Just back from the island of Kauai, where I attended the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania conference. The session on indegenous anthropology was really illuminating. Being indegenous today seldome means any degree of purity. Indegeneity is almost-always-already mixed--as I have repeatedly said in the past twenty years!
Yet there are people with unimaginable background. One young woman in the session was fascinating in her hybridity. Her father is from Ghana, her mother an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, the parents met and married in Trinidad, the daughter went to a US college and became an anthropologist, and she studies the Tongan community in exile in the SF bay area!
It's all so easy to imagine such a person, but she exists in reality, and in reality a person with such a background is singular. How interesting all this is.
