ESSAYS 671 Rentzsch,Hermann Richards, Paul 1866 Geistiges Eigenthum. Handwtirterbuch der Volkwirtschaft.Leipzig. 1985 Indigenous Agricultural Revolution: Ecology and Food Production in West Africa. Boulder: Weshiew Press. Robinson, Joan 1956 The Accumulation of Capital. London: Macmillan. Salaman, Radcliffe N. 1949 The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press. Schiff, Eric 1971 Industrialization without National Patents. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stoffle, Richard W., David B. Halmo, Michael J. Evans, and John E. Olmsted 1990 Calculating the Cultural Significance of American Indian Plants: Paiute and Shoshone Ethnobotany at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. American Anthropologist 92:416432. United States Supreme Court Vaver, David 1980 Diamond v. Chakrabarty. 100 S. Ct., 2004,2211. 1991 Some Agnostic Observations on Intellectual Property. Intellectual Property Journal 6:125-153. Weil, Vivian, and John Snapper 1990 Owning Scientific and Technical Information. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. How Native Is a “Native”Anthropologist? NRIN NARAYAN Department of Anthropology Uniziersity o f Wisconsin, Madison 0W“NATIVE” ISA NATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIST? How “foreign”is an anthropologist from H abroad? The paradigm polarizing “regular” and “native” anthropologists is, after all, part of received disciplinary wisdom. Those who are anthropologists in the usual sense of the word are thought to study Others whose alien cultural worlds they must painstakingly come to know. Those who diverge as ”native,” “indigenous,” or “insider” anthropologists are believed to write about their own cultures from a position of intimate affinity. Certainly, there have been scattered voices critiquing this dichotomy. Arguing that because a culture is not homogenous, a society is differentiated, and a professional identity that involves problematizing lived reality inevitably creates a distance, scholars such as Aguilar (1981) and Messerschmidt (1981a:g) conclude that the extent to which anyone is an authentic insider is questionable. Yet such critiques have not yet been adequately integrated into the way “native” anthropologists are popularly viewed in the profession. In this essay, I argue against the fixity of a distinction between “native” and ”non-na- tive” anthropologists. Instead of the paradigm emphasizing a dichotomy between outsider/insider or observer/observed, I propose that at this historical moment we might more profitably view each anthropologist in terms of shifting identifications amid a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations. The loci along which we are aligned with or set apart from those whom we study are multiple and in flux. Factors