Come Correct: Itineraries of Discovery in Black Women's Ethnographic Practice

Abstract

This methodological reflection invokes the legacy of Black women anthropologists, who have approached ethnography not as encounters with “The Other” but as part of African Diasporic projects. As two U.S. Black women ethnographers, who understand our fieldwork contexts in West Africa as sites of return, re-discovery, and struggle, we situate our work within Black feminist genealogies, which refashion anthropological tools to re-map and reconstitute relations and recognition amongst those we call our kinfolk. We draw on “co-performative witnessing” (Madison 2007) and “mutual comradeship” (Burden-Stelly 2018) as counter-modalities of ethnographic praxis, which follow in this tradition of disrupting and re-routing the disciplinarily legitimized stakes of ethnography. Specifically, we re-narrate gatherings, by which we mean moments of being “gathered,” or collected and corrected in love. Within our respective “itineraries of discovery” (Walker 2015) in Liberia and Nigeria, we were confronted with dilemmas of personal and professional benefit in youth performance ethnography and challenged to relinquish political neutrality in activist ethnography. We conclude by amplifying the call of Black women anthropologists and our kinfolk interlocutors that when we come to our ethnographic work, physically, intellectually, and relationally, that we also “come correct.”