-sities and moral sensibility. These are supposed to be constitutive of one’s positionality, that is the nature and location of one’s private Archimedean point, or mountaintop, from which one gazes at the world or that informs one’s ethnographic encounter. It is now a truism that there is an ineluctable interface, a mutual dependence, between the positionality of the ethnographer, his/her conception of fieldwork and ethnographic practice as well as the end product. The necessity, indeed, urgency, for this kind of self-branding, or biographical reflex