Can the Ethnographic Gaze Look at Itself and thus Become Anti-racist?

Abstract

In this article, I reverse the ethnographic gaze using a selection of images from my ethnographic archive, product of my research with Afro-Colombian, Black, Raizal and Palenquero communities, that reveal structural racism at work in fieldwork, acknowledgment, curatorial decision-making and archive creation. Adjacency and discomfort emerge as creative paths for anti-racism that counter the domination of the representation of otherness by mestizo and white-mestizo anthropologists in Colombia.

Keywords: Reflexive visual ethnography, anti-racism, Afro-Colombians, museums