Going Native

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The term going native is indicative of the 1900 colonial imaginary in which Western science constructed the non-Western world as being inhabited by the objects of science, or “natives.” Colonizers were conceived as being at the top of the human evolutionary ladder, but also as being at risk of being corrupted and falling from their moral pinnacle if they adopted non-Western knowledge systems, values, and beliefs.

In anthropology, this term is usually attributed to Bronislaw Malinowski, who formulated ethnographic field work as a paradigm and reflected on the relationship between researcher and the object of study. Based on his research experience in New Guinea, Malinowski suggested that in order to be able to grasp peoples' perspectives, their relationship to life, and their vision of the world, researchers should go native by taking part in peoples' social lives.

Since then, ethnographic field work has become a research method to explore communities and their patterns of social interaction, cultural meanings, institutional infrastructure, and process of change and conflict. This method is inductive and has been used for discovering issues and questions researchers were not previously aware of. By becoming participant insiders, as opposed to being mere observers, researchers can be able to feel, think, and even behave as insiders or natives. Accordingly, by “being there,” the researcher has access to events, behavior, and contextual dynamics that enrich the experiential method in which the researcher becomes the instrument of data collection.

Since the research is conducted in the chaos of natural settings, the going-native field work method emphasizes the need to live in a native village for an extended period of time, sometimes years, for constant observation, and for learning the local language, learning exact recording, and separating inference from data. Arguably, collecting a broad range of concrete data such as observed incidences, genealogies, maps, and diagrams showing ownership of land gradually provides the resources for understanding the organization of the society being studied, its customary law and practices, and its culture. Thus, ethnographic data are not gathered only through conversations, observations, rituals, and interviews, but also through personal documents such as research journals, letters to colleagues and friends, and other forms of documentation recording researchers' thoughts and impressions. Going native and colonial fascination with non-Western cultures have led Western scholars to impersonate the sociohistorical role of studied societies through acts of cultural appropriation. This practice has exposed the relationship between colonialism and the production of knowledge and culture.

...