I am sometimes asked by well meaning American anthropologists why a Sri Lankan would study Nepal. This has always seemed to me an odd (and tiresome) question for what they clearly find curious is why someone of my nationality would wish to work somewhere other than his country of origin. They seem not to find it odd, however, that someone raised on the prairie of Nebraska or in a suburb in Massachusetts should also want to study Nepal or some other place remote from the United States. The assumption that underlies this question is that Americans (and in particular, white Americans) can study whosoever and whatsoever they please and need justify it only in terms of their interests as individuals, while those anthropologists who hail from places that historically have been the object of anthropological study are supposed to (or assumed to) study their own society.

This assumption has to do in part with the history of anthropology itself, as European discourse about ‘native’ others, but it also reflects the way political and economic power is organized on a global scale. It is because the United States is a global power that American anthropologists are able to take for granted that they may do research where they please (especially if they are recipients of a Fulbright grant, which smoothes the logistics and bureaucratic hassles wonderfully).