Studying up in critical NGO studies today: reflections on critique and the distribution of interpretive labour

Drawing on work with a human rights NGO in Malawi, this article considers the politics of anthropological knowledge production in Africa in the wake of Laura Nader’s classic essay. First, I briefly elaborate on the role of scalar metaphors (namely ‘studying up’) in the anthropologist’s toolkit, with special focus on how such metaphors might stabilize a normative mode of critique as negative orientation to objects of study. I then analyse two …