CWC staff and volunteers were involved in every phase of the research design and implementation. The overall research design as presented here was negotiated to ensure that the goals and methods complemented the CWC’s interests and philosophy of working with the community. CWC staff and participants reviewed and commented on interview guides, suggesting questions they thought might better address the study’s key issues. Periodic research reports were provided to the CWC executive director and medical director and to health and wellness committee representatives. I held regular briefings with key CWC African staff, and reported on my general interpretations (while maintaining a confidentiality policy) about what I was learning in various CWC contexts, sessions, committee meetings, and so forth. These briefings provided regular opportunities for me to enrich the study by including participant reactions to my interpretations as research data.
As has been noted by several anthropologists, participatory research has its own set of unique challenges and opportunities. These were compounded here by the dual expectations in the CWC’s participatory research policy that participants be involved in the research design and that I make efforts to apply my research to my personal life. Many of the ensuing challenges and opportunities could not have been anticipated because they emerged as the fieldwork evolved. Situations occurred in which I had to set boundaries about the nature and extent of my participation in a specific context to maintain the always (at some level) sociopolitical balance between “insider” and “outsider” perspectives. I established some practical participatory research rules. For example, while I would occasionally take meeting minutes or volunteer to make reminder calls to participants about meetings, I reached an understanding with the CWC leadership that I would not act as a CWC staff person, promote a particular point of view, or encourage a participant to take a particular action. Also, we eventually agreed that while this study would include CWC participant perspectives on African diasporan identity, it could not promote or advocate particular participants’ points of view. Staff members understood that my role as an anthropologist was not to reduce these views to one perspective, for example, that of the CWC leadership, but to put together the broader story of CWC African identity formation from the feedback of participants of various ethnic backgrounds, social positions, and opinions. The resulting study is my interpretation of these processes. It is not in any way an evaluation or social impact assessment of the effectiveness of the CWC’s work. In many instances, certain situations and their resolution enriched my understanding of the divergent perspectives among the CWC’s participants and are included in this study.
There was a mutually beneficial convergence of interests between the academic goals of my research and the CWC’s activist agenda. The CWC staff was interested in learning how one could document, describe, and explain the effort to define and build community in tangible terms. Given the CWC’s pluralistic constituent base and mission of creating community out of diversity through health care, the complementarity with theoretical interests in anthropology was not surprising. Groups like the CWC are close to the pulse of contemporary translocal cultural dynamics. Yet it is difficult to describe such “soft” community development approaches to funders and practitioners who are more accustomed to a “hard” nuts-and-bolts emphasis on housing or job development programs. Through this study, the CWC hoped to be able to use anthropology’s emerging models to provide a vocabulary that better explained their work to others.
The study’s participatory research approach was complicated and enriched in unexpected ways by the fact that I was also a “native anthropologist.” Although, in keeping with current anthropological practice, I was aware of the sociopolitically contingent nature of ethnography, I did not begin the study by defining or problematizing my role as a “native ethnographer.” However, once the fieldwork began, the CWC’s interest in building a shared sense of African identity to embrace the diversity of the Twin Cities’ African peoples, combined with the research’s participatory nature, quickly highlighted my position as a native ethnographer. I was not only a member of the culture being studied but I was also a participant in various other professional and academic networks and cultures, several of which overlapped with the CWC’s work. Many of the features of my life—being an educated African American female with complex personal, academic, and professional experiences in the African diaspora; being a native Philadel-phian and a relative newcomer to the Twin Cities struggling to establish this place as “home”; being a mother and wife balancing family and career; being a former foundation executive and community development program evaluator—were in many ways reflected in the struggles, debates, and triumphs of the diverse people and institutions that used and supported the CWC.
Like any ethnographer, I recognized that as cultural creatures, we all have perspectives drawn from our personal lives—academic and professional experiences that color our ability to fully represent the diverse views and dynamism of the participants of the cultures we study. The quality of our work is largely influenced by our ability to keep distinct the perspectives of the “insider” and “outsider” and make systematic, self-conscious, and documented efforts to understand how these points of view mutually influence each other in the research process. Throughout my fieldwork, analysis, and writing, I made explicit attempts to understand and document how my own cultural, political, and other perspectives influenced the research design and findings. My primary strategy for accomplishing this was to include in the research as diverse a representation of African diasporan constituents as possible, and to make explicit in the narrative my personal perceptions, how I attempted to control for them, and how these efforts influenced the research context, wherever relevant. For me, the participatory fieldwork context required that I explicitly recognize my multiple sociopolitical roles—including that of a native ethnographer—and practice, at some level, what is now called reflexive ethnography (see Clifford 1988). My hope was that the inclusion of a diversity of perspectives as well as explicit inclusion of myself in my roles as both participant and observer deepened my analysis of CWC efforts to create African community, while avoiding the kind of self-centered, personal diary type of ethnography that sometimes characterizes reflexive ethnographic approaches.
Part II
Across Diasporan Space/Time: Who Is “African” in a Global Ecumene?
African Americans’ ancestry is African whether they like it, know it, or recognize it or not. Culture has to do with ancestry—blood origins—not nationality—that’s where you happen to be living.
—Akin, a “continental African” and Yorùbá man born in Nigeria, active CWC participant and leader
Some people are really into the African stuff and because their ancestors are African, they say that “Africa is my home”—even though they might be from the southside of Chicago … My ancestors are African, but Africa is not my home. I’m American too—a black American—and I want my due here.
—Mavis, an “African American” and active CWC participant
3
“Three Parts African”: Blood, Heart, Skin, and Memory
The CWC’s “African born in America” leadership, in other words, African Americans, had a three-part definition of who was African. According to a key CWC “African” leader who was a locally well-known African American activist, an African was a person who was “black in skin color or race; has an ancestry that ties them to the continent of Africa; and has an African spiritual identity, meaning that you identify with the intellectual tradition that you are part of creation. Do you view the world as interconnected, or do you have an objective, technological view of the world? Who was African cannot be defined by one of these traits in isolation from the others. “It’s a matter of a both and—not an either or.”1
At the most fundamental level, in the CWC’s three-part framework, an “African”
