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3.

'What Are You Looking At,

You White People?"

In Newhallville children demonstrated early on their capacity for chang-
ing the character and limitations of the research as I had envisioned it.
Not surprisingly, their questions and concerns were very different from
the ones I had come up with in my New York apartment before coming
to New Haven, and they proved to be the guiding questions of the work
that has emerged. The most crucial question was asked by Tionna one
afternoon as she, Natalia, and I stood on a corner just at the neighbor-
hood's border with one of the city's wealthiest areas. Uncomfortable,
perhaps, with occupying this border zone, they both got loud and silly,
belting out songs that got significantly louder when cars passed by. One
of a pair of older ladies in a light-blue sedan turned her head when hear-
ing the commotion. Tionna shouted at her, "What are you looking at,
you white people?" As I have suggested in the previous chapter, the ques-
tion is not so easy to answer. What are we looking at? Is it the people
who we observe and examine, or is it our images of them? Would the
people we "see" recognize themselves in our visions? 1
These questions have become increasingly prickly, not just in research
among the urban minority poor but in the writing of anthropology more
generally. The "natives" we study are ever more adept at manipulating the
anthropologist's vision of themselves to their own political and econom-
ic advantage. Such is the case with many lowland Amazonian indigenes
who, in a move designed to assert their "true" Indian-ness and hence
rights to land and sovereignty, routinely exchange their now more usual
dress of t-shirts and jeans for feathered headdresses and body paint when
addressing government officials and eco-activists (Conklin 1997). This
ability to use outsiders' notions of authenticity to advantage adds layers
of complexity to the engagement between anthropologist and subject.

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