“Start by telling your own story”. Reflections on becoming an anthropologist and taking up the ‘responsibility of performance’ as a researcher and a teacher in Australia and in Italy.

Both De Martino and Fabian propose that, respectively, “a new ethnology” and “a new ethnography” should recognise that the ethnographer is not only part of the cultural performance she is observing but should also unveil “those passions that had motivated the ethnographer to embark on a particular journey and choose a particular phenomenon as an object of research” (De Martino 2009:39). Starting from “telling my own story”, in this paper I take the opportunity to trace my personal trajectory that from my early interests and studies in Italy has taken me to train as a cultural anthropologist in England, carry out fieldwork research in Milingimbi, a Yolngu community in the Northern Territory, and teach anthropology both in Australia and, more recently, in Italy. These reflections use autobiography to identify and comment on some theoretical and methodological shifts in the discipline of Anthropology in general and Indigenous Studies in particular across different countries in the last twenty-five years.