| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Although Narayan’s argument addressed anthropology and ethnography as a field, it spoke to issues of identity as well.
Factors beyond locale and heritage mediate identity formation, and there are multiple ways of identifying oneself. For instance, depending on the situation, one can be defined or can choose to be defined as a woman or a native or a researcher or a daughter. Hence, the issue of the degree to which a native anthropologist is native cannot be gauged. As much as those we study are multiple and in flux, so are we. To pigeonhole, delimit, and bound what it is to be native would be to ignore the fact that it is impossible to set boundaries about the ways in which people identify themselves.
As Lowe expressed, to bound Asian American identity formation in terms of generational categories, that is, attributing stereotypes according to the generational categories, would be denying the multiplicity and heterogeneity of people of Asian descent. Much in the way that anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski (2002) defined native in a deterministic manner, some scholars define Asian American in terms of a set criteria of factors, ignoring the multiple ways in which Asian Americans identify themselves and the identities they created for themselves through mediations and intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and so on. Such acts of identity attribution, Lowe would argue, are deployed to validate the monolithic construction of being Asian American without considering feminist theory and multiculturalism as well as heterogeneity within Asian Americans. There is a tension between how people are identified and how they identify themselves, and therein lies the quandary of identity formation.