ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that research participants engage with similarity and difference in complex ways, in order to assist the researcher to achieve her ends. The author's research interest is in the construction of racial, ethnic and national identities in interaction, and how these are implicated in the formation and enactment of inclusionary and exclusionary attitudes. In New Zealand the most significant and interesting axis around which these questions revolve is in the relationship between Maori people and Pakeha people and the Maori's cross-cultural friendships. The chapter offers some autobiographical details relevant to insiderness/outsiderness. In terms of the groups that the researcher might be considered inside or outside of, relevant categories include ethnicity, race, nationality, gender and class. The chapter argues that the dialogical anthropology shown here extends the cosmopolitan vision of anthropology by incorporating the other and the self into a single universe of discourse.
