The Native That Therefore I Am: Misaligned Interests and Native Anthropology in Egypt

Based on an incident from my ongoing fieldwork in rural Egypt, I focus on my status as a “native” Egyptian anthropologist and the fraught challenges that this status brings about while situating these elements in historical debates on native anthropology. While most existing literature suggests doing away with the term “native anthropology,” this essay takes native anthropology as a positionality that highlights an ambivalent orientation of anthropologists in Egypt and other nationalist repressive nation-states vis-à-vis their ethnographic field sites. I propose a revised methodological tool kit for conducting native anthropology in autocratic regimes. Situating this brief ethnographic encounter in wider historical debates, I illustrate that native anthropology provides a methodological challenge and an opportunity through which ethnographers can speak to and against specific publics. Haunted by immediate safety concerns and inspired by a shared vulnerability with interlocutors, native anthropology allows ethnographers to play with their methodological tool kit to strategically translate, refuse, and withhold information to protect themselves and their interlocutors in politicized research climates.