The Dialectic of Here and There: Anthropology ‘at Home’ and British Asian Communism. In “Social Identities” Vol 11(4). 2005.

“Asian workers ‘at home’ have been organized, culturally and politically, and have provided a critique of anthropological categorisation themselves by focusing on political and organizational issues. It is salutary to find that the communist or Marxist-inspired authors and activists that should be discussed here were able to provide a critique of eurocentric models of social science writing long before such critiques*/under the guise of reflexive anxiety and postmodern doubt*/became common rhetoric within the social sciences as taught in white institutions. The need to challenge slavish mimicry of received versions of positivist and quantitative sociology, or exoticist and primitivist anthropology, has been nurtured amongst militant organizations much more than can be said of the credentialist teaching factories we call universities. A watchful vigilance against the pitfalls of complicity in surveillance knowledge production and the seductions of token-incorporation should not mean…