Decolonizing Anthropology Through Community‐Based Participatory Research: A Case Study

The relationship between decolonization and anthropology is one that has been discussed at length within the discipline since the 1960s. The question of how, and indeed if, we decolonize anthropology remains a contested topic, even as the label “decolonizing” falls out of vogue due to mis/overuse. I argue that community‐based participatory research (CBPR) offers an avenue for scholars to apply many of the principles of decolonizing anthropology in their own research, putting theory into practice by redistributing knowledge, power, and ownership within the study process. I use my fieldwork experience at REACH, an Indigenous‐serving school in the Southwest US, to share some of the practices utilized by our research team that may be duplicated by other community‐scholar collaborations and reflect on CBPR's limitations as a decolonizing praxis in anthropological ethnographic environments.