Disciplinary Forces and Resistance: The Silicon Valley and Beyond

This chapter presents a discussion of my ethnographic methodology as well as the historical and demographic contours of Native Americans in California in general, and Silicon Valley in particular. To facilitate a deeper understanding of my ethnographic approach, it may be useful to examine briefly the historical relationship between anthropology and Native Americans. Indeed, this relationship has been fraught and convoluted, influenced by colonization and oppression.

The Boasian school grew out of the important work of the anthropologist Franz Boas and was based on a theory of cultural relativism. This approach to anthropology worked to undermine the assumptions of unilinear cultural evolution, which was developed in the nineteenth Century and placed Western European and Anglo-American civilization at the top and all other peoples and cultures below them. Although Boas and his students argued that they were committed to showing all cultures as developed forms of social Organization, they still used underlying assumptions of cultural evolution in their studies of "primitive" cultures. Boas, for example, employed the term primitive in many of his titles, such as The Mind of Primitive Man. The book was ostensibly written to demonstrate that all cultures were equal, but nonetheless assumed an implicit distinction between the "civilized" and the "primitive."

These early anthropologists' respect for other cultures encouraged them to search for what they considered pure, unadulterated cultures as their objects of study. Boas was not interested in the social concerns of the present, but wanted to capture the knowledge contained within the quickly "vanishing" cultures of Native America. While the intentions of Boas and his students may have been essentially good, at the same time, they ignored the genocide and disregarded their own membership in the conquering group. Furthermore, the Boasian school was deeply invested in problematic notions of truth and objectivity. For example, the normalizing gaze of the anthropologist was supposed to be objective, impartial, and neutral. Naturally, the problem with this so-called objective distancing was that the anthropologists' assumed sense of innocence was often complicit with imperial domination. In contrast, the equally perceptive analysis by their objects of study was not taken seriously. Consequently, these social scientists could easily ignore protests about the imperial process that were expressed by their objects of study.

In 1969, the prominent Native studies scholar Vine Deloria Jr. first talked back to the field of anthropology in Custer Died for Your Sins. Along with other Native scholars—including Bea Medicine, Alfonso Ortiz, Jack Forbes, Robert K. Thomas, and many others—Deloria argues that anthropologists collected ethnographic material that corroborated their own notions of Native culture, often ignoring the economic, social, and political context. He further asserts that Indians should not be considered as mere objects of study; rather, Native Americans' research agendas must be taken seriously by anthropologists in order to increase Native American social and political power in society. Deloria also argues that anthropologists should study how Western paradigms marginalize Indian people, and he recommends that anthropologists assert Native perspectives in courts, educational institutions, and politicians' offices.

Like other Native anthropologists, including Bea Medicine, Jack Forbes, and many others, I critique Eurocentric knowledge frameworks and governmental policies that marginalize Indian people; in addition, I take Indian peoples' research agendas seriously. Indeed, I do not consider Indian people as mere objects of study, but place them in the role of social analysts, bringing their intellectual knowledge into the academy. Moreover, I privilege the perspectives and analysis of Native women who were not only marginalized in urban Indian studies, but also within the discipline of anthropology.

The feminist scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha investigates why Native women have been ignored in anthropological texts. She describes colonial anthropology as a racialized and gendered undertaking, which was historically carried out by white, male anthropologists who ignored Native women and have removed them from the dialogue. She writes:

It seems clear that the favorite object of anthropological study is not just any man but a specific kind of man: the Primitive, now elevated to the rank of the full yet needy man, the Native. Today, anthropology is said to be "conducted in two ways: in the pure State and in the diluted State." ... The "conversation of man with man" is, therefore, mainly a conversation of "us" with "us" about "them," of the white man with the white man about the primitive-native man. The specificity of these three "man" grammatically leads to "men": a logic reinforced by the modern anthropologist who, while aiming at the generic "man" like all his colleagues, implies elsewhere that in this context, man's mentality should be read as men's mentalities.

In the process of focusing on Native American men, many Indian women have been overlooked in anthropology. Vine Deloria's aunt, Ella Deloria, for example, worked with Franz Boas and collected ethnographic Information for him. In 1944, she wrote Speaking of Indians. Unlike her nephew, Ella Deloria was ignored in anthropology and her book Waterlily was not published until after her death. Clearly, she had ventured beyond her "suitable" role as the silent Indian woman. As an Indian woman anthropologist, she also disputed the classic norms of anthropology, which are based on "fieldwork" in a foreign location where there is a presumed distinction between "Native" and "anthropologist." But what happens when the ethnographer's social location is neither "inside" nor "outside" of a not-so-dissimilar reality? What happens when a Native is the ethnographer?

For Ella Deloria and other Native ethnographers like myself, our "insider" Status ultimately can hinder our assertions of ethnographic "authority." The historian of anthropology James Clifford, for example, discusses fieldwork as a method that enables its practitioners to experience at both an intellectual and a physical level the process of translation, which includes language learning, close involvement, and often a feeling derangement of cultural and personal expectations. Thus, fieldworkers usually gain their authority to speak about foreign "others" through a combination of theoretical training, lived experience in the...