Toward a reflexive anthropology

This partly personal, partly polemical, and partly speculative essay is my thinking-out-loud about how anthropologists might decentre existing ways of producing, teaching, and sharing ethnographic knowledge and strive toward a more accountable, more responsible, and more ethical way of working in the discipline. Imagining a genuinely ethical and intellectually critical anthropology, I reflect on my experiences as a racialised woman trained in the "Western" academy in the subject of anthropology. I think about at what-and whose-cost anthropology stagnates in its whiteness, and how this stagnation affects the emergence of new forms of anthropological knowledge and work as well as how neoliberalisation of academia further encourages and perpetuates whiteness as the norm. Then, I ruminate on what anthropology could look like if anthropologists made serious efforts to dismantle white academic privilege, if we let go of our obsession with Theory, if we took ethics seriously: what I imagine to be a critical epistemic multiplicity in a reflexive anthropology.