ABSTRACT
This chapter probes understandings of the other in the field and academia in terms of academic debates and fieldwork encounters among Guyanese East Indians in New York and Guyana. East Indians want to be others as a category of positive visibility in multiculturalism settings, but are wary of being anthropologised as the objects of research in specific contexts. As the indigenous anthropologist among Guyanese East Indians. They are also described as 'Indian', Indo-Guyanese and in New York, Indo-Caribbean. The implicating of anthropology in colonialism led to the need to address concerns around the legitimacy of fieldwork and the need to examine its authoritative claims for knowing the other. The researcher has to then engage this extended mode as participant and observer in the co-production of anthropological insights as located in the ways people know themselves and want to be known by 'outsiders'.
