ABSTRACT
Zora Neale Hurston sought to clarify with the distinction between "kinfolk" and "skinfolk", where one could imagine that all of one's skinfolk were not one's kinfolk and gave the skinfolk a bad name. For better or for worse, however, in contemporary power grids, being skinfolk tends to establish boundary conditions for the construction of other social personae within which betwixt-and-between anthropologists can act and interact. In Afro-Guyanese evaluations of the pattern of interaction that the author established, the class and status-geography elements that placed limits on the identity of participant-observation did not diminish, nor did the problems associated with being a female moving around alone. For some Afro-Guyanese, even as Pan-African skinfolk, it was, ideally, morally good to ignore racial distinctions in the name of shared "color"—people of Asian and African descent being treated as a major component of the non-White people of the world.
