Cultural Studies Book Prize Awardee

Martin F. Manalansan IV's Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America is a stunning collection of essays that maps out an expansive terrain of Asian American ethnography. In so doing, this groundbreaking anthology collapses the distinctions between "native" and "foreign," inside and outside, home and the field, subject and object, and ethnographer and informant. Manalansan's collection offers a kaleidoscope of ethnographic topics and approaches, while investigating the critical predicaments as well as possibilities that arise when Asian Americans choose to write about our own communities. "Co-ethnic" or "native" ethnographic research not only provides intellectual flexibility and openness but also underwrites new theoretical and critical approaches to empirical research. In this manner, Cultural Compass helps to "decolonize" and to rethink many of the anthropology's most prized methods of investigation, most naturalized processes of "observed reality." [End Page 207]

Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Asian American and Pacific Histories · History · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy