Over the last decade, there have been growing calls for “academic decolonization” (Moosavi 2023) in the Global North, the need to approach and know the South as “plural” and to articulate non-hegemonic forms of self-determination, including in the pages of Cultural Anthropology (e.g., Harrison 2022 and Williams 2022). These calls reflect a collective desire to counter neoliberal and Western-centric approaches to academic research and the racialized systems that characterize today’s academy (Brunila 2016). As a white researcher focusing on the Middle East and based in a UK institution, I have observed how such calls happen in a climate increasingly characterized by a form of anxiety about having our own work morally—and, therefore, intellectually—“legitimized” as not autochthonous in the places we work in. My argument is that such a request for moral legitimacy in international research increasingly happens through our attempt to “localize” ourselves with respect to our research field, to the eyes of the international community of scholars: an attempt that I will now try to unpack in the following lines and that, with a pinch of sarcasm, I call “self-indigenization” syndrome.  I also argue that white scholars have engaged with practices of self-indigenization in response to a growing tendency to employ the decolonial rubric in the discourse and ethics that regard research on the South. Mostly, the decolonial rubric revolves around developing high familiarity with the vernacular subjects, languages, and cultures within the research field. As concepts such as localization and decolonization have gained more currency and approval, they have begun to appear with greater frequency in grant proposals, conferences, paper titles, and curricular initiatives. No matter how ubiquitous these buzzwords have become, meaningful efforts toward the decolonization of academic practice remain unusual.

Decolonization cannot be an easy job. As Moosavi put it (2023, 139), “decolonial reflexivity requires a level of bravery that is not always easy to muster.” This work is necessary, however,  if we are to move beyond the tokenism that characterizes so much academic practice today. In order to undertake some first essential steps, I believe, we need to turn the “ethnography of discomfort” (Hoover and García-González 2022) into an anthropology of life which values generative rather than self-victimizing forms of discomfort and makes of it its epistemological foundation. Thus far, academic critiques revolving around decoloniality have vastly focused on unearthing what should generate such discomfort: notably, how writing and publishing in the academic Anglosphere continues to reflect the colonial politics of knowledge production (Abu Moghli and Kadiwal 2021), or the limited ways Anglosphere academics tend to “include” or “empower” the South. In this contribution, I would like to explore how both tactics of self-indigenization and the resulting reinforcement of tokenistic multiculturalism make epistemological transformations toward actual decoloniality unlikely. Through some key examples, I advocate for a pedagogy of change which goes beyond the mere act of delivering radical content to new academic generations, but rather a lived experience of educators themselves (Carpi 2021), in which we learn and, more importantly, morally accept our own positionality in terms of class, race, gender, and alike.

Anglosphere scholars have written abundantly about humanizing research (e.g., Brankamp and Weima 2021), de-hierarchizing knowledge to end inequities between people and places (Naylor et al. 2018), and strengthening decolonial research ethics (Wiles 2012). These are important discussions that have helped many social scientists to reflect critically on their research. As a consequence, ethics committees, for instance, have become more cognizant about the importance of preserving the wellbeing of research participants; even the United Kingdom’s 2029 Research Excellence Framework—usually viewed as a tool of the neoliberalization of the British academy—speaks of the importance of “knowledge restitution” and of learning from local communities (REF 2029 website), which has traditionally characterized anthropological work. In this regard, the “decolonization is not a metaphor” principle (Tuck and Young 2012) reminds scholars worldwide of the importance of battling against any form of violence and injustice through practice rather than mere scholarly statements. Nonetheless, decolonization has problematically become a matter of professional compliance (e.g. employing the term widely for the sake of research approval) rather than as a wholesale shift in the relational economy of academia.

The self-indigenization syndrome I conceptualize here describes our conscious attempt to avoid the discomfort that we would be living with if we truly worked toward the decolonization of the academy. By this token, self-indigenization is the conscious act whereby the subject is reluctant to process their racial, social, and political privilege and the responsibilities and consequences attached to that. I provide here an example from my own experience. A few years ago, I wrote a critical commentary arguing that some diaspora elites from the Global South, educated in Ivy League institutions, were problematically claiming to be the “voice of the South.” While I did not intend to assess people’s levels of “Southness” in cultural contexts where I do not even belong, I had not expected that my personal perspective could be associated with my whiteness, as I was used to not being questioned because of my phenotype and its colonial associations (see Park and Tomkins 2021). The reviewer, understandably, viewed the article as an accusation leveled by me, a white researcher speaking Arabic, against Arab diaspora elites who did not use any Arabic in their work. I decided not to publish that piece. Looking back, I had engaged self-indigenization in search of academic legitimacy, which, in the way I theorize it, involves the use and parading of “indigenous” elements to be viewed as “local enough” and, consequently, gain moral legitimacy as a foreign researcher in the South. As though the mere use of Arabic in research work could ever be a self-fulfilling act of decolonization. This is not to suggest that learning local languages is not of paramount importance before approaching a place; it is to say that fluency in a local language does not eliminate the power relationships at stake and automatically confer research legitimacy. In that paper, I had turned my language skills into a tactic of self-indigenization to avoid the discomfort of not belonging (or not belonging enough) in my research field. Indeed, asserting language skills relevant to the place we focus on has become one way to legitimate our research (in resonance with debates on language and decolonization in Macedo 2019).

The act of publicly revealing—or even parading—“vulnerability” or “marginality” is another strategy toward research legitimacy, as well as a response to the white researcher’s moral anxiety over passing as “local enough” in the research site. For instance, at an international conference I attended in the past, two prominent scholars who work in Global South contexts were explicitly invited to explain what they “personally had to do with the South.” The scholars started explaining parallels between the fragile sides of their backgrounds and the lives of their research subjects, as if to reduce the moral distance between them, thereby attempting to publicly validate their scholarship and secure moral legitimacy. This struck me as a form of defensive whitism cemented in a mere idea of the South as inherent vulnerability. Afterward, I began to think how much more generative it would have been if these white scholars had simply recognized and morally accepted their positionalities vis-à-vis the research sites, no matter how uncomfortable.

In a nutshell, it seems, we struggle to morally accept who we are about our field sites across the Global South, and we fail to make of the discomforts that come along a shared heuristic asset (e.g., feminist ethnographer Darling-Wolf 1998, on the employability of “multiple selves” as white bodies in the field). By aligning with anthropologists who have made discomfort constructive by proposing experimental and collaborative writing (e.g., Forero Angel 2022), we have too simplistically associated our discomfort, loaded with colonial legacies, with an unspoken form of moral illegitimacy that we feel compelled to conceal and defend against. Questioning self-indigenization means arguing that the ethical and intellectual legitimacy our research should aim for must instead include the effort and political responsibility of uncovering and scrutinizing the discomfort over having our work be viewed as “illegitimate.”

These efforts to make ourselves appear as “local enough,” as though it could ever be a synonym of moral and intellectual legitimacy, are contradicted by some hard-to-die forms of contemporary tokenism. For instance, while in my research I have endeavored to include sources written in languages other than English and authored by local thinkers (Carpi 2020), I acknowledge that my research remains rooted in Anglocentric systems of knowledge production, predominantly relying on scholars who write in English and are trained in Anglophone environments. Even so, I have always been interested in publishing in journals not necessarily based in the Anglosphere. In the UK, nonetheless, where I have spent most of my academic career, only British and North American journals are considered “world-leading” or “renowned” enough to benefit your career. The UK’s university evaluation system, known as the Research Excellence Framework, as a matter of fact, rewards English monolingualism. Publishing original work in non-English journals is likened to “throwing your hard work down the toilet,” to quote a colleague’s response to my decision to publish in a Brazilian journal or publish my first ethnographic monograph in Italian. Indeed, a tacit rule is publishing on the Global South but never publishing within it.

Moreover, in my publication experiences, the peer review process is also part of the Anglo-supremacist politics of publication, insofar as it requires conformity to existing, ostensibly “universal” or “objective” writing norms. Even those who advocate for decentering epistemologies uphold a standardized understanding of how a paper should be crafted when acting as peer reviewers. While this might be discipline-specific, anthropology has been wrestling with issues of forms and norms of writing since the 1960s, especially during the 1980s when debates examined writing cultures and understood ethnography as a text, a rhetoric, and a power-laden production. Disappointingly, among the recent decolonial calls of many sorts, I seldom come across debates advocating for the decolonization of the academic politics of writing.

Parading cultural diversity is further evidence of enduring tokenism. A few years ago, I was included on a grant proposal as a “non-British” researcher without anyone asking me whether I hold a British passport, even though I had been living in the UK for ten years. It was plain that geographical diversity had become a box-ticking exercise to raise research funding rather than to bring in any expressed intellectual asset (see Harrison 2022). Likewise, I have since noticed growing numbers of scholars from the Global South sitting at the table with foreign researchers and funders focused on the South, and yet, too often, they are treated as tokens of research self-legitimization. They are increasingly invited to coauthor research publications (Young et al. 2024), but on the mere basis of their nationality, regardless of what forms of knowledge they have been educated in. The road to recognizing such contributions as essential intellectual capital for producing rigorous scientific knowledge remains quite steep (Carpi 2019).

The same tokenism runs through how UK-based academics approach research ethics and methods in the Global South. Research proposals referencing decolonization (e.g. see Sukarieh and Tannock 2019) tend to emphasize the so-called “local communities” who need to be treated with “sensitivity.” However, I have never been required to think deeply or systematically what “local ethics” are in a country like Lebanon, where I have worked for the last twenty years. This shows how white researchers have learned to develop an exceptionalist ethical lens reserved for the so-called South, and, therefore, to adopt a therapeutic approach to “southern societies.” Despite the long duration of my relationship with the country and my previous reflections on the role of vernacular specificities (Carpi 2020), in my current academic role, I need to officially assert that I will comply with research norms established in the academic Anglosphere. This unchanged understanding of what research ethics should mean in a country where we do not “belong” leaves some ethical issues unchallenged, such as the cultural inappropriateness and practical unfeasibility of conducting individual interviews in contexts where the collectiveness of the encounter with the outsider is the societal norm.

These problems, representing different forms of tokenism, are compounded by limitations on international partnerships and the unwillingness of Global North scholars to subordinate themselves within them. As a former co-lead of the Global Young Academy Academics At-Risk Initiative and mentoring volunteer for the Council for At-Risk Academics, I observed how financial support for so-called at-risk academics from war zones was extended only insofar as they adequately demonstrated awareness of the politics of research, writing, and publishing (and their related ethics) of the Anglosphere. The process of experiential learning in these “humanitarian-inspired” scholarship schemes remains rigidly monodirectional, with Global North institutions directing knowledge about the Global South.

In the final reckoning, learning and accepting who we are vis-à-vis the “researched other” is less self-evident in practice than we tend to believe, despite decades of anthropological debate. If we do not practically move beyond mere acknowledgements of our situated identity (e.g., Narayan 1997; Ghosh et al. 2021), our engagement with decolonial talk will remain smug and self-serving: simply a different way of championing research legitimacy through public self-flagellation (e.g., Bott 2010).

What do my experiences with self-indigenization continuously induce me to reflect? Our primary academic concern should no longer be publicizing the virtue and moral legitimacy of our research practices. Rather, we should be working toward decolonization not only at an institutional level (e.g., promoting a fairer distribution of research funding and resources across the North and South, or designing research ethics in a way that accounts for local norms and ethical practices), but also at an individual level: implementing lived pedagogies (Klitmøller 2018), whereby learning and teaching become an embodied practice. As scholars have discussed over the years, this surely involves questioning our homegrown epistemologies and cultures of writing (such as the use of knowledge references, e.g., Park 2019); or rethinking professional authority by engaging with autochthonous scholarship as, not only ethically, but intellectually essential in research. Ultimately, we need to continuously invest in critically learning who we are and make our pedagogical efforts “lived.” The political, entailing decolonial efforts, needs to be reflected in personal attitudes driven by relational justice (Carpi 2025), or it will remain complicit in the violent tokenism we reproduce and then live in. Acknowledging that the self-indigenization syndrome, as a way to earn “research legitimacy,” is not only illusory but also misleading would be a significant step toward such relational justice.