M.E. SHARPE ARMONK : Culture Incarnate : Native Anthropology from Russia

Who has the right to claim authoritative interpretations of the ethnohistory and cultural anthropology of a given people ? Do « insiders » do it better, or is it more appropriate for carefully trained professionals from another culture to attempt to attain knowledge of a particular society without « going Native » ? These classic anthropology questions have special relevance in the current fin-de-siècle and fin-de-Soviet period of political uncertainty, cultural multiplicity, and ethnic assertion. The answers are by no means obvious, for standards of anthropology are shifting both in the « West » and in the « East. » It is not even clear who is « Native » and who is not, for many truly multicultural people of mixed ethnic and educational backgrounds have become our most talented and sensitive anthropologists worldwide.