collaborative anthropologies i-2008

published by the university of nebraska press

collaborativeanthropologies

Edited by Luke Eric Lassiter

volume 1 • 2008

© 2008 University of Nebraska Press

For personal use only.Not for distribution.

Collaborative Anthropologies is a forum for dialogue with a special focus on the com-plex collaborations between and among researchers and research participants/ interlocutors. It features essays that are descriptive as well as analytical, from all subfields of anthropology and closely related disciplines, and that present a diver-sity of perspectives on collaborative research.

Collaborative Anthropologies (ISSN 1943-2550) is published annually at $61 for institu-tions and $36 for individuals by the University of Nebraska Press. For subscriptions outside the United States, please add $15 for shipping and handling. Canadian sub-scribers, please add appropriate GST or HST. Residents of Nebraska, please add the appropriate Nebraska sales tax.

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editorLuke Eric Lassiter, Marshall University Graduate College

editorial assistantKathryn Santiago, Marshall University Graduate College

editorial boardDiane E. Austin, University of Arizona

Linda Basch, National Council for Research on Women

Michael L. Blakey, College of William and Mary

Caroline B. Brettell, Southern Methodist University

James Clifford, University of California, Santa Cruz

Samuel R. Cook, Virginia Tech

Les W. Field, University of New Mexico

Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge

Sjoerd R. Jaarsma, Papua Heritage Foundation

Junji Koizumi, Osaka University

Smadar Lavie, Macalester College

Dorothy Lippert, Smithsonian Institution

George Marcus, University of California, Irvine

Charles R. Menzies, University of British Columbia

Yolanda Moses, University of California, Riverside

James L. Peacock, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Joanne Rappaport, Georgetown University

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, University of Brasília

Jean J. Schensul, Institute for Community Research

Judith Stacey, New York University

Paul Stoller, West Chester University

Sandy Toussaint, University of Western Australia

Alaka Wali, The Field Museum

Larry J. Zimmerman, IUPUI/Eiteljorg Museum


contents

vii Editor’s Introduction

research articles 1 Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography

as Theoretical Innovation

joanne rappaport

32 “Side by Side or Facing One Another”:

Writing and Collaborative Ethnography

in Comparative Perspective

les w. field

51 Caught in Collaboration

deepa s. reddy

81 Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of

the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter

douglas r. holmes and george e. marcus

102 Challenging Hegemonies: Advancing Collaboration

in Community-Based Participatory Action Research

jean j. schensul, marlene j. berg, and ken m. williamson

138 “You Can’t Put a Price On It”: Activist Anthropology in the

Mountaintop Removal Debate

samuel r. cook

reflection and commentary 163 Reflections on Collaboration, Ethnographic and Applied

james l. peacock


175 Collaborative Anthropology as Twenty-first-Century

Ethical Anthropology

carolyn fluehr-lobban

book reviews 183 Jordan E. Kerber, ed. Cross-Cultural Collaboration:

Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States

jon daehnke

187 Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T. J. Ferguson, eds.

Collaboration in Archaeological Practice:

Engaging Descendant Communities

joe watkins

192 Larissa Petrillo, in collaboration with Melda and Lupe Trejo.

Being Lakota: Identity and Tradition on Pine Ridge Reservation

r. d. theisz

196 Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy. Fieldwork Connections:

The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America

ho ts’ui-p’ing

201 Keyan G. Tomaselli, ed. Writing in the San/d:

Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans

megan biesele and robert k. hitchcock

205 Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, eds.

World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within

Systems of Power

claudia briones

211 Information for Contributors


editor’s introduction

Collaborative Anthropologies rests on the premise that “collaboration,” in its many different forms and articulations, offers ongoing opportuni-ties for critically exploring the possibilities and challenges for the future of anthropological theory and practice. Collaboration—in very general terms, the wide range of theories and practices that relate to the dy-namic and complex processes of navigating joint projects and partner-ships—has always been a vital, albeit often implicit, facet of what we do as anthropologists. We all collaborate on some level in our wide range of anthropological practices. Today, however, collaboration has become more central to these practices. Collaboration is no longer just a con-sequence of our multiple and diverse anthropologies; it now precondi-tions and shapes our anthropologies more pervasively than ever before.

Several scholars have noted that at the very time these collaborative anthropologies are becoming more common, the changing subjects, conditions, and work of our field are also expanding the range of col-laborative possibilities—between and among researchers and their in-terlocutors, anthropologists and other scholar-practitioners, academ-ics and other professionals, universities and local communities, faculty and students. These expanding collaborative possibilities are stimulat-ing new theoretical and methodological approaches that promise to transform our anthropologies in new and exciting ways—especially as we increasingly bring together academic, applied, and public practices within ever more dynamic, multi-sited, and globalized contexts.

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in our research with the various and shifting publics with whom we work—publics who have increasingly demanded not only that their voices be heard but that the research on which they consult benefit them more immediately and directly. While collaborations between researchers and such publics are


collaborative anthropologies • volume 1 • 2008 viii •

certainly not new, our still-emergent collaborative practices continue to offer formidable challenges to the conventional power differentials between “researchers” and “subjects,” and thus are becoming increas-ingly central to reconceptualizing conventional anthropological theory and practice.

While I personally have been keenly interested in these kinds of col-laborative researches (especially as realized via collaborative ethnogra-phy), and while this journal embraces a special focus on the possibilities and challenges of these emergent collaborative researches (as noted in the bulleted list below), the scope of Collaborative Anthropologies is by no means limited to discussions of collaboration that follow these lines. More than one member of this journal’s editorial board, for example, has expressed interest in how anthropologists might reconceptualize working with one another (as well as with other researchers), recaptur-ing, as it were, interdisciplinary collaborations that reach across (sub)disciplinary divisions in anthropology and traverse the humanities and the biological and social sciences in new and innovative ways. Others have expressed interest in how anthropologists might deploy more de-liberately collaborative pedagogical approaches—approaches that en-gage faculty and students in transformative university-community part-nerships and projects. Still others have expressed interest in how we might further explore, problematize, and question the deeper meanings of collaboration itself, in whatever form it may take, and, in turn, chart new theoretical and applied trajectories for anthropological praxis.

These varied positions set out a range of possibilities for Collaborative Anthropologies to serve as a forum for engaging ever-widening discus-sions of collaborative research and practice in anthropology and in closely related fields. The mission of Collaborative Anthropologies is lined out on the journal’s Web site but bears repeating here. In sum, this annual:

facilitates dialogue about collaborative anthropologies, including •but not limited to those between and among researchers and their interlocutors, anthropologists and other scholar-practitioners, ac-ademics and other professionals, universities and local communi-ties, faculty and students;embraces a special focus on the complex collaborations between •and among researchers and research participants/interlocutors, although it is by no means limited to this focus;


editor’s introduction • ix

promotes discussion about new forms of collaborative research •that are engendering new kinds of collaborative anthropologies;charts new theoretical and methodological approaches, especial-•ly those that theorize collaboration and imagine new intellectual spaces for collaborative anthropologies;invites essays that are descriptive as well as analytical, interpretive, •and exploratory;solicits works from all subfields of anthropology (and closely re-•lated disciplines);encourages interdisciplinary inquiry into collaborative anthropol-•ogies, especially those that connect collaborative anthropologies with other modes of collaborative research practices;seeks a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research, includ-•ing those academic, applied, and pedagogic;considers scholarship from single- to multi-sited in scope and •from all parts of the world; andinvites book, media, and exhibit reviews that chronicle the creative •and innovative use of collaboration in anthropology and closely related fields.

The many possibilities, potentials, and challenges for exploring the complexities of collaboration in the pages of Collaborative Anthropologies offer much promise. Given this, however, we are mindful that discus-sions of collaboration always risk falling back on what is by now a rath-er well-known “trope of collaboration,” which can do more to obscure than elaborate these possibilities, potentials, and challenges. Indeed, although “collaboration” has become an oft-heard motto in our field, the deeper complexities of collaborative anthropologies remain elu-sive. The nuances of collaboration, for instance, are at times glossed over in overly simplistic or celebratory accounts of what otherwise may be extremely complex partnerships. Calls for collaborative anthropolo-gies can be consequently (and perhaps understandably) dismissed, and accused, in equally simplistic and unsophisticated terms, of being not much more than one-dimensional exercises in ascertaining agreement, or, worse, of being uncritically complicit with the agendas of our re-search collaborators (whoever they may be). One of the key challenges of this journal is thus to help “thicken” discussions of collaboration so as to move away from such tropes and toward deeper, more critical,


collaborative anthropologies • volume 1 • 2008 x •

and more complex discussions and understandings of collaborative re-search processes.

The articles and reviews that constitute this inaugural issue of Collaborative Anthropologies make abundantly clear that collaboration is inherently complicated, involved, and multidimensional. And diver-gent too: while the authors may agree on the growing role of collabo-ration in our field, they differ (some more than others) on how collab-orative anthropologies have and will shape anthropological theory and practice. As such, they point to a growing dialogue about collaborative anthropologies that is vibrant, diverse, and polyphonic. The following articles and reviews thus include varying perspectives emerging from researches both academic and applied, perspectives that engage au-thors in a range of very different experiences with and visions for do-ing and thinking about collaborative work, experiences and visions that can, at times, conflict. But, as in any collaboration worth pursuing, em-bracing, dialoguing with, and working across, difference is every bit as important as finding common ground. And in my view, this is precisely the kind of polyphonic discussion that Collaborative Anthropologies has the potential to encourage.

Several of the following papers (by Field, Schensul et al., Cook, Pea-cock, and Fluehr-Lobban) grew out of a 2007 American Anthropologi-cal Association (AAA) Presidential Session, “Collaborative Anthropolo-gies, Public Engagements, and Epistemologies of Equity,” in which we (along with other session participants) explored the intersections of difference, (in)equality, and justice (the meeting’s theme) via our vari-ous articulations of collaborative praxis. The remaining papers (by Rap-paport, Reddy, Holmes and Marcus) and the book reviews were volun-teered or solicited to help further the first volume’s tone and approach. Having noted this, there is, of course, much more to the “tone” and “approach” of collaborative researches, which this first issue of Collab-orative Anthropologies only begins to touch upon.

Obviously, those involved in collaborative researches are not engaged in a single, uniform “collaborative anthropology,” but rather multiple and diverse “collaborative anthropologies.” I do not presume, therefore, that this journal (in this volume or in future volumes, taken indepen-dently or together) can be exhaustive or representative of all the kinds of collaborative anthropologies now at work in our field. This being the case, though, I look forward to the potential of Collaborative Anthropologies


editor’s introduction • xi

to highlight, elaborate, and advance our various and diverse collabora-tive researches. All of us—practitioners, academically situated scholars, students, and importantly, the people with whom we work—stand to benefit, it seems, from engaging in dialogue about these issues. I, for one, continue to be deeply interested in and inspired by the broad range of collaborative work now materializing in our field.

I do hope, then, that scholars and practitioners engaged and inter-ested in these issues in whatever form will feel welcome to submit their work to Collaborative Anthropologies. While subsequent issues of the jour-nal will no doubt continue to include traditional “research articles,” I hope also to incorporate more explorations like those featured in the “Reflection and Commentary” section herein. Dialogue and debate, critique, interviews, experiments in collaborative practice, descriptions of university-community collaborative partnerships and projects—to name just a few—are all future possibilities. In this same vein, I would also like to feature other media reviews in addition to book reviews. Whatever the nature of your collaborative anthropologies, I hope that you will feel free to contact me or any members of the editorial board with ideas and suggestions. We look forward to hearing from you.

acknowledgments

Parts of this introduction were presented during the 2007 AAA Presi-dential Session, “Collaborative Anthropologies, Public Engagements, and Epistemologies of Equity,” and appear in the originating abstract for Collaborative Anthropologies and on the journal’s Web site at www.marshall.edu/coll-anth. The idea for Collaborative Anthropologies rests with Gary H. Dunham, former director of the University of Nebraska Press and current director of the State University of New York Press. I am grateful to the editorial board members and outside reviewers who so generously reviewed essays; I am especially grateful to board mem-bers Les W. Field, Joanne Rappaport, George E. Marcus, Jean J. Schen-sul, Samuel R. Cook, and James L. Peacock, who were instrumental in helping me pull together this first annual, graciously provided their papers to feature herein, and offered much appreciated advice and di-rection. (Any and all editorial shortcomings are mine, however.) A deep debt of thanks is owed to Marshall University interim deans Rudy Pauley (Graduate School of Education and Professional Development)


collaborative anthropologies • volume 1 • 2008 xii •

and Donna Spindel (College of Liberal Arts), who provided the moral support, office space, and financial and other resources necessary for bringing Collaborative Anthropologies to life. Former dean Christina Mur-phy and current dean David Pittenger, both of Marshall University’s College of Liberal Arts, also provided support. And finally, but certainly not least, many thanks are due to Kathryn Santiago, editorial assistant, whose dedication and attention to detail did much to keep this annual on track.

Luke Eric Lassiter


beyond participant observationCollaborative Ethnography as Theoretical Innovation

joanne rappaport, Georgetown University

The past decade has witnessed a growing interest in collaborative ethnographic methods in North America. Most recently, the Latin Amer- ican Studies Association introduced a new initiative, Other Americas/Otros Saberes, aimed at funding collaborative research between academics and Latin American indigenous or Afrodescendant orga-nizations.1 A series of collaborative projects with indigenous and African American communities have demonstrated that collaboration is not only a moral choice for progressive ethnographers but a choice that makes for good ethnography (Field 2008; Lassiter et al. 2004; Ridington and Hastings 1997). The growing appeal of collaborative research has also been reflected in the pages of major anthropological journals (Castañeda 2006; Field 1999a; Lassiter 2005b); it is mirrored by a call for a “public anthropology” attentive to pressing public issues and written in a language accessible to an educated general public, and by a turn toward a politically engaged “activist anthropology” (Hale 2007, 104).2

Collaborative ethnography has been defined as

an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes

collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without

veiling it—from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and,

especially, through the writing process. Collaborative ethnography

invites commentary from our consultants and seeks to make that

commentary overtly part of the ethnographic text as it develops. In

turn, this negotiation is reintegrated back into the fieldwork process

itself. (Lassiter 2005a, 16)


collaborative anthropologies • volume 1 • 2008 2 •

Such an endeavor is not new to anthropology, nor is it confined to the North American anthropological arena: it can be traced back to Boas and his associates (Berman 1998), and it has been a mainstay of African American activist anthropology (Gwaltney [1980] 1993). It is also prac-ticed widely by Latin American anthropologists working with social movements (Bonilla et al. 1972; Vasco Uribe 2002) and nongovernmen-tal organizations (Riaño-Alcalá 2006). The products of collaborative ethnography include coauthored pieces (Field 2008; Fletcher and La Flesche [1911] 1992; Ridington and Hastings 1997; Vasco Uribe, Dagua Hurtado, and Aranda 1993), edited volumes in which anthropologists and local researchers present their findings (Lassiter et al. 2004), pub-lications for consumption by local communities (Lobo 2002; Reynolds and Cousins 1993), and single-authored books that acknowledge the collaborative context in which they were produced (Field 1999b; Lassiter 1998; Lawless 1993; Rappaport 2005a; Urton 1997).

The bulk of the English-language literature on collaboration focuses on the substantive content that results from this brand of research, ignoring the specificity of its methodology: how researchers come to learn through collaboration. As I hope to illustrate, the local agendas that community researchers bring to the collaborative endeavor are key spaces in which we can begin to discern the potential contributions of collaboration. It is precisely the possibility of constructing alternative research agendas outside of the academic orbit and, correspondingly, pursuing alternative forms of analysis, which make collaborative ethnography different from traditional participant observation or, for that matter, from methodologies in which subjects participate as research assistants but have little control over the research. What I wish to accomplish in this article is to focus on collaboration as a space for the coproduction of theory, which is, I will contend, a crucial venue in which knowledge is created through collaboration. My aim is to discover why such an approach is not only morally or ethically necessary—an argument that has become well represented in recent public anthropology literature (Scheper-Hughes 1995)—but, more importantly, to what extent it bears potential for nourishing and revitalizing anthropological thought (Hale 2007). I also hope to turn the attention of North American readers to the particular brand of collaborative research that has been going on for years in Latin America, and in Colombia, particularly. Using methodologies that


rappaport • beyond participant observation • 3

merge research with activism, anthropological collaborations in Colombia function as spaces in which co-theorization takes place, nourishing both the political objectives of community researchers and the academic analyses of scholars. Refocusing our sights outside of the North American orbit will help us build new intellectual genealogies that can potentially nourish our goal of promoting collaborative anthropology.

colombian anthropology and social engagement

Following the lead of my Colombian colleagues, who are searching for an approach to anthropology originating in the global south, in this article I intend to draw upon Colombian collaborative ethnography as a paradigm that could have an impact on our understanding of what collaboration means, shifting our emphasis from the production of ethnography as a central goal to that of engaging in activist research that is equally productive in a broader sense for both the professional ethnographer and the community. Social engagement lies at the heart of the emergence of a distinctly Latin American anthropology (Ramos 1990). Intense, sometimes radical, engagement characterizes Colombian anthropology in particular, marking it as distinct in style from its northern cousins, which are by nature more academic in focus or aligned to the priorities of mainstream institutions (Oliveira 1999–2000). An emphasis on the political in Colombian anthropology is evident from the choice of topics of study, which today pay close attention to conflict, ethnic movements, and social inequalities, probing the moral and political fiber of Colombian society (Jimeno 2004; Ramírez 2001; Ulloa 2004). Most importantly, however, Colombian insistence upon social engagement has resulted in a distinct way of doing anthropology.3

Myriam Jimeno (2000, 2005, 2008) argues that Colombian anthro-pologists are “citizen-researchers,” for whom the “exercise of the pro-fession is simultaneously the exercise of citizenship” (2000, 160). This owes to the fact that Colombian academic researchers feel themselves to be part of the social realities they are studying, leading them to share a sense of citizenship with their subjects: “The sectors studied are not understood as exotic, isolated, distant, or ‘cold’ worlds, but as copar-ticipants in the construction of nation and of democracy” (2005, 46;



cf. Correa 2005). Such a proximity between the researcher and the re-searched leads to the creation of “a space of meta-academic debate” in which intellectual work “has implications for social life and for the practical significance of the exercise of citizenship” (2005, 51). What this has meant in practice is that Colombian anthropologists tend to privilege the use of workshops and other collective venues as research methodologies (Zambrano 1989), the formation of interdisciplinary research teams, the adoption of historical modes of investigation that uncover the history of existing inequalities (Pineda Camacho 2005), and a brand of participatory action research pioneered in Colombia that inserts anthropologists into grassroots political and social strug-gles as activist-scholars, fostering collaboration simultaneously on the political level and at the level of ethnographic analysis (Caviedes 2003; Vasco Uribe 2002; cf. Bonilla et al. 1972; Fals-Borda 1991). As a result, the research of the anthropological community only sometimes comes to fruition in classic ethnographic monographs. Scholarly work is reported in articles, essays, and historical monographs, but it also flowers in other written genres that are of greater utility to the communities being studied, including publications aimed at popular consumption, journalism, political documents, testimonial narratives, and primary-school textbooks. Much of what transpires in these activities is not written at all, unfolding in workshops whose contents are only imperfectly captured in the summaries stored in organizational archives but which have lasting impact in communities. As a result, we cannot think of the work of Colombian anthropologists as exclusively encoded in the written channel, nor of fieldwork as embodying entirely scholarly ends, nor, indeed, of ethnography as an applied pursuit mediated by official institutions in the sense that we understand applied anthropology in North America. Colombian anthropologists orient themselves toward broad audiences—not only reading publics but also grassroots organizations and other popular sectors—creating a particular brand of public anthropology.

collaborative research as a vehicle for theory building

One of the most valuable contributions that Colombian collaborative research can make to anthropology across the globe is in the grounding of collaboration in co-theorization. By co-theorization, I mean the col-



lective production of conceptual vehicles that draw upon both a body of anthropological theory and upon concepts developed by our interlocu-tors; I purposefully emphasize this process as one of theory building and not simply coanalysis in order to highlight the fact that such an operation involves the creation of abstract forms of thought similar in nature and intent to the theories created by anthropologists, although they partially originate in other traditions and in nonacademic contexts. Understood in this sense, collaboration converts the space of fieldwork from one of data collection to one of co-conceptualization.

Let me be more specific about what I mean by co-theorizing. Co-lombian anthropologist Luis Guillermo Vasco engaged in pointed theorizing with his interlocutors from the history committee of the Colombian indigenous community of Guambía. Their oral history project was conceived and directed by local researchers who did not serve as “consultants” to an ethnographic project proposed by an external researcher but as full team members who engaged the services of the anthropologist once they had set their own research priorities. In the years before undertaking their research, the Guambianos were involved in a process of land-claims that expanded their territorial base and strengthened the legitimacy of their traditional authorities. For them, historical research was a way of connecting cultural revitalization to their objectives of reclaiming territory lost in the nineteenth century and demonstrating that they were native to the reclaimed lands.

Vasco, an anthropologist at the National University of Colombia and an activist in organizations in solidarity with the indigenous movement, worked for several decades with a Guambiano research team to develop theoretical constructs out of local material culture and language use, in the service of creating novel narrative vehicles for recounting the past in what we might call a “Guambiano tonality.”4 In particular, they engaged the motif of the spiral, present on petroglyphs and in straw hats, as a vehicle for breaking the mold of Western linear forms of historical narration (Vasco Uribe, Dagua Hurtado, and Aranda 1993; cf. Rappaport 2005a, chap. 5), which allowed them to recount the Guambiano past through circular narrations. These stories constantly sight back on primordial beings associated with key topographic sites that are also locations of significant land-claims activity. The team did not simply interpret the historical narratives they collected from a “Guambiano perspective” but created what we might call theoretical concepts out of their everyday realities.5



The co-theorizing done by Vasco and his collaborators might be thought of in a very general sense as an example of a thorough and conscientious ethnography, in which exegesis takes place between ethnographer and subject. However, collaboration is more than “good ethnography,” because it shifts control of the research process out of the hands of the anthropologist and into the collective sphere of the anthropologist working on an equal basis with community researchers. It was the group of Guambiano researchers, themselves aware of what theory is and intent on building it, who appropriated the spiral as a conceptual tool and shared this approach with Vasco. Significantly, the spiral is not a motif that earlier ethnographers of Guambiano culture had identified but a construct that Guambiano intellectuals derived from their own analysis of its ubiquity in their everyday lives as well as in commonly used metaphors identified by Guambiano linguists, which depict social relationships as “rolling and unrolling” (Muelas Hurtado 1995). This process of creating conceptual vehicles to interpret historical materials was grounded in the political objectives of the Guambiano authorities, building upon a model of participatory action research pioneered by Orlando Fals Borda (1991) that explicitly oriented research toward grassroots political objectives and laid the foundations for much of today’s collaborative work in Latin America. By means of historical research, the Guambianos sought to document their ties to their territory.

Vasco’s Guambiano interlocutors took away with them new modes of interpretation that they could engage beyond the academic sphere, in community spaces in which writing is not the ultimate goal (Cas-tañeda 2005), and where the results of historical research could be interpreted in the Guambiano language (which, although it is written, is not widely read outside of the classroom). Vasco (2002) contends that the team’s central objective was the development of a collective ethnographic research methodology, not the creation of ethnographic texts. In fact, he argues that for the first six months of the project, the team had no intention of writing up its research, which was to be translated into picture-maps for internal use; they began to write only when community authorities asked them to do so and provided them with a list of research topics (Cunin 2006, 28).6 Subsequently, a host of Spanish-language pamphlets, initially in mimeograph form and later in print, disseminated the narratives within Guambía (Dagua, Aranda, and



Vasco U. 1989; Tróchez T. and Flor 1990). The first of these pamphlets contained pointed critiques of previous anthropological writings on the community, demonstrating that when subordinated groups adopt the ethnographer’s craft, they must pay as much attention to what others have written about them as about their own culture, a standpoint that Rey Chow calls “being-looked-at-ness” and identifies as a hallmark of what she calls “autoethnography” (Chow 1995, 180).7

However, the results of the research were not confined to internal pamphlets. The most prominent project in which this collaborative history was subsequently incorporated was a far-ranging development plan constructed by the Guambiano authorities, which would guide their efforts at revitalizing an autonomous public administration and incorporating new territory into a land base that could no longer sustain their growing population (Guambía, Cabildo, Taitas, and Comisión de Trabajo del Pueblo Guambiano 1994; cf. Gow 1997, 2005, 2008). The project also resulted in coauthored texts, aimed largely at an academic audience (Dagua Hurtado, Aranda, and Vasco 1998; Vasco Uribe, Dagua Hurtado, and Aranda 1993). What these scholarly texts achieved was the legitimization of Guambiano autoethnography in academic circles (Cunin 2006, 30), bringing to light a new epistemology of fieldwork, where the field is a place for creating conceptualizations, as opposed to a space of data collection.

There is, indeed, a growing recognition on the part of more conventional North American ethnographers of the significance of recognizing that what happens in the field is much more than data collection. George Marcus (1997) argues that traditional methods of participant-observation predicated upon the notion of rapport ignore the broader contexts within which ethnography takes place: they do not pay heed to the colonial or neocolonial contexts in which fieldwork unfolds, nor to the multiple locations from which knowledge must be drawn in order to conduct research in the contemporary world. The recognition of such constraints calls for a new approach to field research which, Marcus suggests, must be premised upon a kind of complicity between the (external) ethnographer and (internal) subject. Complicity is, for Marcus, an intellectual symbiosis through which connections can be made to the multiple global contexts that impinge upon—but range beyond—local knowledge; this is something that he does not appear to think can be accomplished by the internal subject



working in isolation from the ethnographer (1997, 98). Marcus provides various examples of such complicity. In his article he cites a study of highly educated members of the European right (Holmes 1993 in Marcus 1997); also complicit is his own research with the Portuguese aristocracy, written in the form of an electronic-mail dialogue (Marcus and Mascarenhas 2005). The kinds of complicity that seem to appeal to Marcus indicate that it is most likely to unfold in the presence of cosmopolitan and educated subjects, such as the elites he has studied, who can comprehend the big picture that the ethnographer hopes to paint and can expand upon the ethnographer’s concerns in lengthy and complex expositions. He argues that this approach, which pays heed to global connections through what I take to be an exegetic dialogue, places the anthropologist “always on the verge of activism, of negotiating some kind of involvement beyond the distanced role of ethnographer” (1997, 100).

I must admit, however, that I am perplexed by Marcus’s assertion, given that there is a great deal of distance between complicit dialogic involvement and activism, which to me are not necessarily coterminous, and should not be, in some ethnographic contexts (such as the study of the European right, which I, for one, would not promote). I also think that his assertion misinterprets the political role that ethnographers can play, which most certainly can involve collaboration through joint creation but does not necessarily imply activism, which, I would argue, entails a skill set that anthropologists as scholars do not bring to the table. There is also a gap between the one-way question-and-answer dialogue that characterizes ethnography in general (Tedlock and Mannheim 1995; cf. Marcus and Mascarenhas 2005, 103) and the reciprocal dialogues of Vasco, in which questions and answers are coming from both parties in a bidirectional movement.

The kind of complicity called for by Marcus can, however, hold the potential of converting collaboration into a charged and fruitful methodology, if we take his suggestion further, to comprehend not only complicity in an ethnographic dialogue (which is frequently of greater interest to the ethnographer than to the subject), but complicity in achieving the goals of the subject through conducting joint research. This can occur only when we shift control of the research process out of the ethnographer’s hands. In this scenario, the external ethnographer is not so much on the verge of activism as of enhancing activist agendas



by entering into dialogue with methodologies already chosen by the community. When Vasco left the fundamental decisions concerning the research agenda to the Guambianos, the team began to ask questions of local history that an external anthropologist might not necessarily have considered and interpreted historical materials within novel frames of reference. Clearly, this called for a deep external knowledge on the part of the Guambiano researchers, including a comprehension of academic forms of analysis, an appreciation of what theory is, and an understanding of the broader history of indigenous land loss in Colombia as well as a facility in data gathering.8 What Vasco brought to the table was a broad command of comparative ethnography, a familiarity with indigenous organizing beyond Guambía, a knowledge of anthropological theory that could be placed in dialogue with Guambiano “concept-things,” the experience and legitimacy of a successful academic author, and a willingness to subordinate his own objectives to those of his coresearchers.9 The border between the internal subject and the external ethnographer, as Marcus describes it, was blurred in this project, given that both the Guambiano researchers and Vasco had access to distinct forms of external knowledge, and above all, because this was not a team of “internal subjects” and of “external ethnographers” but was composed of highly sophisticated and well-read ethnographers, both external and internal, with different knowledge sets and methodologies that were placed in dialogue with each other.10

co-theorization with the colombian indigenous Movement

In the remainder of this article, I will argue the significance of co-the-orization for a revitalized ethnographic practice by thinking through my own collaborative experiences in Colombia with an interethnic team of indigenous researchers, Colombian anthropologists, and North American scholars studying politics in the department of Cauca in southwestern highland Colombia since 1991, when a new constitu-tion recast the country as a pluriethnic and multicultural nation (Van Cott 2000). The starting point for our methodology emerged out of the work of the Guambiano history committee, our central objective being cotheorization. Our team operated in association with several regional and grassroots indigenous organizations whose goals are to promote



Native rights in a country that only recently recognized the existence of indigenous citizens and to reform the Colombian state by injecting into it a radical brand of democracy in which minority participation is not diluted by an insistence on the rule of an electoral majority (Mouffe 1995). As a result, the indigenous team members participated in the project, not in the spirit of promoting ethnographic research for aca-demic ends but with the express intention of harnessing the research experience to the goals of their organizations.

The aim of our project was to study local politics as a scaffolding upon which we could establish a horizontal dialogue that would recognize and build upon our different research agendas, conceptual approaches, and methodologies. Cauca is unusual in Colombia, given that a plurality of its population is indigenous, whereas only some 2 percent of Colombians in general would identify as Native; Cauca is also the home of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), Colombia’s oldest indigenous organization, which has the capacity to mobilize tens of thousands on short notice. CRIC’s membership includes numerous indigenous groups, the Nasa being the largest group in the region, numbering approximately 120,000. In our project, we intended to look at indigenous organizations as significant players in the formation of multicultural policy, most frequently from a contestatory position in negotiation with the state. In particular, we hoped to explore the multiplicity of levels at which indigenous activists are organizing—from national and regional organizations to subregional associations of community authorities and local councils.11 The team included two Colombian academics from the Universidad del Cauca, two foreign academics, and two community-based Nasa researcher-activists.

We did not write together, nor did we conduct fieldwork as a group. Instead, each member had his or her own research project (mine focused on cultural politics in CRIC), which was brought to the table in written or oral form and collectively analyzed at periodic team meetings (which were recorded, transcribed, and available to all team members). We agreed that such an approach would encourage professional anthropologists and indigenous researchers to operate on a more equal basis. In other words, the team was essentially a space of reflection and theory-building. Our understanding of what constituted theory derived from CRIC’s own research experience, from our knowledge of the Guambiano history project, and from our scholarly reading (which



all of us had engaged in from distinct disciplinary perspectives in anthropology, linguistics, and pedagogy).

The methodologies we employed in our individual projects varied. While the academics tended to privilege participant-observation and in-depth interviewing, the Nasa members also engaged in a form of introspective analysis in which they constructed typologies in Nasa Yuwe (their native language) in order to organize their ethnographic data according to what they identified as Nasa criteria (Rappaport 2005a). All of us participated in projects spearheaded by various indigenous organizations and local communities in addition to conducting research on our own; our collaborations ranged from lending assistance in development plans, serving as note-takers at regional meetings, cooperating with organizational research projects, writing bilingual intercultural curricula for primary schools, and assisting Nasa women’s organizations. The aim was to allow our activism to enter into dialogue with our individual research projects, so that, in a sense, we were simultaneously external analysts and internal actors, something I will return to at the end of this article.

The indigenous members of the team continually emphasized that although they appreciated the ways in which our dialogue helped develop their writing skills, in the final instance they hoped that the collaborative space could engender new methodologies revolving around their indigenous subject position. For them, the team was all about subjectivity, about forging a place at the table as indigenous researchers and developing an intellectual agenda that met the needs of their organizations. Susana Piñacué and Adonías Perdomo, the two Nasa members of the team, saw the development of a collaborative methodology as an urgent task that would build bridges between indigenous researchers and communities, and between those Native researchers and their academic counterparts, something that Piñacué observed at one of our meetings:

I would say that more than writing a thick tome (mamotreto) I hope

to consolidate a methodological proposal. . . . In the coming year I

hope this work will produce methodological points that can impact

the different spaces in which we operate. There are many Native

people who are doing research. What kind of approaches are they

using? How are they writing it up? Where are they publishing? What



are they writing? For whom are they writing? From an indigenous

perspective. . . . But there are also many professionals from different

disciplines who are still writing with that archaic mentality: you are

the informant, I am the researcher, tell me in so many words. . . . So,

thinking it out somewhat ambitiously, how can we have an impact in

those circles? (Susana Piñacué, August 8, 2001)

Conversely, many of the academic members of the team entered into collaboration under the assumption that we would engage in scholarly publishing, but we swiftly discovered we were to be absorbed in a more far-ranging project that involved methodological innovation, something that could potentially have a greater impact than would the contents of our research. As scholars familiar with academic discussions about reflexivity, we were drawn into a new arena of conversation about the topic, focusing on why identity is central to the construction of theory by Nasa autoethnographers. As will be apparent in what follows, self-consciousness about being Nasa or an outsider was not only central to our exchanges but became the conceptual vehicle through which we made sense of our research.12

Central to our objective of transforming methodology was the creation through collective dialogue of a number of key concepts—theoretical vehicles—that would guide our research. Contrary to the Guambiano example I described above, these concepts did not originate in specifically Nasa cultural forms but were grounded in the rich organizational culture of the Caucan indigenous movement in which all of us were to some degree enmeshed. The remainder of this paper will focus on one of these theoretical constructs, looking at how it developed in our open-ended team meetings. My analysis centers on the meetings (and not on our individual research methodologies) because they functioned as the principal site in which our co-theorization unfolded. I conclude with a discussion of the utility of co-theorizing for anthropologists and our interlocutors.

“inside” and “outside”

During the five years our team worked together, we developed a concep-tual framework that revolved around an opposition between “inside” and “outside,” a construct that arose out of the reflections of the indig-enous members of the team regarding their own problematic insertion



into Native communities. Inside and outside are metaphors frequently used by CRIC members to contrast Native and non-Native social, cul-tural, and political spaces. At first glance, the inside/outside opposition appears to be a rigid and essentialist dichotomy that simplifies a com-plex reality, since it imposes an exclusive topographic metaphor upon a dynamic and heterogeneous social landscape. But in the course of our team discussions we discovered that the inside was more than simply the indigenous community in opposition to the outside of the national society. In our analysis, the two spaces could be almost juxtaposed, de-pending on the context. Indigenous intellectuals—the political leaders and cultural activists in these organizations—move between the space of the Native community and the urban world of indigenous organizing and regional politics, yet they feel alienated from their indigenous base and constantly seek nourishment in constructs of indigenous culture. Longtime non-Native collaborators—colaboradores, in CRIC parlance, who along with the organizational leadership, form the backbone of the organization—inhabit a kind of an inside in concert with indige-nous activists, in opposition to members of other sectors of the region-al society. CRIC leaders who participated in the ideological training of an interethnic but largely indigenous guerrilla organization active in Cauca in the 1980s, the Quintín Lame Armed Movement, were posi-tioned outside while non-Native combatants affiliated with the organi-zation were on the inside. The inside of the culturalist discourses used by indigenous educational activists comes into conflict with the more pragmatic discourses of indigenous political leaders, who are seen as moving on the outside. In other words, we began to see a constellation of dynamic forms of identification functioning within an intercultural space that could be comprehended through the use of an opposition whose contents were entirely relative to the political juncture. What this paired notion allowed us to do was to evaluate the broader constella-tion of indigenous politics from the standpoint of organizational ac-tors at particular political junctures.

Such distinctions extended beyond the purview of our discussion group. Debates over inside and outside were also taking place on a more general level in the organization, particularly over whether col-laborators should more properly be considered as external “advisors” instead of their present status as integral to the movement. The political leadership of CRIC and many of its militants questioned whether indig-



enous cultural activists should be associated long-term with programs in the regional office, or whether they should more properly rotate into community-based positions. Nasa-speaking activists repeatedly noted the differences between their political practice and that of monolingual Spanish-speaking Nasas, who make up a good half of the Nasa popula-tion. In other words, our adoption of the inside/outside conceptual pair echoed the concerns of many of CRIC’s activists.

A brief excursion through our team meetings illustrates how we en-gaged this pair of metaphors, both to interpret the political develop-ments we were studying and to evaluate our group methodology. The inside/outside opposition was employed by Nasa team members to refer to cultural revitalization efforts meant to “protect” those inside from external influences. However, they asserted that it is only by strad-dling the boundary between inside and outside that indigenous leaders (or researchers, for that matter) can innovate, thereby maintaining the integrity of the inside. Inside and outside are necessarily intermeshed; control of movement across the two poles is an urgent political respon-sibility of Native researchers. Perdomo (at the time of our meetings, a “traditional authority”—as local elected leaders are called—in the com-munity of Pitayó) reflected on this issue at a team meeting, speaking simultaneously as a leader and an analyst:

We’ve had to reorient ourselves to reach the frontier. The great thing

that might happen is that . . . as people reach the border in the course

of the [organizing] process . . . [this reorienting] will be useful so that

they establish other proposals, other strategies, so that the people who

must reach the border return stronger. . . . I think that the frontier isn’t

as dangerous if I’m inside it. . . . But I am concerned, one, that this

research project strengthens us on the inside; two, that it strengthens

those of us who are on the frontier; and three, that this research

helps the . . . Nasa community to seek strategies, so that they become

conscious about what is happening and so that they no longer have to

wait for us to reorient ourselves and go to the frontier to value what is

ours and return to rework it. (Adonías Perdomo, August 3, 1999)

This is a very complex statement because it indicates that the actors themselves are acutely aware of the ambivalences and the borrowings that accompany processes of cultural revitalization. In fact, our meth-odology required that all of us straddle the frontier.



Perdomo’s statement demonstrates that inside/outside was key not only to making sense of our methodological objectives but also to the way research could nourish the political objectives of indigenous in-tellectuals. Myriam Amparo Espinosa, the Colombian anthropologist on the team, employed the opposition to question traditional ethno-graphic research and to underline the ways in which our nascent col-lective would have to rethink the purpose of our collaboration. In one exchange, Perdomo argued that we needed to move away from defin-ing research through the individuals who engage in it (he employed the Spanish form por, or “by,” used to denote authorship) to a reconceptu-alization of research with a collective purpose (para, or “for”). Espinosa responded that we would have to rethink what it meant to write up our research:

As to the results of the research, I think it would be a good exercise if

they came out as a text. But that already limits the “para”—that is, the

external “para.” For whom externally? For the outside researchers. Or

for whom internally? For the Nasa researchers. For whom especially?

(Myriam Amparo Espinosa, June 10–11, 1999)

In this exchange, the inside/outside opposition did not force us into rigid dichotomies but enabled us to explore the heterogeneity of both the indigenous movement and of academia.

In particular, it led us to deepen our appreciation of the variety of audiences on the inside and the relationship among them. Piñacué re-peatedly questioned the culturalist discourses of the urban-based re-gional intellectuals of CRIC, including herself, who have constructed a proposal for “Nasa culture” that is to be propagated in local communi-ties: “Should we speak of a Nasa identity? Or of identities at the level of the community?” She asked this because she felt that

we are undergoing a cultural crisis at the cultural level among the

[Nasa] people. Because in effect, I see my future as fragmented, frag-

mented in the sense of being immersed in many political, economic,

religious interests, so that ultimately, we are folklorizing or roman-

ticizing the discourse of an elite that has left its community and

attempted to frame its culture to benefit its own interests. (Susana

Piñacué, August 3, 1999)



Here, Piñacué critiques the very work of the cultural “insiders” located on the frontier. Implicitly, she is questioning her own frontier position as inherently dangerous.

Piñacué wonders whether, in the final instance, her own work is writ-ten from the “outside,” a general problem for autoethnographers that North American team member David Gow expressed by noting that some of Perdomo’s work “was clearly written from the inside,” while in other instances, it “could have been written by an external anthropolo-gist, who’d worked so many years with the Nasa that he knew them, had their trust” (David Gow, July 2, 2000). Such tension originates in the anthropological models that have persistently dogged Native re-searchers and cultural activists, restraining the kind of methodological and theoretical innovation that we were attempting to pursue.

But Piñacué’s preoccupations with the outsider status of indigenous intellectuals also points to the very real methodological differences be-tween Nasa researchers and academic ethnographers, which our proj-ect sought to bridge, although not to erase. Earlier, I suggested that Piñacué and Perdomo employed introspective approaches centering on the creation of typologies in Nasa Yuwe. Their insistence upon the in-side/outside opposition and the ways in which they speak of it in rela-tion to their own positionings indicates that their research methodol-ogy also involves using themselves as measures for making sense of the dynamics of the regional indigenous movement. Piñacué’s individual research project centered on the relationship among a heterogeneous set of Nasa women within CRIC. Employing what she hopes is a Nasa frame of reference, she places them in three categories framed in Nasa Yuwe: elderly, monolingual women who “live like Nasa”; those, like her, who work in the regional office in the city of Popayán and “think as Nasa”; and those occupying local-level leadership roles who only “move about as Nasa,” a subtle set of distinctions that positions differ-ent types of activists at distances relative to everyday Nasa experience (Piñacué Achicué 2005; Rappaport 2005a: 100–102). The three catego-ries occupy distinct grades of “insiderness.” While the elderly women anchor her typology, activists who “think as Nasa” and have the ability to mentor those who simply “move about as Nasa” hold, in Piñacué’s interpretation, the ultimate responsibility for cultural revitalization (al-though they also run the greatest risks). Her typology leads me to sur-mise that more than the collection of ethnographic material, research



by CRIC’s cultural activists involves soul-searching and deeply reflex-ive attempts at tracing political relationships, providing interpretive frameworks steeped in subjective sentiments.

Clearly, Piñacué is no essentialist. However, our debates about the heterogeneity of the inside led us increasingly to consider why the exi-gencies of politics internal to organizations force leaders and cultural activists to deploy discourses of ethnic difference and cultural stasis. Numerous scholars have dwelled upon the essentialism that appears to characterize indigenous identity politics, ranging between those who critique such discourses out of hand as inauthentic (Hanson 1989; Linnekin 1983) and those who see essentialist discourses as politically strategic (Friedman 1994; Spivak and Grosz 1990; Warren 1998). Les Field (1999a) transcends what is perhaps a sterile disagreement to as-sert that the deployment of constructionist and essentialist discours-es in Native American circles in the United States is more a product of the balancing of political priorities than the either/or debate that has raged in the academic literature (see also Fischer 1999). Myriam Amparo Espinosa notes such a tension in the work of both Perdomo and Piñacué, leading her to question how they use the notions of inside and outside:

It’s the constant duality between inside and outside. I don’t know

if Nasa culture identifies dualisms or if it is in the construction of

the text. Because this problem of the inside/outside dyad lends an

essentialist character [to your argument], as though something

already existing were being constantly disrupted. (Myriam Amparo

Espinosa, July 2, 2000)

Piñacué responded to Espinosa’s question by stating that the inside/outside dyad is constantly voiced in communities, making it a discur-sive reality. However, Piñacué’s political positioning on the inside, cou-pled with her need to move between inside and outside in the conduct of her research, leads to a very particular use of the dyad that constantly shifts between essential culturalist discourses and more constructivist social analysis.

While external analysts have expressed an overriding concern about the essentialism of ethnic actors, the indigenous members of our team worried about the inverse: that collaborators were the ones who were guilty of essentialism, not indigenous activists. In the following quo-



tation, Piñacué points to the persistent desire of nonindigenous aca-demics to privilege specific political junctures that capture the atten-tion of the broader public, such as, for example, regional mobilizations in which the indigenous movement comes into confrontation with the Caucan elite and with nonindigenous popular movements. At such mo-ments, we appreciate indigenous actors as a homogenous group that stands as a counterpart to an equally homogenous dominant society, losing sight of the conflicts, negotiations, and ambivalent positions within the indigenous sphere. Piñacué, who belongs to an influential Nasa family—her brother, Jesús Enrique Piñacué, is a former president of CRIC and currently a member of the Colombian Senate—has long been dogged by the criticism that she is not “culturally Nasa.” The am-bivalence of her own identity becomes a point of departure for her cri-tique of academics in an exchange she had with Espinosa:

Maybe it’s because you’re Amparo and I’m Susana, and I identify

more [as a Nasa]—although they say that they identify me more as

a [nonindigenous] mestiza but also as indigenous—that I look at my

problem in a panorama. So I have no single focus, I try to explore

everything without situating myself or obligating myself [to a single

position]. But the fact is that Amparo has an academic trajectory and a

point of reference among other academics, a profession that absorbs

her and to which she must belong, so that you don’t observe the

panorama around us and what’s important in this space is to register

the entire dynamic. (Susana Piñacué, January 17, 2000)

Piñacué chides Espinosa—and the rest of us—for not appreciating the complex dynamics at work on the “inside,” which would mitigate our appreciation of indigenous actors. She implores us academics to shift our perspective and look beyond the dyad, to think more in terms of a set of nested categories than a simple opposition. She can do this be-cause she perceives the inside and the outside to be nested within her-self, a sensation akin to Espinosa’s experience as a political collabora-tor with CRIC:

At first they told me that I was really a Nasa at heart. Right? And later I

discovered that I was more Nasa than the Nasa themselves. OK? That

happens to many of us collaborators, although we really never stop

being the Other. (Myriam Amparo Espinosa, June 10–11, 1999)



What Espinosa ultimately recognizes is that a collaborator’s posi-tioning “inside” in the service of the indigenous organization will al-ways remain under debate, given the fact that the movement speaks for the Native community. In this sense, it is only through dialogue that we outsiders can appreciate the extent to which inside and outside are nested in the interior of the indigenous sphere. It is not so much that we are unable to capture the richness of the operation of this opposi-tion but that we do not have the authority to do so. That authority only comes through collaboration with our Nasa colleagues, whose self-re-flexive interpretative moves entered into a corrective dialogue with our academic analytical tools. Inside and outside were thus not only ana-lytical tools but the very spaces in which we were forced to continually position and reposition ourselves as researchers.

conclusion: Why collaborate?

The process of co-theorizing we engaged in brought forth tangible in-tellectual results in the academic arena. In particular, it provided alter-natives to current debates over whether or not the discourse of indige-nous activists is essentialist (or strategically essentialist). It emphasized the sophistication of these actors and underlined the fact that we can-not compare their culturalist constructs to those of anthropologists but must begin to comprehend them on their own terms. It also opened an important window onto the pluralist nature of indigenous organiz-ing, a political project in which Native activists work side by side with nonindigenous collaborators. Finally, it furnished a viable alternative to current ethnographic practice, taking methodologies like Vasco’s in new directions and suggesting that as North American ethnographers we might look toward the national anthropologies of Latin America as sources of methodological innovation.

Would those of us on the outside have heeded the suggestions of our Nasa colleagues had our conversations not been framed by a collabora-tive project? I do not think so because we would not have been as aware of the possibilities that lay before us. I conclude by considering how the inside/outside opposition was of use to me as an anthropologist. (I leave it to Piñacué and Perdomo to reflect on its utility in their activist lives.) In my opinion, this pair of concepts helped me understand the conceptual impasse between anthropological notions of ethnicity of



the sort pioneered by Barth (1969) that emphasize “groupness” or eth-nic boundaries without paying heed to the broader political context in which indigenous organizations have affected the national conscience, and the new social movement literature, which does not effectively ex-plain the place of culture in these movements.

The Barthian notion of ethnicity is problematic for making sense of the multiple and contradictory processes of identification that have been harnessed by indigenous political actors to contend with both their organizational needs and their own subjectivities as cosmopoli-tan intellectuals. Anthropological treatments of ethnicity focus on how individuals negotiate ethnic boundaries, not how political organiza-tions—which are themselves palimpsests of multiple ethnic boundar-ies that are continually negotiated and renegotiated—create and main-tain them. What is needed is a new look at who participates in identity politics, at how intercultural organizations create new forms of iden-tification and negotiate the fluid boundaries of their constituencies. The participation of nonindigenous collaborators in indigenous move-ments seems crucial to me in this necessary move away from an ethnic-ity paradigm, as it homes in on the intercultural space in which new indigenous identities are under discussion. Nevertheless, I know of only two scholarly takes on indigenous organizing that recognize the role of non-Natives in these movements (Caviedes 2003; Laurent 2006).

Central to the processes of identification going on at the heart of indigenous organizations are culturalist discourses, which appear essentialist because they promote Native practices as though they were contained within stable and bounded cultural frameworks. The Barthian model of ethnicity eschews culture in favor of examining the dynamics of boundary negotiation. But culture, particularly as a self-conscious process of construction, is fundamental to indigenous discourses and cannot be neglected in our analysis. At an early team meeting, Piñacué drove this home by turning the idea of authenticity on its head: “To be authentic is to increasingly demonstrate what we dream. . . . To be authentic is to draw closer, to make our dreams a reality, so that as we approach our dreams we become more authentic” (Susana Piñacué, January 17, 2000; italics mine). What Piñacué is telling us is that for indigenous activists, culture is not an existing constellation of practices and meanings located on the “inside” but a projection of how future lifeways should look, driven by a process in which elements



of the inside are revitalized through the incorporation of ideas from outside; that is, culture necessarily straddles the frontier. This is not a strategic deployment of essentializing discourses to describe what exists “out there” but a model of what “should be,” a blueprint for the future.13 As a result, indigenous activists’ deployments of culture cannot be equated with ethnography. Their purpose is different. While ethnographers engage in cultural description with an eye to analyzing it, indigenous autoethnographers study culture to act upon it (Asad 1986; Briones 2005, 61). Piñacué and Perdomo were forced to examine their own subjectivities to accomplish this task, to question how and why they, as intellectuals, experienced their Nasa identity and whether that experience could lend them the authority to construct a new cultural practice for other Nasa. Their participation in the team was introspective, self-conscious, practical, and utopian.

Now, such blueprints are heterogeneous and constantly under debate, adopted within certain contexts and rejected in others. This was apparent in our team discussion, where Piñacué and Perdomo spent a great deal of time critiquing various models for intercultural democratic participation, the reintroduction of indigenous cosmologies, the construction of house-gardens, and other CRIC projects which, on the surface, appear as though they were ethnographic descriptions of what exists, and not proposals for what should be. They also devoted discussion time to exploring the political intentions and the actors behind some of these projects, emphasizing that what looks like objective ethnography is shot through with interests not always apparent to the outside observer. The very appreciation of whether indigenous research produces ethnographies or blueprints marked multiple positionings inside and outside of the movement. Collaborators and academics, located on the nonindigenous outside, frequently take Native research to be an objective description of existing culture, while Nasa-speaking activists on the inside saw them as projections toward the future. Similarly, local activists sometimes adopt blueprints uncritically in their presentation of self, as though they were stable cultural traits. Of course, the dynamics of our team also sometimes led Perdomo and Piñacué to represent cultural forms as ethnographic (as opposed to projections) in an effort to differentiate themselves from the rest of us, in a kind of “It’s a Nasa thing. You wouldn’t understand.” On these occasions our Nasa colleagues, tongue in cheek, very consciously deployed essentializations strategically.



Rodgers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000, 1) offer a compelling critique of antiessentialist arguments as they had been employed in the study of new social movements, one that is highly pertinent to the topic of collaborative theorizing. They argue that constructivist apologies of strategic essentialism leave scholars without a conceptual handle with which to analyze the power of the categories used in identity politics. They distinguish between “categories of practice” and “analytical categories,” the first embedded in the essentializing discourses of groups advocating identity politics and the second the province of constructivist analysts (2000, 4, 33). It is the gap between the two, they argue, that precludes effective analysis of identity, forcing observers to uncritically adopt discourses that are more appropriate to political action than to analysis.

In the course of our collaborative theorizing, we merged these two poles in various ways. We all engaged in organizational work as an integral part of our projects, either as indigenous activists or as collaborators, forcing us to move back and forth between the practical sphere and the analytic sphere. Although this exercise was particularly important for Perdomo and Piñacué, who continually had to rethink in the space of team discussion the conceptual categories they employed in their activism, it also left a significant mark on the academics, who in the past had either assumed a purely observational stance or had compartmentalized research and advocacy. Our team dialogue provided an important window onto how each of us, from our distinct subject positions, experienced this required movement between practice and analysis, albeit in different ways, as we simultaneously engaged these constructs in the work of conceptualizing our team methodology and collaborated in ongoing organizational projects. Piñacué and Perdomo conceptualized our meetings as mingas, an Andean form of labor-sharing, conveying through metaphor how we reconceptualized the “work” in fieldwork. In other words, we were transformed through collaboration in ways that both exposed the fallacies of Brubacker and Cooper’s dichotomy and demonstrated that it is possible to derive new insights as analysts as a result of the realignment of our agendas and conceptual toolkits in conversation with activists.

While much of what we learned about Caucan politics can be acquired through close proximity to an indigenous organization, collaboration provides access to the kinds of internal discussions an external eth-



nographer would not normally be privy. But it goes further than that. Perdomo and Piñacué’s constant deepening of the nested meanings of inside and outside provided a conceptual handle through which we were able to make sense of the complex situation that was unfolding. They not only provided us with opportunities for ethnographic observation but also shared their own analytical tools. This sharing compelled the nonindigenous team members to radically shift our understanding of the nature of ethnographic dialogue. We were not led to essentialize. In fact, we were entreated to do entirely the opposite: to focus on the ambivalences and heterogeneities of indigenous politics because Perdomo and Piñacué’s appreciation of the movement provided them with an approximation of the shifting ground upon which they could construct and negotiate their cultural blueprints. They had to engage in constructivist analysis in order to propose seemingly essentialist futures for the Nasa. We had to follow their line of reasoning in order to maintain the dialogue. I do not think we academics would have comprehended as profoundly what we were seeing, if not for the ways that Perdomo and Piñacué forced us to mine the depths of the inside/outside distinction; instead, we would have remained mired in CRIC’s culturalist discourse, which looks essentialist. Of course, in the end, we would write ethnography, while they would develop blueprints, something that was never in dispute. But our ethnography would be different from what it was before, adopting what Paul Gilroy (1993) has termed an “anti-anti-essentialist” perspective, which, through complicity—and not just intellectual but also political—melded the urgency and utopian standpoint of Perdomo and Piñacué with the thick description of “good ethnography.”

The kind of ethnographic methodology I espouse in this article is not for everyone. It demands a level of commitment to long-term dialogue that is not possible for all scholars, a degree of trust that comes from years of working in the same place (particularly in the delicate situation of Colombia, where grassroots organizations’ integrity is at stake) and, most important, a group of interlocutors who can take the lead in co-theorizing. However, our experience also bears lessons for those who do not choose to engage in collaboration. Contemporary discussions of how anthropology operates in the world (Field and Fox 2007) force academics to engage ideas and methodologies beyond the ivory tower of the university, something that many Colombian (and other



Latin American) anthropologists realized long ago. The concepts we encounter when we step out into the world should be incorporated into ethnographic interpretation. Indeed, conceptual vehicles that emerge from spaces that we have ignored in the past (the writings and discourses of the indigenous intellectuals of whom I write are but one example) can be discovered outside of a collaborative research relationship by simply paying attention to their presence, at the same time that we pay heed to other anthropological approaches that have historically engaged them. By entering into an intellectual dialogue with these ideas, we establish a horizontal form of complicity in which we acknowledge the capacity of ethnography’s Other to theorize and to occupy locations similar to those of academic ethnographers.

• • • • •joanne rappaport teaches anthropology at georgetown University. in addition to her books in english, Cumbe Reborn (1994), The Politics of Memory (1998), and Intercultural Utopias (2005), she is coauthor with graciela bolaños, abelardo ramos, and carlos Miñana of ¿Qué pasaría si la escuela . . .? Treinta años de construcción educativa (2004), a study of cric’s bilingual education program, published by the organization, and editor of Retornando la mirada (2005), an edited volume by members of the collaborative team highlighted in this article. she is currently working on an ethnography of latin american collaborative research teams and continues to work with cric in the training of indigenous researchers.

notes

The research from which this article is drawn was conducted with southern Colombian indigenous organizations between 1996 and 2002, with the support of the Graduate School of Georgetown University, the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología (under a grant awarded by Colciencias), and an international collaborative grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am particularly grateful to the two interethnic collaborative teams with which I worked during this period, and which served as a space in which indigenous and nonindigenous researchers could engage in coanalysis: Graciela Bolaños, Myriam Amparo Espinosa, David Gow, Adonías Perdomo, Susana Piñacué, Abelardo Ramos, and Tulio Rojas. I am also indebted to a number of Colombian researchers whose ethnographic practice and thinking has served as a model for me, especially Orlando Fals Borda, Myriam Jimeno Santoyo, Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, and Luis Guillermo Vasco, as well as for critical comments, to Denise Brennan, Claudia Briones, Les Field, Gelya Frank, Charles Hale, and the anonymous reviewers for this article. Versions of this paper have been presented at Georgetown University, Harvard University, Universidad de Antioquia, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia; I thank the students at these institutions for their enthusiastic and perceptive commentaries. The work of Luke Eric Lassiter, Elaine Lawless, and Robin Ridington and Dennis Hastings has prodded me to deepen my appreciation of what constitutes collaborative research.



1. See the program description at http://lasa.international.pitt.edu/specialprojects/otrossaberes.html.

2. The public anthropology Web site www.publicanthropology.org/Defining/definingpa.htm defines the collaborative endeavor in the following terms:

Public anthropology demonstrates the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline—illuminating the larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change. It affirms our responsibility, as scholars and citizens, to meaningfully contribute to communities beyond the academy—both local and global—that make the study of anthropology possible.

Hale’s definition of activist anthropology is, “the institutionalized practice of collab-orative and politically engaged scholarship” (Hale 2007, 104).

3. If we focus exclusively on the research topics of contemporary Colombian anthropologists, we will not mine the depths of social engagement among academics there, given that in the past two decades scholars writing from northern locations have paid equal attention to Colombia’s pressing social and political issues, including the study of violence (Riaño-Alcalá 2006), but also racial and ethnic politics (Ng’weno 2007) and human rights discourse (Tate 2007). For one, Colombian scholars were probing such issues long before the rest of us comprehended their importance (Arocha 1979; Friedemann 1975; Jimeno and Triana 1985). The earliest anthropologists, now in their eighties, actively pursued the study of such issues as sharecropping and land loss, forging contact with the forerunners of the indigenous movement.

4. A Colombian archaeologist, Martha Urdaneta, was also invited to engage in collaborative research with a Guambiano archaeological team (Urdaneta Franco 1988).

5. There are also North American examples of what I am calling co-theorizing, although they are less explicitly political than my Colombian example. In Holy Women, Wholly Women, Elaine Lawless (1993) recounts her experience with female ministers in mainstream Protestant denominations. In addition to collecting their life stories, Lawless engages in what she calls “reciprocal ethnography,” a process of interpreting the autobiographies with the narrators themselves through her interventions in focus groups that these women invited her to attend; her exegetical exchanges with them are an integral part of her text, allowing the reader to follow closely the collaborative process. The result is a series of new insights into how women recount their life experiences, demonstrating crucial differences from characterizations of women’s life history made in the academic literature.

6. The construction of picture-maps drew upon the previous experiences of Colombian activists with the neighboring Nasa ethnic group, by whom a series of thematic maps depicting key moments in Nasa history were produced as a tool for teaching and reflection, and for stimulating land-claims activities (Bonilla 1982). Bonilla’s picture-map project was part of the program of La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social, the organization that pioneered participatory action research in Colombia.

7. Chow’s usage of the term “autoethnography,” which I will return to later in this article, is most appropriate for those whom she calls the “formerly ethnographized,” (1995, 180) those who have traditionally occupied a subordinate position in the ethnographic encounter.

8. Among the Guambiano members of the research team were individuals with advanced degrees as well as elders who had read widely. My own experience in Colombia



indicates that older activists with limited schooling are not unaware of the ethnography and history of their region and of the even larger corpus of political analysis by the left. That is to say, they are as sophisticated as elite informants, albeit in different ways.

9. I frequently come into contact with students anxious to engage in collaborative research. What the Guambiano history project suggests is that the academic counterpart in a collaborative venture must bring a wealth of experience to the table and that the challenge of collaborative research—at least, in the sense I am proposing, of co-theorization—can be better met by someone who already knows how to do good ethnography. This does not, however, cancel out the value for both ethnographer and community of more modest forms of collaboration, such as engaging in research at the request of a community, followed by a communal evaluation of the results of that work (Speed 2007), or assisting research subjects in a broad range of endeavors, such as translation, note-taking at meetings, or providing essential information (Sawyer 2004).

10. The joint interpretation of Guambiano history exemplifies a collaborative project in which external ethnographers and internal autoethnographers cooperate on a common research objective. Co-theorization can take a different tack, however, permitting groups of researchers, both internal and external, to use material they have collected in the course of their individual research projects to solve pressing issues that transcend their research agendas. The example I have in mind is an Argentine research group studying indigenous affairs at the University of Buenos Aires composed of academics and native people (Briones et al. 2007). Here, it is difficult to draw the line between ethnographer and subject, in part because some of the Mapuche members of the team are also academics, while some of the academic team-members are from Patagonian cities with large Mapuche populations, thus departing from the stereotype of the Buenos Aires–bred academic. In addition, all of the team members would see themselves as simultaneously engaging in research and activism. In this article, the four authors came together to evaluate the context in which neoliberal governments have opted to recognize indigenous rights, a topic that has received attention from other anthropologists (Hale 2002). Their discussions sought to counter the solitary task of the anthropologist, who is frequently seen as an “expert,” in contrast to local people (2007, 72). At the same time, the four discussants hoped to break down dichotomies between ethnographers and “informants”:

We also wanted to question the fragmentation that underlies the notion of polyphony, which leads us to the formation of contrasting, closed discursive blocks emphasizing the differences among our trajectories and coincidences. We wanted to avoid formats in which the “indigenous voice” would appear as an ethnographic record in the service of “anthropological writing.” (2007, 72)

In contrast, they hoped to illustrate that it is possible to engage in collaborative analysis as actors who draw as much on their ethnicity and profession as on their generational positions, the places in which they were raised, their specific articulations with the indigenous movement, and the theories with which they buttress their remarks, that is, as actors with heterogeneous social trajectories (2007, 73). The reader cannot identify any distinctly “Mapuche” discourse, although there are clear differences in the level of specificity at which each of the participants situated her or his analysis. There is no one who can clearly be identified as “ethnographer” or as “subject,” although there is an intense collaboration taking place. This is a case of co-theorizing in which the distinct lines of analysis are not so clearly drawn between ethnographer and subject but merge in myriad ways.



11. CRIC has a strong institutional presence in Cauca, controlling the educational systems of most Nasa communities and administering health programs for the indigenous population. Notwithstanding its legitimacy as an organization providing assistance to communities, CRIC also has a long history of clashes with the state, beginning with its early policy of occupying lands stolen from communities and its support in the 1980s of an indigenous guerrilla organization (Rappaport 2005b). Thus, its position vis-à-vis the Colombian state is contestatory and critical, and it has been at various moments in its history branded as leftist. Colombian indigenous communities are organized in resguardos, collective landholding corporations validated by colonial title. The resguardo is governed by a cabildo, an annually elected council that is commonly referred to in movement parlance as a “traditional authority.” Regional indigenous organizations are not generally recognized as “traditional authorities,” although their leaderships are selected by cabildos. For more on the tensions that have erupted around the legitimacy of the leadership of regional and national organizations, see Jackson (2002).

12. It is difficult to gauge the impact of our collaboration on the organizations with which we worked, particularly CRIC. The team’s major contribution to the Caucan indigenous movement was in its commitment to a horizontal dialogue and to the creation of a common research methodology, a significant goal given that Colombian indigenous organizations are engaged in a broad array of research projects in the areas of customary law, education, and health, frequently operating at odds with the provincial academic establishment. Our methodology was aired among cultural activists affiliated with CRIC’s bilingual-intercultural education program but was not discussed with the political leadership. Thus it would be presumptuous on my part to suggest that co-theorization had an impact on CRIC’s general politics, although it was engaged with interest by the programs in which many of CRIC’s research activities take place. However, our work did culminate in a number of tangible results, such as a history of CRIC’s bilingual education program (Bolaños et al. 2004) and a text on gender relations in Nasa society for use by local women’s organizations (Pancho, Bolaños, and Piñacué 2004), both of which have a wide readership in the organization. Team members also participated in a range of local workshops on gender, the Nasa alphabet, alternative development, local history, and customary law; these were much more about the content of our projects than about our methodology. The Nasa team members have intimated to me that the experience profoundly influenced their continued practice in the organization, especially in boosting their self-confidence and rigor as activist-researchers and in helping them with their writing. At an internal CRIC meeting in the late spring of 2008, held to discuss the expansion of their research agenda through the training of several hundred new researchers in an indigenous university that CRIC had recently founded, Piñacué made it clear to me that her position on indigenous research was forged in the cauldron of our team meetings.

13. Researchers who participated in the founding of CRIC in the early 1970s called this a process of “critical recuperation” of cultural forms, which were subsequently reappropriated in the interests of struggle (Bonilla et al. 1972, 51–52).

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“side by side or Facing one another”Writing and Collaborative Ethnography in Comparative Perspective

les w. field, University of New Mexico

introduction

In 2000, I began a collaborative project with Cheryl Seidner, the chair of the Table Bluff Wiyot Rancheria, and her sister, Leona Wilkinson, who heads the tribe’s Culture Committee. Seidner, Wilkinson, and I agreed to collaboratively formulate the methods and goals of a project of mu-tual interest and to also work together to shape the final written form that resulted from our work.

Their great-grandfather had survived the 1860 Indian Island Massacre, where more than sixty and likely as many as two hundred Wiyot men, women, and children were killed by six white men, “known to be landowners and businessmen” from the nearby city of Eureka, California (Kowinski 2004, D1). The Wiyot village of Tuluwat, located on what became known as Indian Island in Humboldt Bay, had been a site where Wiyot bands had conducted World Renewal ceremonies.1 The massacre was perpetrated while a large number of Wiyots had con-gregated at the village for these ritual dances. In the years following the massacre, the site was overtaken by a shipyard. By the middle of the twentieth century, it had become desolate, trash strewn, and for-gotten except by the descendants of the survivors. Since the time of the massacre, the Wiyot people had not enacted the ceremonies of World Renewal. Much of the remnant population of Wiyot who survived the massacre, and the ravages of alcoholism and endemic poverty that fol-lowed, settled at the Table Bluff Rancheria.

Under Seidner’s leadership, the Table Bluff Wiyot of the late twenti-eth century and early twenty-first century have conducted a determined


Field • “side by side or Facing one another” • 33

campaign to repurchase land on the island, including the site of the massacre, and heal through a cultural renaissance the psychic trau-mas caused by their near genocide. The Wiyots purchased and rehabili-tated just an acre and a half of the island in 2000, having raised funds through the Wiyot Sacred Site Fund. In 2004, the Eureka City Council voted to return forty acres of Indian Island to the Wiyots, “the only city in California to return a sacred site to a native people” (Vogel 2004).

I met up with Seidner and Wilkinson because I was trying to figure out the significance of the abalone mollusk to contemporary California Indian peoples, working with tribes and individuals in those tribes who also thought this was an important research question. The Wiyot telling of the story of Abalone Woman, a spirit-being important to several tribes in northwestern coastal California, is well known in both anthropologi-cal and Native circles in California. The story was recorded and translat-ed by linguist Karl Teeter in the 1920s (see Teeter and Nichols 1993).

Seidner and Wilkinson were willing to discuss the story of Abalone Woman, although initially they were unsure of what I was looking for. I asked them what the story meant to contemporary Wiyots, and they spent many hours with me discussing Wiyot history and culture, and how they planned to make Indian Island once again the center of Wiyot ceremony. Neither of them were strangers to collaborative work with non-Wiyots. They had been promoting public remembrance of the massacre among the wider community in Eureka and Arcata for more than a decade, and through extensive interviews with Ron Johnson, contributed to an important volume about the weaving of basket caps (Johnson and Marks 1997). Seidner and Wilkinson have assumed very public profiles in pursuit of healing and remembrance, which also means that their feelings about the genocidal experiences of their peo-ple and their consciousness of the need to represent that suffering to the non-Wiyot world remain close to the surface.

In discussions with both women, it became clear that the signifi-cance of Abalone Woman’s story had not diminished, and Seidner be-lieves the story’s importance will grow as the Wiyot repair longstanding historic traumas. In response to my queries about Abalone Woman’s meaning for contemporary Wiyot people, Cheryl wrote three install-ments of a prose-poem reflection on Hiwat (Abalone Woman), Wiyot history, and her own personal struggles and milestones over the course of our three-year discussion. This poem, along with a transcript of



Teeter’s rendering of the Abalone Woman story forms the core of one chapter of Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California (Field 2008).

After reflecting on the work that Seidner, Wilkinson, and I did, I would say our collaboration was characterized by three principles. First, while my research questions may have sparked conversation, the goals of the collaboration were oriented toward the tribe’s own current struggles. Second, the importance of older, anthropological texts from a different era in anthropology’s own history was acknowledged by both me and the Wiyots, for whom works such as Teeter’s had become less the interventions of outsiders and more documentations of im-portant tribal heritage and intellectual property (see Hanson 1989 for a social constructionist analysis of how anthropological texts written during the apex period of anthropology’s “literary turn” became part of Maori tradition). Finally, all of us accepted as natural and important the use of writing as a collaborative strategy. This final component has been a feature of my work in both California and earlier in Nicaragua, and it is the focus of this article.

The fact that two books of which I am the main author oblige “us” anthropologists to read what “they” (collaborating Native people) write, does not derive from an attempt to pursue a new innovative collabora-tive technique. Few if any of the individuals I consider most effective in developing increasingly collaborative forms of anthropology (including Joanne Rappaport [2005], Luke Eric Lassiter [2005], Lassiter with Clyde Ellis and Ralph Kotay [2002], Robin Ridington and Dennis Hastings [1997], Joe Watkins [2000], and Gelya Frank [2007]) claim that they are doing something entirely novel or radically at odds with all of the an-thropology that has come before this moment in time. Thankfully, that sort of post-modern hubris, which not so long ago claimed for itself both the cutting edge of the present as well as the future of the field, now seems quite dated. By contrast, the work of many collaborative an-thropologists has been predicated upon demonstrating the lineage of the ideas and methods that are the foundations for their work. The indi-viduals involved in the current wave of collaborative work acknowledge how collaboration has always been a part of ethnographic research, and in many instances a part of the writing of anthropological texts. This could be true even when the anthropologists who were engaged in col-laborative research did not publicly acknowledge or detail the nature of



that collaboration. Several authors have argued that this was the case in a number of foundational ethnographic careers, such as George Hunt’s, with his role in the making of Franz Boas’s anthropological oeuvre (see Berman 1996), and Francis La Flesche’s, with his involvement in the work of Alice Fletcher (Ridington and Hastings 1997).

In the following exegesis of collaborative writing strategies in my work, I first elaborate one possible lineage of such strategies. Through an extended discussion of writing as a part of doing ethnography, which draws on a number of wide-ranging examples, I want to point out both advantages and problems for collaborative research. This discussion does not aim to suggest that such a strategy has a transcendent value for all collaborative work, much less all ethnographic research, but rather its purpose is to help illustrate why it did have such value in my own work. I then return to a treatment of specific deployments of collabora-tive writing projects in my work in Nicaragua and California. I end with ideas about future directions for this kind of collaborative work.

critical reflections on Working collaboratively

Anthropologists developing collaborative approaches to ethnography and anthropological analysis are exploring and developing a number of different strategies. On the one hand, many of the anthropologists engaged in collaborative projects are concerned about how the foci, goals, and purposes of anthropological work are formulated. In oth-er words, this strategic area focuses on the question What should eth-nography be about? This arena of collaborative enterprise has seen the expanding use of anthropological tools and analyses by communities in the pursuit of their own goals, and a simultaneous refashioning of the role of the anthropologist as one among two or several primary in-vestigators, or even as an accessory investigator, in the coalescing of re-search projects and programs. On the other hand, there is also a great deal of work focusing on the development of new epistemologies and methodologies for planning, conducting, and carrying out both ethno-graphic research and anthropological writing. That is, this focus con-cerns the question What is ethnographic knowledge and how is it to be investigated and represented? This arena is increasingly shaped by the distinctive and complex worldviews of the communities with which anthropologists work. The conversation about and reforging of epis-



temologies and methods between communities and anthropologists working on collaborative projects refers to what Joanne Rappaport has named “co-theorizing” (see Rappaport 2005).

It is quite clear that separating these two kinds of strategies as I have done is entirely artificial because in discussing epistemology, one is in-evitably led to a discussion of research foci and goals, while any dis-cussion of foci and goals requires a discussion of the methods used to reach those goals. The inability to maintain a separation between these efforts becomes clearer as I focus on the use of collaborative writing as a strategy I have developed and deployed in the two most important and longest-term research programs I have pursued over the past two decades. That is, I have in my work among artisans in Nicaragua, and among Native American tribes in California, asked people with whom I work to write their texts that identify and explore their own analyses of issues and events about which our collaborative projects have focused.

Several possible motivations and factors could bear upon an anthro-pologist adopting such a strategy. There are, for example, what I would consider unseemly motivations for eliciting the writings of those with whom anthropologists work and conduct research. Anthropologists have routinely used the oral statements and extended discourses of their interlocutors to support, buttress, and sustain their own interpre-tations and analyses of societies in which they are working. This for-mulation of ethnographic texts, I would argue, stems from deep-seated ambivalences and ambiguities in our discipline dating from at least the time of Bronislaw Malinowski (see Valentine and Darnell 1998 for an alternate accounting of ethnography’s history), who is frequently rep-resented as the founding father of participant observation ethnogra-phy in many cultural anthropology textbooks, and also from some of the work of other iconic ethnographers such as Clifford Geertz.2 Those ambivalences include a concern for “the individual” as an essential unit of analysis but also an aversion to referring and relating to actual indi-vidual people whose opinions and perspectives are distinct, positioned, and perhaps even opposed to one another.

Likewise, the importance laid upon uncovering “the native point of view” in the work of our founding and iconic figures has historically been accompanied by a skepticism bordering upon distrust of the anal-yses of anthropologists’ “informants.” This sentiment is summed up in the term “folk theory,” which was impressed upon my generation of



graduate students to describe the analyses anthropologists encounter among their “informants.” It is accompanied by the assumption that the anthropologist, because of his or her training and sophistication, inevitably derives a superior analysis.

The lingering effects of these deep-seated binary oppositions in the discipline could lead an ethnographer to elicit written texts from “in-formants” in the service of the same old exploitative utilization of one’s collaborators’ discourses, but now via an even more fixed and reliable format, that is, the written word. Needless to say, I and the other an-thropologists I cite who are developing collaborative approaches are not engaged in this sort of work. But a deeper, more insidious conun-drum might also be detected in the elicitation of written texts from those with whom one works in the field. That has to do with the ways that writing shapes narrative by its particular telling of events and the unfolding of ideas, shapings which might under certain circumstances be radically at odds with the conventions for orally relating and explain-ing narratives in a given society. The significance of writing’s entrance into the narrative traditions of any given society is varied. The historical value of an imperially imposed literacy, for example, might be immea-surable, as in the cases of the indigenous intellectuals, such as Guaman Poma (see Adorno 2001), the authors of the Huarochiri Manuscript (see Salomon and Urioste 1991), the Popul Vuh (see, for example, the translation by Tedlock [1986]), or any of the creators of the books of the Chilam Balam (an example is the Chumayel book; see Alvarez Lomeli 1974). The authors of these texts were survivors of the systematic de-molition of indigenous civilizations by the conquistadors, who with the tools of Spanish literacy recorded information about their societies that have extraordinary significance. But those who know those texts well caution the rest of us to be aware of the double-edged valence of litera-cy in these cases and not to use them blithely or naively. I am certainly not the first anthropologist who has expressed such anxieties, which may become even more acute in situations in which anthropologists are working with indigenous peoples who until very recently have not used writing or understood their histories and traditions via written texts.

Regina Harrison’s book (1989), which provides an excellent intro-duction to the texts of Guaman Poma, offers one critical perspective on the complex dynamics of the nexus between narrative, writing, and col-laboration. More recently, I encountered a well-known text that I im-



mediately understood as collaboratively produced, even though it is not discussed as such in the interpretive literature that deals with this text, nor is this text usually brought up in the context of anthropologists working with indigenous peoples. I found this text, The Kalevala (1835), relevant and provocative primarily because it emphasizes the historical-ly framed value of collaboration, including frames that appear to render irrelevant the question of collaboration.3 By implication, this realiza-tion means that the value placed upon collaboration recently, however much I and others appreciate its advantages, is also historically contex-tualized and must be specifically and particularly understood.

The Kalevala comes from Finland, a country about whose sociocultur-al history (not to mention language) I am far from being a specialist in, but of which I am instead a novice student.4 In the early nineteenth cen-tury, a Finnish medical doctor and scholar named Elias Lönnrot assem-bled a very large number of songs and stories he had elicited from indi-viduals living in rural areas of Karelia.5 His unique edited compilation of these spoken texts forms the body of The Kalevala, which has been for decades considered by many the “Finnish national epic” (Kirkinen 2007, 3), and it is still described as such nowadays perhaps more than ever. But even in my novice’s reading and study of The Kalevala and the innumerable critical commentaries of it, it became evident that the methods and underlying theory of knowledge behind Lönnrot’s work are not identically reflected in how it was received in his own time nor since then. In what follows, I review what I have learned to see what this yields for our understanding of collaborative research and writing.

First, let us consider Lönnrot’s own understanding of his work, re-corded in his 1835 introduction to the book. According to Lönnrot, he “collected” and then organized songs from individuals who would sing them to him with the following criteria:

First, I followed what I observed the best singers paid attention to

in matters of arrangement; and second, when no help was forth-

coming from that quarter, I sought a basis for arrangement in the

songs themselves and arranged them accordingly. (Lönnrot [1835]

1963, 366)

Lönnrot attested that he was searching for “original” and “pure” render-ings of the songs, and in the preface to an 1849 edition, he elaborated:



Remembering well that these poems are coming to be the oldest

specific memories surviving for the Finnish people and the Finnish

language as long as these exist at all, one is called upon to arrange

them with all possible care and diligence and to concentrate them

as well as possible and to include in them everything the songs have

preserved in the way of information about the life, customs, and

vicissitudes of that time. (Lönnrot [1835] 1963, 374)

Lönnrot’s concern was clearly contextualized by similar efforts start-ing in the eighteenth century, such as the compilation The Poems of Ossian (Macpherson 1819) in Scotland. The influence of the scholarship of J. G. von Herder, also considered an important figure in anthropol-ogy’s own peculiar history, and the emphasis laid upon our discipline to salvage disappearing folk narratives by the Boasians and others, is unmistakable. In Scandinavia, there is an even deeper historical urge to salvage, record, compile, and publish oral and written texts of the vanishing past, seen in the work of Icelandic scholars as far back as the thirteenth century in the case of Snorri Sturlason, although I have not as yet encountered scholarship that describes a relationship between the work of Icelandic scholars on the one hand and Lönnrot on the other. Lönnrot was certainly aware of the implications of his work for anchoring Finnish language and narrative tradition in history for a peo-ple who had been under the imperial control of Sweden for seven hun-dred years followed by the rule of the Russian empire. Even so, Aarne Anttila in 1935 (in Lönnrot [1835] 1963) wrote that because Lönnrot wrote mainly in Swedish, and publicly affirmed his appreciation of and for the Swedish language, he was in his own time considered insuffi-ciently nationalist. In effect, Anttila’s observation highlights the differ-ences between Lönnrot’s intentions in conducting research and com-piling its results, and the way his work has been interpreted ever since.

The comments of other critics writing about The Kalevala, such as Salminen and Tarkiainen (1933, in Lönnrot [1835] 1963) drive to the heart of the issues surrounding Lönnrot’s research and the book’s authorship:

There has been some debate as to whether the Finnish people or

Lönnrot is to be regarded as the maker of the Kalevala. Although

Lönnrot conscientiously preserved the manuscripts and rough drafts

which he used, the issue is sometimes viewed as not a little obscure.



The homogeneous epic is the work of Lönnrot. But Lönnrot put the

Kalevala together not as a real scholar or literary artist but as a singer

of traditional songs. He departed from the singers only in that he

used writing as an aid to his memory so that it was possible for him

to command a great number of song variants. . . . Lönnrot did not

wish to add to the Kalevala anything at all out of his own head. . . . The

verses composed by Lönnrot . . . are only five per cent of the whole.

. . . he also had the advantage of literacy and models, especially the

Homeric epics. (354–55)

In this passage we see a host of issues concerning methods, knowledge, and interpretation brought into high relief with respect to the making of The Kalevala. Because my fieldwork in Nicaragua formed around the shared experience of making pottery with San Juanense master potters, it seems evident to me that the book derives from what I and other col-leagues would call a work of collaboration, and that Lönnrot’s meth-odology—his participant-observation, if you will—formed around his presence in rural Karelian communities as a fellow singer. In the volume I own, the 1963 translation by Francis Peabody Magoun Jr., there are several eighteenth-century engravings and early nineteenth-century photographs of “folk singers” in the act of reciting the songs that Lönnrot compiled and concatenated. In these pictures, as Henrik Gabriel Porthan wrote in 1859,

the singers sit either side by side or facing one another, close enough

to bring in contact their right hands and also their knees (the right

knee, of course, of one, the left of the other), on which they prop

their clasped hands. While singing they move their bodies gently as

if wanting to touch heads, and they assume a reflective and serious

expression. On the rarest occasions they sing standing up, and if they

ever happen, as if moved by some poetic afflatus, to start singing in

a standing position, they soon go and sit down hand in hand and

continue their singing in the usual way. (Lönnrot [1835] 1963, 381)

The physical, artistic and emotional intimacy of the collaboration in which Lönnrot was clearly obliged to engage in order to “collect” the songs that form the basis of The Kalevala was accompanied by the shar-ing of these research methods with the other scholars with whom Lönnrot worked. By Lönnrot’s own reckoning, he worked with a team of at least seven researchers.



In the early 1960s, Magoun considered Lönnrot’s achievement to have been the creation “for Finnish posterity [of ] a sort of poetical mu-seum of ancient Finno-Karelian peasant life . . . that was, like the songs themselves, already in Lönnrot’s day destined for great changes if not outright extinction,” ([1835] 1963, xiv). By the early twentieth-first century, Kirkinen and Sihvo’s (2007) little volume of Kalevala criticism sought to represent the book not only as the national epic of Finland but also as a universal narrative “for all mankind.” None of the inter-pretations of Lönnrot’s work, including, I would argue, his own, can triumphantly claim The Kalevala for itself.

What I have learned in my brief but intensive encounter with this extraordinary book is multifaceted. First, I extended my ability to see a collaborative project even when none of the scholars I was reading were looking for or seemingly valued that characteristic. The fact that Lönnrot’s interlocutors were “unlettered” was not ancillary to the way that the collaborative character of The Kalevala has been unworthy of mention in the sources I have read. My own view, which by contrast makes much of the collaboration I see in this book, must also be con-textualized in its appropriate time and place just as other interpretive work, such as the nationalist interpretation or the antiquarian sal-vage approach, derives from different historic sociopolitical contexts. I am not posing anachronistic or utopian propositions to the making and interpreting of The Kalevala, such as wondering how things might have turned out differently if Lönnrot and his team had metaframed their work as a collaboration, or speculating how the outcomes would have been different had Lönnrot’s Karelian interlocutors been literate. Rather, my encounter with The Kalevala underscores how in my work (and the work of other anthropologists) the fact that we are emphasiz-ing the value of collaboration and the fact that our interlocutors are lit-erate exercises a determining influence on the methods and outcomes of these collaborations. Seeing and emphasizing collaboration be-comes a part of the epistemology of doing collaborative work in spe-cific research relationships at specific moments in historical time.

It is therefore important to emphasize again that collaboration and collaborative work are not transcendent, inherently superior, supra-his-torical methods and forms of knowledge that can be applied to all proj-ects in a single manner. The collaborative projects I have undertaken, and the ways writing was a part of them, must be understood in their



particular specificity rather than being considered as examples of an overarching, universally prescribed collaborative approach to fieldwork and analysis in anthropology.

by sharing the Writing, We Find What We Don’t share

These concerns bring me back around to discussing the specific cir-cumstances in which I first solicited the writings of individuals in com-munities of Nicaraguan artisans where I had been working. Let me first pay due respect to the early inspiration provided by James Clifford’s critique of ethnographic authority and his call for anthropologists to produce “polyphonic ethnographies” (Clifford 1986), which offers a utopian possibility that contrasts with other approaches to “infor-mants’” words and ideas whether spoken or written. Such a utopia was especially appealing in the context of the revolutionary transformation that a young ethnographer like myself was witnessing in the Nicaragua of the 1980s. In that milieu, a key part of the process of individual and collective empowerment from the beginning, as far as both the revolu-tionary state and the concientizado (consciousness-raised) social groups that supported that state were concerned, was the drive to create a lit-erate majority. Literacy was understood on individual, local, and na-tional levels as a means to access knowledge and advance social and economic progress and development. That emphasis made particular “common sense,” from a Gramscian perspective, in terms of the histo-ry of Nicaraguan cultural production. For such a small, extraordinarily impoverished, and embattled country, where literacy has always been the preserve of less than half of the populace, there has been an aston-ishingly long and distinguished parade of poets, playwrights, and nov-elists who are held in high esteem by the largely illiterate population (Beverley and Zimmerman 1990). Anecdotally speaking, in no other country in Latin America, have I ever routinely encountered more ec-centric local historians and storywriters, only too willing to share their laboriously hand-written texts with strangers from foreign countries.

Under such circumstances it was not such a conceptual leap for me to ask several of the people with whom I had been working for over a decade to take pen and paper and put in words their own ideas about what had transpired in their community during the revolutionary pe-riod. The camaraderie that had formed over the many months of work-



ing in the ceramics cooperative with San Juanense potters also led me to think about sharing the experience of writing with them just as we had shared the clay. Asking the artisans to write their versions of these narratives also seemed to me part and parcel of the overall revolutionary process and the “democratization of culture” which Ernesto Cardenal had theorized, advocated, and attempted to implement.6

What I discovered upon receiving the essays and letters written by my collaborators, and translating them for inclusion in the book titled The Grimace of Macho Ratón (1999) was two-fold, at least. On the one hand, because I retained ultimate authorship of this book, this limited and shaped this collaborative exercise, as I admitted and wrote about at the time, and as Luke Eric Lassiter has also commented about (see Lassiter 2005). More to the point for this discussion, however, I real-ized that the perspectives of my collaborators and my own mostly con-verged. But this should hardly have been surprising. My curiosity about what my friends would write followed more than a decade and a half of conversation between me and my collaborators about the events we had lived through together. Those conversations had resulted in much agreement about several important substantive conclusions about the events that had occurred in the mid-1980s when the Sandinista Front decided, ever so briefly, to favor the National Artisans Union over its own Ministry of Culture. Our agreement was not disappointing but nevertheless enlightening about the nature of co-theorizing through the written word. The stories and accounts related by San Juanense ar-tisans were indeed narratives of social transformation and therefore of diverse and heterogeneous narratives of kinds of empowerment, but their voices in my own accounts, as well as my part in their stories, was already present before anything was ever written down. The experience in Nicaragua led me to take on and accept new and very different chal-lenges in my next effort at collaborative production of anthropological analysis, which in some but not all cases involved elicitation of my in-terlocutors’ written texts.

In this project, I worked for about five years with individuals and tribes located from the San Francisco Bay Area northward almost to the Oregon border to produce a book that focuses on the polyvalent significance of the abalone mollusk in California Indian diets, symbolism, ritual, and mythic narrative. I should say first that for a decade before initiating this project I had been staff ethnologist for an unrecognized tribe in the Bay



Area, which had charged me with helping to produce their petition for federal recognition. I still work with this tribe, the Muwekma Ohlone, in this capacity, which means that I take direction, methodologically and thematically, from the tribe’s chair and its council with respect to the kinds of texts I research and write about Muwekma culture, society, and history. These underpinnings have not undermined the objectivity of the work I have done for the Muwekmas. In other words, I have not been obliged to bend data to fit the Muwekmas’ a priori conception of their cultural and social history. Much to the contrary, the task of confronting federal acknowledgment regulations in my work for them has obliged contestations with the power to bend data of a priori anthropological conceptions about identity and cultural continuity that are stubbornly ensconced at the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Be that as it may, my relationship with the Muwekmas around for-mulating research agenda goals and methods prepared me for col-laborating with a much broader range of Native Californian peoples in pursuit of the abalone research project, although in this case, I was not strictly directed by any tribe. Halfway into that project, I realized that the research would never have progressed, whatever my own in-tentions, if it had not coincided with the ongoing research interests of intellectuals and leaders within the Native communities I ended up working with, among whom there were several agendas and goals that were compatible with my own, which were and remained very open. From the beginning, I aimed to investigate whether abalone for California Indians was, like buffalo or salmon elsewhere in Native North America, an iconic animal whose significance congealed mul-tiple layers of daily utilitarian and sacred ritual life. Such an open-end-ed inquiry, and its congruence with a number of tribal and individual interests and goals, formed the basic precondition of our collabora-tion, a fact of which I tried not to lose sight as the research progressed. In other words, I understood that I collaborated with these intellectu-als, leaders, and tribes not because doing so made it possible for me to pursue my project. Rather, the project was at each step of planning and execution moving forward because it already reflected already agreed upon, although always dynamic, agendas with particular individuals in specific tribes. These agendas derived from and reflected ongoing struggles over Native identity and sovereignty within the participating Native communities. Within those contexts, different kinds of collab-



orations around research and writing advanced the specific individual and tribal agendas at hand. I was obliged not to fetishize one kind of collaborative process—say, for example, the elicitation of texts from my interlocutors—over any other.

Each collaborative process, and the role of writing texts within that process, was therefore distinct and even unique. On the one hand, for two cases I did most if not all the writing, which was oriented around collaboratively negotiated and derived research agenda and goals. In the case of the Muwekma Ohlones, their interest in the project reflected the tribal council’s and chair’s desire to document diet and subsistence practices of the past as well as their growing concern to understand the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century material culture in which abalone plays an important role. That material culture, most of which resides in either European museums or in collections in California to which tribal members are not given access, constitutes lost cultural patrimony without which it is very difficult to substantiate the cultur-al continuities needed to achieve federal recognition, but which with-out federal recognition will remain inaccessible to the tribe. The tribal chair and council gave me permission to pursue the current locations of several very important artifacts from the aboriginal Ohlone homelands around the San Francisco Bay area, and using funds from a National Endowment for the Humanities research grant, I traveled around California and to Europe to look at, describe, and photograph these ob-jects. Following established practice in my work with this tribe, I then produced text which was then subject to their critical review and over which they exercised final editorial power.

In the second instance, a much more emotionally and historically wrought process hinged upon the reconsideration of a coastal Pomo elder’s family history and that family’s long-term relationship to an-thropology. The elder and I agreed to look over and then critically dis-cuss decades-old (forty- to seventy-year-old) anthropological texts that described life histories of members of her family along with their religious beliefs. My intention in this process was to attempt to rectify inaccuracies about this elder’s family history and present a more re-spectful and humanistic portrayal of her ancestors. Her intentions, if I may presume to summarize them, were to become more familiar with what was written about her family and her tribal region, and to help me understand her own views on these matters. Her family history was



not the only focus of our collaboration, which in fact had been initiated around and continues to center on the uses and significance of abalone for coastal Pomo groups. I would describe the chapter in Abalone Tales exploring these themes as “co-produced” through extended discus-sions and redrafts of manuscripts over whose editing the elder exerted final decision-making power.

In other collaborative work explored in Abalone Tales, tribal leaders and scholars wrote text that either accompanied mine, in one case, or dominated an entire chapter of the final volume, in another case. In working with the Wiyot Tribe, the resulting material became the for-mer type, as tribal chair Cheryl Seidner, whom I described in the in-troduction to this article, had been actively engaged in addressing the legacies of social traumas from the genocidal ethnic-cleansing cam-paigns of the mid-nineteenth century that her tribe had never recovered from. Because Seidner considered the work of early twentieth-century anthropologists who had recorded extensive mythic narratives about an abalone spirit-being among the Wiyot part of her peoples’ cultur-al patrimony, she put a high value on continuing discourse about that spirit-being, and doing so through writing. She therefore undertook to explore the writing of a three-part prose poem. Similarly, in the chapter that explores the complex ritual relationships between the Hupa people and abalone, one individual, a well-known storyteller, produced a tex-tualization of the particular telling of the abalone spirit-being narrative in her family, which was included in the overall text. Other Hupa peo-ple who are deeply involved in the tribe’s ceremonialism coproduced different sorts of texts based on conversations and interview transcrip-tions that formed other sections of the chapter.

One chapter of Abalone Tales is entirely written by someone other than myself. For Julian Lang—Karuk linguist, published intellectual (see Lang 1994), and performance artist—talking about abalone provided him with the opportunity to advance his own long-term ongoing grand goal: the reconstruction of the Karuk mythic narrative cycle. Long be-fore I met Lang, he had been wondering about the abalone spirit-being in his own people’s narratives and had taken action as an artist and a researcher. He had assembled and shown an innovative installation about the abalone spirit-being for a gallery in San Francisco in the early 1990s, and had also undertaken extensive archival research about the abalone story. He took the opportunity afforded by our interaction to



write a chapter-length exploration of this work. The scholarship in that chapter straddles and combines academic and tribal notions of exper-tise, knowledge, and methodology.

concluding thoughts

As I reflect on the specificities of the collaborative projects I have de-scribed, I recall Bruce Mannheim and Dennis Tedlock’s discussion of what they call “the dialogic emergence of culture,” by which they re-ferred to the strange intertwining between ethnography and ethnogra-phy’s object “culture” (1995). The way I read their analysis, anthropol-ogy’s interventions in the histories of the peoples that anthropologists have spent their time studying have become part of those histories, and the result is an intimacy between those peoples and anthropological work. (See Hanson 1989 for a more strictly “invention of culture” view.) This is extremely evident for the Muwekma Ohlones, for whom the eth-nographic notebooks of John Harrington have played a central role in their federal recognition work. Julian Lang has on more than one occa-sion mused about a revision of Alfred Kroeber’s 1925 tome The Handbook of the Indians of California, rewritten by anthropologists from each tribe. Such musings derive from both an acknowledgment of the importance of Kroeber’s work for the California Indians of today, as well as a desire to place the multiple heterogeneous voices, perspectives, and analyses of California Indians into the forefront of the dialogue between Indians and anthropologists.

I am therefore of two minds as I think of these collaborations. On the one hand, I know that the nitty-gritty of fieldwork has always in-volved a collaborative intimacy conjured by the image of Lönnrot’s re-search: “The singers sit either side by side or facing one another, close enough to bring in contact their right hands and also their knees (the right knee, of course, of one, the left of the other), on which they prop their clasped hands.” On the other hand, anthropologists’ willingness to fully acknowledge and theorize the significance of their collabora-tive methods and epistemologies has varied quite widely. It is about the specific outcomes of that full acknowledgment that this article has been directed.

With respect to the production of Abalone Tales, I maintained my con-cept of writing as both a means and ends with respect to individual and



social empowerment, the concept that had inspired my earlier collab-orative project in Nicaragua. In the case of collaborative work in Native California, collaborative research and writing ultimately intersect with my overall intention of directing anthropological tools toward the pur-suit of tribal goals. Ultimately, and in the near future I hope, what we read about indigenous and aboriginal communities, should be, in the main, what they write, as Julian Lang also intends. That will not neces-sarily shut non-Native anthropologists out of the conversation, but it would change everything with respect to methods, agendas, and goals. I hope my collaborative research and writing efforts play a role in that change.

• • • • •les w. field is a professor of anthropology at the University of new Mexico. his first book, The Grimace of Macho Ratón: Artisans, Identity, and Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Western Nicaragua (1999) describes the development of nicaragua’s national culture and identity. Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California (2008) explores historical and contemporary uses of abalone in the california indian diet, subsistence practice, narrative, and ritual. his next project will explore the complex relationships between the material culture of the pre-columbian past and contemporary national identity in colombia.

notes

1. A cycle of ceremonial dances including the White Deerskin Dance, Jump Dance, Boat Dance, and others have historically been conducted by a number of different California Indian peoples, including the Wiyots, Hupas, Yuroks, Karuks, and Tolowas. The intention of these dances is to simultaneously give thanks for food and good fortune and to try to recalibrate social harmony so as to reproduce social and environmental benefits. Anthropologists and Natives alike refer to the ceremonial cycle and the philosophy behind it as the World Renewal religion.

2. Geertz, the famous pioneer of interpretive anthropology, did not always let individual people with whom he worked have much say in these interpretations. In many essays, including his most famous, “The Balinese Cockfight,” he had successfully gotten “inside the heads” of his informants, at least to his own satisfaction, and spoke (in other words, wrote) almost entirely on their behalf.

3. The edition of The Kalevala that was available at my university bookstore was Francis Magoun’s 1963 translation published by Harvard University Press. It was a fortuitous purchase because this edition features quite a few different essays written by authors, including Lönnrot himself, from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

4. I went to Finland in the fall of 2007 to participate in a traveling exhibition of Nicaraguan pottery from the village of San Juan de Oriente, where I have worked since 1982. The exhibition was organized by Ricardo Alvarado, the Nicaraguan ambassador to Denmark and Finland, and his wife Paula Blomster, a Finnish anthropologist. In addition to giving a paper about San Juanense pottery at the University of Helsinki, I prepared for



this trip by reading The Kalevala, and during my stay in Helsinki, spent time investigating and talking about the artistic and literary legacies of the “Finnish national epic.”

5. Karelia is a historically Finnish-speaking region that has also been central to the development of Finnish nationalism and cultural awareness. Remote from urban areas and influences, the inhabitants and their traditional songs, stories, crafts, and sociality persisted long after industrialization had stimulated social and economic transformations across much of Finland. Karelia has been in contention between Russia and Finland both before the latter gained its independence from the former in 1917, as well as after Finnish independence, particularly during World Wars I and II. Currently Russia controls the greater part of Karelia.

6. Ernesto Cardenal—poet, activist, artist, Catholic priest, and Marxist philosopher—became the minster of culture under the revolutionary Sandinista government of 1979–90. The implementation of his ideas had significant consequences for artisans such as the San Juanense potters.

references

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caught in collaboration

deepa s. reddy, University of Houston, Clear Lake

the Field in pieces

“Lecherous thoughts, marvelous sunset, walk around the island,” ama-zon.com tells us are among the “statistically improbable phrases”—not keywords but the “most distinctive phrases in the text of books” iden-tified by its Search Inside!™ program—by which to tag Malinowski’s posthumously published Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Indeed, these seemingly unlikely tags are hardly off the mark: throughout the Diary, the lore and allure of in situ fieldwork dissipate variously into a sense of meandering boredom, agitation, irritation, preoccupation with other fascinations, work, the need for escape. The “statistically improbable,” it quickly becomes evident, is not even so much distinctive as quotid-ian. The following passage provides a taste:

Then lunch with a fellow and talk—about what?—In the afternoon: I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and started work—bwaga’u business. At about 5 stopped, was fed up. Excited, impossible to concentrate. Ate pineapple, drank tea, wrote E.R.M., took a walk; intensive gymnastics. Gymnastics should be a time of concentration and solitude; something that gives me an opportunity to escape from the [blacks] and my own agitation. Supper with a fellow who told me stupid anecdotes, not interesting at all. (Malinowski [1967] 1989, 188)

Such narratives about the field and fieldwork (and Malinowski’s is not by any means the only example), render even the most mythic conceptualizations of ethnographic fieldwork incoherent—not with-out meaning, that is, but disjointed, comprised of parts that must be painstakingly identified, sifted through, and organized to become ana-



lytically intelligible. With “villages” and “communities” now either dis-sipated by their own transformations within nation-states or rejected as questionable projections of wholeness by anthropologists, it seems less and less possible to speak of the field in a single breath, as a sin-gle place to which the lone anthropologist travels to undergo his or her rites of professional passage. So this essay is concerned with the “field” as an almost random assemblage of sites that come into coherence through the processes of fieldwork itself: the field as deterritorialized and reterritorialized, as it were, by the questions brought to bear on it in the course of research. This process necessarily entails much move-ment, as much between physical locations closer or farther apart as be-tween ideological positionings or frames of reference (as I call them). Tracking this movement and understanding the relationships between sites, one’s own positioning within each, and the demands placed on the ethnographer coming-into-being—these, I believe are the means by which the field is made, quite alongside the objects of study that it yields then to ethnographic attention.

The narrative of Malinowski’s Diary suggests that this condition of the ethnographic field is nothing new—and yet, as I am about to sug-gest, the character of the deterritorialized field is in transition, and the demands it consequently makes of ethnography have fresh implica-tions for how anthropologists can move about in it. To explain this fur-ther in the sections that follow, I use the example of my most recent ethnographic work on a National Institutes of Health/National Human Genome Research Institute (NIH/NHGRI)–sponsored “community consultation” project to research “Indian and Hindu perspectives on genetic variation research” in Houston (henceforth the ELSI-HapMap project, ELSI being the acronym for Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in genetics). My role in ELSI-HapMap was largely prewritten—with some flexibility and room for innovation, but still largely given, and draw-ing my expertise as Indianist specifically into the frame of a bioethics initiative. Not only because this is urban anthropology par excellence and Houston is a vast, sprawling metropolis with a large and diverse Indian community, then, but even more as a result of the framing of this research as interdisciplinary and collaborative, the field seemed a bewildering assortment of pieces: a bric-a-brac assortment of people, institutions, interests, ideologies, skepticisms, locations, and exper-tise all forced into specific modes of contact with one another. And the


reddy • caught in collaboration • 53

field demanded piecing together via various prescriptive collaborative means, all toward an end—“understanding Indian and Hindu perspec-tives on genetic variation research”—that was at once crystal clear and frustratingly unfathomable.

The narrative follows the evolution of this project with an eye to marking the disjointed character of the field and fieldwork that then calls for particular kinds of professional collaboration: indeed, gives older models of “community studies” a new lease on life and pres-sures particular kinds of “classic” ethnographic praxis into being. Collaboration in this context is both enabling and limiting, I suggest, but is nevertheless the overriding means by which a heavily deterritori-alized and disjointed field is paradoxically given a (rhizomic) coherence of a kind, and new objects of ethnographic study acquire definition. Ethnographic “method” comes into being somewhere in the interstices of such a field in pieces, a product of interlocking expectations gener-ated of and by anthropology. It is the emergence of such method along-side its ethnographic objects out of a bric-a-brac terrain jointed by the mechanisms of collaboration that this essay will explore.

the inherited Field

The charge of the ELSI-HapMap study in Houston, as I have often de-scribed it to Indians in Houston, is fairly straightforward. The NIH would like to collect blood samples from 140 Indian Gujaratis to add data (and presumably depth) to an already existing haplotype map, which is a strategized cataloging of human genetic variation.1 The original “HapMap” was compiled from four sets of samples collect-ed internationally and named thus to indicate their sources: Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria; Japanese in Tokyo; Han Chinese in Beijing; and CEPH (Utah residents with ancestry in northern and western Europe). To these originary four were to be added a longer list that included samples from African Americans in Oklahoma; the Luhya in Webuye, Kenya; communities of Mexican origin in Los Angeles; metropolitan Chinese in Denver, Colorado; Tuscans in Sesto Fiorentino, Italy; and lastly, Gujarati Indians in Houston. The relationship between the dif-ferent data-gathering phases of the HapMap project has never been fully worked out; in fact, the project was announced to be complete in October 2005, making the data that we were at the time yet to collect



from Indian Gujaratis a supplement, at best, to the completed HapMap. In any event, the Houston project has benefited from being last in line for having the flexibility to precede any request for blood samples with a full two years of ethnographic inquiry—much longer than the time allowed any of the other constituent projects, as the urgency to collect samples had almost entirely lifted.

But what was this period of ethnographic inquiry supposed to achieve? This being a “community consultation” initiative, the objec-tives were, all things considered, clear. We were to consult the Indian community in Houston over the question of their participation in HapMap, tracking everything from their understanding of genetics to their interests in genetic and biomedical research, from their deci-sion to participate (or not) to the creation of “culturally appropriate” informed consent documents, and the nature of the returns they might expect for having contributed vials of blood. The reasons the NIH/NHGRI would support such extensive community consultation is, of course, a dramatic narrative in its own right that deserves more atten-tion than I can afford here, though I will touch on the relevant themes a little later in this essay. Essentially, community review is a means to bet-ter anticipate and therefore circumvent the sorts of controversies that have dogged other blood sample–collection initiatives, the most noto-rious of which was the Human Genome Diversity Project (HDGP). In some ways a direct heir to this contentious past, the HapMap project frames itself as an ELSI initiative, meant to focus first on the Ethical, Legal and Social Issues raised by research in genomics, meant not to presume the unilateral support of communities, and meant to move for-ward with sample collection only with some clear sense of community consent—though the question of how “consent” is identified, negoti-ated, and documented remains still an open question (for example, see Foster, Eisenbraun, and Carter, 1997; Juengst, 2000; Sharp and Foster, 2000). As such, the project has a history that is quite independent of anything specifically Indian—but has always an air of possible contro-versy, the sense that things could go terribly wrong if procedures are not followed or the right questions not asked. The task at hand, under the watchful eye of institutional review boards (IRBs), colleagues, and collaborators alike, is nothing short of risk assessment and potentially also that of firefighting.

Here enters something called “Culture” with a capital “C”: Chinese



culture, Mexican culture, Masaai culture, Indian culture, the Culture of a definite People. I should note that not all the HapMap community review projects included anthropologists, and not all placed particular emphasis on the collection of ethnographic data, but there was a defi-nite “Culture” with which to contend, nonetheless. This concept was both intimately familiar and strikingly alien to me. I knew and recog-nized it, of course, as the presumed object of ethnographic research: variously a source of fascination, a demarcation of difference, a cor-doned-off territory, an object to revere, contemplate, catalog, or cham-pion. But here also was Culture operationalized by ELSI, rendered into a useable something that is then amenable to deployment as a tool of procedural ethics in genetic research (Kelty 2004). And I, it would ap-pear, had been recruited not as an independent observer but a facilita-tor of the process that was to investigate culture and render it a work-horse for bioethics, with the beneficiaries being (my) community on the one hand and researchers on the other. I will have more to say about my positioning between groups and their respective interests later on. For now I want only to note that the ELSI-HapMap project gave me a role in the operationalization of culture, as an interpreter-translator of Indian ideas into useable material for ethics that could, say, filter into informed consent documents so as to “appropriately” inform, or, hurt no cultural sentiments in the research process. My assigned role was that of cultural broker in a transactional chain that led from something called “community” to something called “genetics.”2 Certainly, this was unlike any role I had ever been handed before as I was being called upon to put culture (and my cultural expertise) to “good” use and, as I would quickly discover, also harness my position as an area academic for the betterment of my community. The fact that I am Indian was not incidental to either role. Quite the contrary, it had a highly specific use-value, a (presumed) closeness to both “culture” and “community,” with the very position of the native anthropologist taken to set the objects of classic ethnography into motion—this time not merely for the sake of abstract ethnographic understanding but rather in the specific interests of ELSI.

In short, the inherited field turned me, and everyone else in our re-search group, into cultural producers of the very kind whose work I might otherwise have been interested in scrutinizing.3 For how else might we have completed the task of generating interest in genetic re-



search (and our study in particular), perhaps producing educational materials or just generally keeping the community informed about the project? How would we, in all good conscience, staff booths at com-munity events and recruit volunteers for interviews and focus groups without communicating some sense of the worthiness of our efforts? The choice was between being invested and being disingenuous, and neither a comfortable position, for if one allied me wholly with ELSI research or pitted me straightforwardly against it, the other entirely masked my professional affiliation and commitments. Perhaps be-ing overly sensitive to the comments of colleagues who disparaging-ly named HapMap the unfortunate successor of the HGDP, I was also acutely affected by the atmosphere of deep skepticism that prevailed among many (although not all) scholars engaged in the social/ethno-graphic study of science—for whom any truly ethical position vis-à-vis genomics would have to be a skeptical, critical, and distanciated one. Kelty (forthcoming) notes a certain anthropological predilection for exclusivity, the avowed professional interest “in remaining anthropolo-gists rather than joining in and becoming part of their field”—whatever that wider field may be—for the sake of maintaining “critical distance.” Indeed, I have occasionally been struck at the relief with which anthro-pologists sometimes approach one another at consortium gatherings or other interdisciplinary meetings as though discovering long-lost comrades in the embattled fields of expertise, the given designation “anthropologist” apparently obviating all intradisciplinary differences in approach and training. Such resistances have considerable impact on molding the possibilities and limitations of collaboration, by always already preframing any hopes of “friendship with the sciences” with skepticism about science’s lack of care, or only incidental care, for the objects of ethnographic concern (Fortun and Fortun 2005, 50–51).

Indeed, our own wariness as researchers involved (and maybe there-fore implicated) in the ELSI-HapMap study cannot be underestimated. Ours was a project steeped in what Mike Fortun has called an “ethics of suspicion,” an anticipation of everything going awry especially when genetics are involved (Fortun 2005). This was a formulation we in the research group quite embraced. The sampling phase of the research would not proceed without active community involvement and support, we insisted, to ourselves as much as anyone else, from the very incep-tion of our study. Our annual NIH/NHGRI workshop presentations on



the issues inherent to community consultation research were geared toward documenting what concerns and risks we didn’t find among Indians in Houston. We even dubbed what we did find—which was a broadly speaking very healthy regard for knowledge, the very validation of “pure,” unoperationalized knowledge about culture that we may oth-erwise have celebrated—“anticlimactic,” as my research assistant Corrie Manigold once noted. From where we stood, there were significant risks involved in taking on more-or-less close, rather than obviously distan-ciated, roles within the ELSI-HapMap project. The field we found and ourselves unfolded was thus heavily polarized, overdetermined by cri-tique in which ELSI research represented just what James Watson cyni-cally imagined: a move “to preempt the critics” (cited in Weiner 2000, 169). Our collaborative positionings were laden with ironies.

So there are two meanings of the word “caught” from the title of this essay that are both relevant to understanding the field and its forma-tion: the sense of being embedded in a nexus of relationships that each make their own demands, but also found out, caught red-handed with hands in cookie jars as it were, taking the multiple demands seriously, allowing ethnography to become a tool in the hands of other interests that are properly the objects of critique, and then needing to explain the undoing and redoing of ethnography and one’s complicities within these schemes. The point is not so much that ethnography can be pro-fessionally risky business, but that the terrains in which it is produced and in which it acquires meaning are many and can hardly be avoided, and that an accounting of the demands of each of these is what pres-sures research into existence. The inherited field positioned me, with not much apparent wiggle room, on the one hand, in a research com-munity comprising bioethicists, physical anthropologists, popula-tion geneticists, legal historians, and sociologists, and, on the other, amidst a “community” comprising various and sundry religio-cultural organizations, and, of course, the people running these organizations from diverse personal and professional backgrounds. Finding myself the point of articulation between these two loosely defined “groups,” much more so than my research colleagues for being both Indian and Indianist, the sense of divergent commitments to divergent sets of in-terests (on both sides) made the work consuming, both personally and professionally. I longed frequently for Malinowski’s pineapple, tea, gymnastics, and other such modes of escape.



collaboration as Method

This distinct sense of discomfort generated by a particular kind of po-sitioning within the field alerted me to what I have come to see as a characteristic of the field itself: its disjointed nature, its sometimes overwhelming sense of being a collection of segments—places and po-sitions and commitments—disconnected and therefore in need of eth-nographic grounding. I had encountered such a field before in a prior project that traced expressions of Hindu political identity from middle-class Hindu homes to political party offices and media debates, eth-nicist rhetoric becoming a resource for new critique and refashioned feminist identity in the spaces of women’s groups and broadly Left pol-itics in India (cf. Reddy 2006). No position, in no place, was entirely comfortable for me as (Indian, Hindu, middle-class, upper-caste, even NRI, or nonresident Indian) anthropologist; being in any one involved a level of complicity, with all the ethical heaviness that complicity in-herently implies.4

In the ELSI-HapMap work, too, there are a series of very distinct sites that come into dialogue with one another. By this time in the history of genetic research, however, heated criticisms of sample collection had given way to a set of procedures that replace the charges and dilemmas of complicity with a methodology called “collaboration” that shapes fieldwork. Let me clarify. Collaboration here is not so much the possi-bility of working jointly with informants and interlocutors (cf. Lassiter 2005a, 2005b), although that is never precluded, but is at once a rec-ognition of disciplinary distinctiveness, specializations, and expert cul-tures, a form of professionalism, and a method by which to tackle mat-ters that straddle the boundaries of science, ethics, culture, legality, religion, and more.5 Collaboration did not appear in our grant applica-tion as an explicitly rationalized research strategy, nor was it a recog-nized “method” of ethnographic research. By the time of our research, however, it was a presumed strategy of turning disciplinary “pluralism into a strategic resource” (Fortun and Cherkasky 1998, 146): of hitching different forms of expertise to a single carriage and therefore training each, in more or less significant ways, to make sure the carriage does ultimately get pulled. Differences matter here, far more than common-alities, although they must somehow be aligned to become meaning-ful means to larger, predetermined ends. The identity of fieldworker as contrarian, which had been so useful in situating myself in the fraught



fields of Indian feminist activism and religious politics, was unneces-sary here, even counterproductive. What mattered far more now was disciplinary particularity, the valuation and, indeed, valorization of dis-ciplinary difference.

The unease of recognizing, valuing, and committing to labor across disciplinary difference (all of which Fortun and Cherkasky see as inher-ent to collaboration) has at least one important methodological out-come that I want to highlight here. By identifying anthropology as the key to “Culture,” and thus as the discipline to bridge the social and the biological sciences via the conduits of “ethics” (cf. Marcus 2002a), col-laborations between the biological and “human” sciences also gener-ate “anthropology” to the extent that they generate certain specific ex-pectations of what anthropologists exclusively do. For one, as I have said above, anthropology is charged with operationalizing knowledge about culture. But how is it that anthropologists are to gather their data so as to preserve the uniqueness of their contributions? Not so much through interviews, which are common to other disciplines, not so much through other forms of face-to-face contact with people, but pri-marily through something called “participant observation.” The meth-od seems to require both much justification and no explanation at all: how quantifiable data will be extracted from “hanging out” naturalis-tic observation, how bullet-point ends will be met by such meandering means, how ethics will be handled in the absence of formal consent documentation certainly bears spelling out. The method itself, how-ever, as somehow self-evidently a form of “cultural immersion” seems to require little further rationalization. In this, “participant observa-tion” becomes virtually synonymous with “fieldwork” in anthropolo-gy, a pithy, catchall phrase to capture the uniqueness of ethnographic method and, indeed, of anthropology itself. It also becomes (oddly) a sort of disciplinary defense, a sign of the value and the esoteric imper-meability of the discipline that protects the anthropologist’s place at the collaborative, not to mention financially lucrative, tables of ELSI re-search. It becomes the reason for the collaboration and simultaneously the means by which ethnography produces value for ethics in science. If collaboration as methodology generates some of the connective tis-sue between the diverse disciplines brought into dialogue through ELSI research, then it does so also by generating select tropes that come to stand in for what ethnography concretely is.



Here I should add that few other community consultation projects made such room for “participant observation” in their research proto-cols. Indeed, other anthropologists I met at NIH/NHGRI-sponsored workshops on community consultation remarked that we were lucky to have had even such support for ethnographic method in our collabora-tive exercise. In most other projects, focus groups and interviews were the primary modes of data collection and were more-or-less strictly cordoned off from distinctively ethnographic modes of investigation. Qualitative research, broadly conceived, stood in for ethnographic fieldwork, involving ethnographers simply as skilled practitioners of qualitative research techniques. Even focus groups, which represent a methodology employed in market research far more than in classic eth-nography, become ethnographic by association with the qualitative. In the end, however, the result was the same: anthropology and its practi-tioners were transformed in accordance with the needs of ELSI research and its constituent collaborations.

The object of research, it bears restating, is given, and clearly so: understand community perspectives on genetics (for the sake of cap-turing risks and needs), develop “culturally appropriate” recruitment strategies, develop “culturally appropriate” consent documents, and—almost as an afterthought although a hugely crucial one—collect 140 blood samples from Indian Gujaratis. With an apparently definite “Indian and Hindu” Culture in play, the outcomes of this research for the NIH/NHGRI are anything but elusive. Anthropology in this con-text is an instrument, a stepping stone, the means by which to mobilize Culture for the sake of (bio)ethics and then in the interests of Science. And, precisely as a means to some other nonanthropological end, the means of ethnography, which are its in situ methods with their qualita-tive emphasis, are far more important than its modes of, say, analysis, which also could be said to give the discipline its unique stamp. The collective laboring of collaboration at this stage of research is not pri-marily to establish the NIH/NHGRI’s goals, which other collaborations (such as that of the HapMap Consortium) have already established. The collective labor of collaboration at this stage is primarily to establish the means by which these goals are best achieved, and to implement these, with sometimes less, sometimes more emphasis on ethnogra-phy itself. Anthropology is reduced, as a result, to its classic fascination with “culture” as object, and to its classic method in the form of “par-



ticipant observation,” its qualitative emphasis. It is not just that anthro-pology is transformed in accordance with ELSI research, then, but that it is (largely) expected to perform either a prior or distilled version of itself.

It is not a coincidence that such oddly classic formations as “culture” and “participant observation” become the emblematic of a fetishized ethnography precisely as “culture” (as object of study) and field meth-ods have been filtering through successive decades of disciplinary transformations. Nor is it a coincidence, I think, that “culture,” as a definite association with a people, comes to be methodologically mobi-lized within the HapMap project alongside the category “populations,” which the International HapMap Consortium recognizes as scientifi-cally valuable but culturally quite imprecise (2004, 469, box 2). This is not to critique HapMap as much as it is to recognize that outmoded ideas of ethnography, “the way we don’t do things any more,” exist as a normative, even prescriptive, means to rein in other objects (like genet-ics) that are obviously and simultaneously in motion. “Collaboration” as the modus operandi of research done in such a framework necessar-ily generates stultified expectations of ethnographic praxis and makes anthropology instrumental to the large promises of “world health” while simultaneously yielding itself to new ethnographic inquiry (International HapMap Consortium 2004, 474). “Collaboration,” too, like culture, is itself everywhere these days, itself a bit “too feel-good, too friendly a notion for the commitments, fights, and compromises that anthropologists frequently make in order to pursue some kind of conceptual innovation,” and

too weak a word to describe the entanglements that are by now

thoroughly commonplace in cultural anthropology: entanglements of

complicity, responsibility, mutual orientation, suspicion and paranoia,

commitment and intimate involvement, credit and authority, and

the production of reliable knowledge for partially articulated goals

set by organizations, institutions, universities, corporations, and

governments. (Kelty, forthcoming)

And yet it is precisely the friendly feel-good quality of the term that renders collaboration a stable methodological tool to “break up a prob-lem into identifiable, exclusive chunks” that could, but don’t necessari-ly, pave the way for “conceptual and theoretical work” (Kelty, forthcom-



ing). Whether any conceptual and theoretical work in fact ensues, or whether collaboration is limited to what Kelty identifies as simply “co-ordination” is of course a separate question. In thicker or thinner form, collaboration becomes the tidily synchronized way in which we do now do things, at least some of the time, its backside of messy and multiple entanglements becoming fresh material for independent ethnograph-ic reflection (an example of which is of course the present essay). The conceptual and methodological tools used in such collaborations may be worn, outmoded, or weak for strictly ethnographic purposes, in oth-er words, but their utility is not lost in cross-disciplinary exercises like ELSI-HapMap. Rather, projects like ELSI-HapMap themselves serve then to bring new ethnographic objects into view: both I and my col-league Jennifer Hamilton (who was the project’s study manager for all but its final year) were independently advised at the outset of the study simply to “wait and watch the project unfold.” In other words, our in-volvement in the study was valuable just for the ways in which it posi-tioned us as witnesses to science, bioethics, and indeed even culture at work. The operationalization of a fairly outmoded ethnography point-ed, quite ironically, into fresh ethnographic terrain.

But what exactly is my work beyond the operationalization of ethno-graphic knowledge? What does it mean to make HapMap an object of study, encrusted and contained as it is by worn-out notions of ethnog-raphy? The grants I wrote as a doctoral student seeking funding for dis-sertation research compelled me to articulate responses to such ques-tions at the outset. All the pages submitted for NIH review, by contrast, defined NIH goals and made those mine for four years, but configuring any ethnographic goals beyond was a separate, independent task. As clear as my objectives were, as clearly defined as my methods, my own tasks were hazy and ill-defined. Recognizing this fact in advance, the associate dean at my university asked me once if the HapMap research was really to be considered “research” for my own purposes: would it yield publications? I rationalized, as advised, that it was all about po-sitioning, buying myself access to a field that would invariably yield at least some research products. But, again, what was this field? And what did I plan to study in it?

Before I address these questions, however, I need first to tackle my given object of study, the “community,” and a second mode of collabora-tion that also brings the disjointed field and its objects into better view.



“community consultation” as collaboration

As with “culture,” here again in “community” was a concept both in-timately familiar and overwhelmingly alien: on the one hand, an ob-ject with presumed coherence, a focus of ethnographic expertise, and on the other, a group as diffuse and disparate as the city of Houston itself, a “beguiling linguistic fiction” with vague and elusive referents (Comaroff 2005, 127). Our relationship as a group of researchers to this “community” was given in the form of a methodology known as “com-munity consultation.” The community was to be engaged or consulted over issues related to genetics in order to discern risks, possible harms, and expectations of returns in advance of sample collection. We were to investigate the following: (1) so as to establish a “community advisory group” or some equivalent body to serve as liaison between the com-munity and scientific bodies: Who speaks for the Indian community? Where are the sites of authority? How are authority and voice ordered? And (2) so as to assess interest and risk, and manage both: What were the expectations of researchers and the entire process of sample collec-tion? “Community,” presumably already intelligible in all its depth to anthropologists, especially native ones, was now to be made navigable for the sake of ethics of ELSI.

“Community consultation,” to offer only a cursory summary here, gains force and spurs further debate as a consequence of pressing de-mands for group or collective recognition, sovereignty and identity, which “transform the context and substance of population genetics research” and in this “help define what the ‘principled conduct of re-search’ might mean in practice” (Brodwin 2005, 148). Community re-view has really only one foundational premise: that communities have a crucial stake in their futures and in their representations and there-fore need to be at least aware of and ideally involved in research that in-volves them. This definitive premise emerges largely as a result of prior encounters between researchers and community but is consolidated in the furor over the Human Genome Diversity Project, an international initiative to collect blood samples from select indigenous communi-ties to anchor understandings of human evolution. Groups targeted for sampling sharply criticized the project for its biopiracy and biocolo-nialism, further demanding a role in defining research agendas, inter-preting the facts, and acquiring the right to the (monetary) benefits of research itself. The overwhelming response to the HGDP as a global-



ized iteration of the politics of recognition rendered human population genetics forever “politically vulnerable,” as Paul Brodwin has remarked (2005, 148, 169), from that point on. The premise of community review, I wish to highlight here, is a particular response to this deepening sense of political vulnerability.

Community review—in other words, a prior notion of community and the premise for review—comes into our ELSI project in Houston, then, as a prepackaged, preemptive move in anticipation of political assault. In this, it defines the nature of my contact with Indians in Houston and guides the sorts of questions to be addressed with them. Its mode is wholly representational, which is to say that participants must on some level identify with the principle of representation: the fact that some groups or cultures and some (genetic) populations and some views are underrepresented, and that efforts such as ours are meant to address these historic imbalances. So also does community review very nearly expect the communities in question to see themselves as politically vul-nerable.6 Ethics then can help negotiate the vulnerability of researchers, on the one hand, and the vulnerability of communities, on the other, by bringing these into dialog: you tell me where your rights begin, so that I can determine where my nose ends, to reverse the popular dictum. Not only is this model of ethics culturally and historically specific, it is also procedurally overdetermined. Virtually all our decisions as researchers were subject to IRB scrutiny. Confidentiality and consent needed to be explained over and over. Paperwork needed signing. Documentation of all sorts, from meeting minutes to mileage to assiduous quantifica-tion of “participant observation,” needed generating. Decisions about from whom to collect samples needed to be made—Indians resident in Houston, who had had opportunities to participate in the consulta-tion, or Indians visiting Houston for regional Gujarati congresses with no prior knowledge of the community engagement phase of our work? Did the distinction matter? The infrastructures of ethics, precipitated in community review which was itself premised on a sense of political vulnerability, were the obvious and not-so-obvious guides to just about everything we could do.

The individuals with whom I met and interacted generally under-stood little of this background, or paid it only passing heed. Only those who had themselves been professionally involved in addressing health or other disparities among Houston’s diverse racial and ethnic groups



identified readily with the premises of our work. Most others various-ly ignored the consent documents, dismissed them as “legal mumbo-jumbo,” or simply saw them simply as the constraints under which we (researchers) had to operate. The questions we were asking seemed valuable but rather irrelevant to “the community”—a fact which was borne out by the reluctance of some institutions to lend our efforts time and support: “it’s not that genetics isn’t important,” I was sometimes told or shown in so many polite ways, “it’s just that we are not doctors. Our priorities are different” (cf. Reddy n.d.).7

On the other hand, there was also a model of “collaboration” active-ly advanced by many with whom I spoke. Less theorized than “com-munity consultation,” to be sure, there was nonetheless a discrete set of expectations that derived from a recognition of my position within the ELSI-HapMap group, that were therefore brought to bear on me and my work: sing at the temple, help organize health fair, help orga-nize community events, attend said events (held with relentless regu-larity in Houston), lend support to various and sundry cultural initia-tives, become a “torchbearer” for the establishment of an India Studies program at the University of Houston (I was sent a poster mockup that named me as one such), and more along similar lines. This was not col-laboration as professionalism or interdisciplinary harnessing of differ-ences, but collaboration as volunteerism, personal favor, and personal commitment to something still abstractly assembled as “the commu-nity.” Here, however, the concept was less anthropologically inflected, a much more straightforward reference to “Indians” as a diasporic group within the United States. And the pressing need for this com-munity in diaspora was not so much one for representation, especial-ly at a moment when Indian institutions, organizations, and activities are all but commonplace, Indian Americans are increasingly visible in local, state, and even national politics, and most measures of advance-ment indicate superlative progress. Certainly, there was almost none of the political, or for that matter cultural, vulnerability on which “com-munity review” so centrally depends for its rationale. Rather, the press-ing need—the sense of vulnerability that impels action, as it were—was much more for links to be maintained with Indian cultural traditions, all the more as newer generations are born and grow up outside India, and for “Indian culture” (that construct again) to be somehow merged with mainstream American life.8 Indeed, my own participation in the



HapMap study gained meaning and value precisely because it fit this mold: something done for the betterment and development of “the community.” And already so positioned, it followed logically that I should then contribute ever more for the sake of that abstract goal.

The expectation of service (for the community), I have argued else-where, itself rationalized community participation in our study, whether in its ethnographic or sample-collection phases. Giving time or blood was tantamount to serving some greater community good, in other words (cf. Reddy 2007). The fact that this expectation extended to me was logical, of course, and its pressing nature made me acutely aware of the distinctions between the overlapping models of collaboration in play here: one a “paid mandate” (that would after four years be neither paid nor a mandate), the other wholly voluntary, based on ethical com-mitments to communal ideals; one rooted in a history of research viola-tions and controversies, the other moved by the imperatives of diaspora; one invested in the reformulated and procedural “Ethics” of ELSI, the other invested in ethical commitments quite incognizant of ELSI. Both sets of collaborations were deeply invested in such concepts as “cul-ture” and “community” but for purposes that were quite at odds with one another. Not only was I made aware of the two divergent models of collaboration, I was also pressed closely between them: asked to give of my time and my energies beyond the demands of professional and paid obligation, and asked for a commitment to things Indian in a way that the ELSI project was just not framed to incorporate. My community—mine because I did (and do still) identify with it and because it claimed me, in turn—disregarded entirely the “30 percent” quantification of my annual participation on our grant. Instead, I was reminded that most people who really contributed to community development did so after they were done working ten-hour days. And, having been hired on the ELSI-HapMap project as an Indianist, precisely for my close ties to the Indian community, and being the only Indian in our research group, suffice it to say that I felt obligated to build and maintain the very ties that I was presumed to have. I felt crushed between two sets of expecta-tions, two registers that each claimed culture and community in diver-gent ways, and above all by the demand that anthropology as discipline would have the ready-made means to link these meaningfully.

What did it mean to return the benefits of genetic research to the Indian community in Houston? For us, as researchers, the moral im-



perative to “give back” flowed logically from our own responses to the fallout of the HGDP and from such wider movements as resulted in the Declaration of Belém, which effectively instituted the principle of redis-tributive justice as central to any kind of ethical prospecting research.9 So, it was obvious that something needed to be returned for the favors of time and blood, but what? We were not collecting samples for com-mercial use, so there was no question of royalties flowing back, even if geneticists down the line might have generated royalties. In any event, Indians in Houston are not in need of community development proj-ects or communal toilets or schools, but instead frame their priorities in terms of needing to foster ties to “Indian culture” and to bring this into the American mainstream. What was needed was not the return of monetary benefits, but the return of work, effort, time, and above all identification with the community’s notions of culture: presentations on genetics at area cultural institutions, presentations articulating Gandhian principles with medical practice at universities or other sites of research. As an anthropologist and as an Indian, I saw it as neces-sary not merely to document but also to incorporate these priorities and the conceptions informing them into our research. As an Indianist with my own proclivities, I found it difficult to live up to such expectations, especially when they demanded an overwhelming focus on Gandhi (at a time when stringent critiques from some quarters have perhaps bol-stered allegiance to Gandhian precepts in others). As a paid researcher with the ELSI-HapMap group, I recognized the impossibility of asking colleagues for participation beyond the time allotments given in our research protocol, or beyond the mandated three years of our grant’s term. The expectations of community far exceeded the capacities and parameters delimited by our study.

the Double bind of genres

The deterritorialized field unraveled, then, into a series of expectations manifested in distinct sites; multiple commitments to multiple publics, each quite important, each quite inescapable. The parameters gener-ated by the ELSI-HapMap project were those of a classic double bind—in which my commitments as an ethnographer to the community I was studying were implicated as much as my commitments as an Indian to the community to which I belonged. Even so, the means by which to



navigate the double bind were not straightforwardly to be found in the company of anthropologists. Why? Here, again, were two additional sets of expectations to consider.

The notion that “science is political” has become virtually axiomatic in social science discourse, an all but predictable conclusion that seems nonetheless to foster the “ethics of oppositional critique” of which Mike Fortun has written (2005, 161). The prevailing ethos of critique within the discipline had a profound bearing on the directions of my work, as I was soon to discover. The orientation of HapMap being in some ways undeniably political, given its heritage in controversies like the HGDP, how could I ignore this or even set it aside? No matter how apolitical the Indian community’s own positions on the issues of ethics in genet-ics were? What was the nature of the choice I was making, and what was its rationale? Such were the questions posed (not unkindly) to me at a panel presentation made at the Society for Cultural Anthropology meetings, for my paper had been written in the voice of an Indianist. This was one additional set of expectations brought to bear on my work by none other than an audience of anthropologists. Here was, among other things, the atmosphere of deep skepticism about science and genomics that had, in ways, framed our project from the outset, and there was no circumventing it. By contrast, I wished for a useful means by which to take stock, say, of the “ressentiment” that not only marks much of science studies writing (Fortun 2005, 164), but also character-izes the responses of at least some geneticists to analyses generated via an increasingly privileged ELSI research. If critique was the overriding framework guiding analysis, then there seemed the need to admit its multiple manifestations, not to presume that critique is the exclusive purview of the social sciences. Was there a way to reasonably account for the frustrations of geneticists over, for instance, the centrality ac-corded “race” in science studies writing? How could one avoid presum-ing, implicitly or otherwise, that if the scientists designing genetics re-search were only “more humanistic, more ethical, more responsible, or had better values to begin with, we wouldn’t be faced with the ‘implica-tions’ that justly preoccupy our attention” (Fortun 2005, 164)? What did it methodologically and conceptually mean to demand that geneticists be more humanistic, more ethical, and more responsible? Not unrelat-ed, were the “well-meaning,” antiracist motivations of HapMap orga-nizers and other scientists phenomena with which to reckon, as Jenny



Reardon has done in her writing on the HGDP (2004), but not merely as oddities or apparent contradictions. And, finally, I wished for a way to incorporate the so-called “emic” and the seemingly anticlimactic Indian apolitical affirmation of the inherent value of “science” into an analysis of ELSI-HapMap itself. Not taking such views into account would have been tantamount to suggesting, on the advice of fellow an-thropologists, that the very ethnographic perspectives I had document-ed were naive and ill-informed for their apolitical orientation, at worst, or that they belonged in a separate “cultural” register, not amenable to integration with “mainstream” thought, at best. The choices delineated by the prevailing modes of critique within the discipline seemed unten-able even as they defined the very framework of any possible research based on ELSI-HapMap.

As the lesser of two evils, I gravitated somewhat defensively toward retaining my commitments to “community,” India studies, and to my ascribed identity as Indianist. But the problem of segregation dogged me still. With the fields of science and technology studies and the so-cial studies of science now well instituted as “areas” in their own rights, where did the older “area studies” models fit in such reformulated in-tellectual terrain? The “Indian and Hindu” perspectives that the ELSI-HapMap research sought would no doubt have made for an interest-ing addition to the annals of bioethics, but only as a segregated chapter with not much more value added than that. Retaining too closely the identity of an Indianist in the company of scholars of science seemed to run a similar risk: here, too, my work might be of interest to Indians and other Indianists, but beyond those audiences, it would be largely an interesting chapter on “culture” added to the annals of science stud-ies, another model of giving to add to the existing mixes. So the chal-lenge in this struggle over genre, it seemed to me, was not merely that of navigating the binds precipitated by ELSI-HapMap, but of learning to speak to the different audiences within the discipline of anthropol-ogy itself, as also to the distinct professional and intellectual compul-sions these groups represented. Subject and object (or area) demanded integration, all the more since ELSI-HapMap tied both together within the framework of its expectations.

Arthur Kleinman has made a distinction between moral process-es and ethical discourse, where the moral is a dimension of practical, localized engagements with specific social worlds and the ethical is



abstract, principle-based, a debate over codified values, the space of (bio)ethics itself (Kleinman 1998, 363–65). For the “moral” community represented by Indians in Houston, blood is largely and unproblemati-cally a possession but a wholly alienable one, to be freely given for an easily identifiable “greater good” represented by genetic research. For a community of scientists, particularly bioethicists and those others al-lied with bioethics initiatives (including anthropologists), blood is an abstract but ethical problem, one which marks out a terrain fraught with anxiety, the perpetual threat of controversy, and all the attendant legal and institutional protections and precautions. Kleinman sets out then to “develop the case for experience,” arguing that “the concern with ethical discourse far predominates over an orientation to moral experi-ence” and that his own professional positioning prepares him for such an approach (Kleinman 1998, 373). What I have tried to demonstrate in this narrative, however, is that it was harder by far in the context of the ELSI-HapMap research to make the same choice. It is a significant com-ment on the current predicament of anthropology as a discipline that we find ourselves allied with both sides on questions like that of blood sampling: as ethnographers who discern the contours of practical, lo-calized engagements with specific social worlds, and as ethnographers working within the scaffoldings of established bioethics projects (such as the HapMap), who track abstract debates on codified values lifted from some local contexts and brought to bear on others. Even further, I mean to suggest that we find ourselves caught in between the “subject” and “area” pulls of the discipline particularly when called to be anthro-pologists in the prescriptive “ways we don’t do it any more.” Area spe-cialty, of course, often remains crucial to ethnography for professional identification and on the job market besides. But for that it also runs the risk of becoming a niche identification in an age when any exclusively “area” approach to ethnography is not only dated but is also diffused by the predominance of the more topically driven, interdisciplinary ap-proaches of cultural studies, science studies, and the like. The case for “moral experience” that Kleinman builds, which is centrally the case for immersed local, cultural engagements, is therefore both valued and marginalized within the discipline ironically in much the same way that “Indian and Hindu perspectives” are valued and marginalized in wider conversations about bioethics in genetic research. Shifting from one collaborative context to the next, ethnography has perforce to deal al-ternatingly with the shifting value of its objects of study.



The double bind of genres, the sense of being caught in between multiple and divergent sets of expectations precipitated both by spe-cific projects and the social science study itself, each invaluable in its way, seems increasingly emblematic of the character of fieldwork, and seems increasingly to define the parameters for any analysis that can then logically follow. Something called “ethnography” is perpetually undone and redone, as a result, fetishized, protected, or freely reinvent-ed. Ethnographic “value” is thus forever in the process of being trans-lated, reconstituted, and recirculated; ethnography is made up as one moves through collaborations and the various sites that give it mean-ing. Not only does the ethnographer become a cultural producer in his or her own right, but ethnography, too, becomes both by-product and end-product of such endeavor.

between thick and thin

The by-products of the ELSI-HapMap work (the press releases, the sta-tistical data, the synopses of “community perspectives”) are of course end-products in their own right, and of a different order than the an-thropological desired ends of such research in which I am—we all are—observers and the things being observed: participant observation with a vengeance, I dare say. The ELSI-HapMap project, it should be said, too, internally tolerates little methodological bricolage. This is an NIH-funded initiative that allows latitude but demands rigor of the kind that quite plainly produces data that is of PowerPoint clarity, in-telligible to diverse audiences of medical practitioners and researchers. As rich as the ethnographic data generated, as useful as the analysis, it does not obviously speak to audiences other than social scientists. In that it works somewhat against the goals of the project and, I would argue in the spirit of collaboration, even the desired ethnographic out-comes. Snowballing subject recruitment techniques, or even the multi-sited method that follows a thing, a metaphor, a plot/story/allegory, a conflict (Marcus 1995) may be increasingly commonplace or quite unquestioned in the course of ethnographic field research. Such meth-odological strategies are, however, red flags for other audiences with more positivist leanings, to whom also anthropologists must speak with greater than anthropological authority. Failure to do so is not just the failure of research-mandated collaboration, but a foreclosure of any



hope of releasing “anthropology” from its given, prescriptive forms and of making it more broadly relatable to medical or basic science re-search. So, within the project, method is consistently vetted, means to particular ends specifically chosen and justified to IRBs, funders, phys-ical anthropologists, medical anthropologists, and ourselves alike. Method simply cannot be made “out of a rhetoric of circumstance” (Marcus 2002b, 198)—not because ethnographers have such expanded freedoms to experiment but as a result of specifically devolved condi-tions of constraint.

Method is another story entirely, however, beyond the deadlines, mandates, and regulations of the ELSI-HapMap project. Here is osten-sibly free terrain where predetermined methodologies are both scarce and sparse, not least because it is difficult to devise both questions and method to encase a project that already possesses both questions and method, and in whose execution one is primarily (and currently) in-volved. “In classic ethnography,” George Marcus has written:

thickness was a virtue, thinness was not; in multi-sited fieldwork, both thickness and thinness are variably expected, and accounting for the differences in quality and intensity of fieldwork material becomes one of the key and insight-producing functions of ethnographic analysis. This accounting for the variability of thickness and thinness of ethnography is the most substantive and important form of reflexivity in multi-sited projects. (2002b, 196)

Not just to account for variability, I venture to add, but (reflexive) mechanisms to track thick and thin, to track the transformations of thick into thin, are equally key to stitching together a field inherited in disciplinary pieces. Movement into, out of, and in between collabora-tions in multi-sited research is such that meaning is neither uniform nor stable. “Culture” described thickly as a “stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake winks, parodies, and rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and in-terpreted” must be filtered, distilled, and reduced for HapMap into a thinner-by-far version of itself (Geertz 1973, 7). And yet, HapMap is thick with its own negotiation of “science” and “ethics” that begs doc-umentation tailored to particular outcomes: defining new approach-es to population genetics, or new ethnographic objects. Sites are not either thick or thin but produce meaning and demand coherence by configuring thick and thin to meet given ends.



What I am searching out here is a praxis that takes stock of the fact that field sites (and the ethnographers who encounter them) exist si-multaneously in multiple forms: even as “the field” unravels into a se-ries of nodes and pathways and signposts pointing both ways at once, it retains the coherence of collapsed bits and pieces—that often seem any-thing but logically whole to the interlocutors within. Sarah Strauss, re-flecting on her work on yoga as a transnational phenomenon, observes that she certainly could have written a “traditional” ethnography, but in so doing “would also have failed completely to represent the Rishikesh which I experienced, knowable only within the context of movement and change” (1999, 189). She’s right of course, but one wonders if her comment would apply just as well for those who are ashramites or sad-haks, come to Rishikesh for other kinds of study, in search of a place that coheres and endures and whose enduring coherence is precisely tutelary. In my own work on caste, too, I’ve had to grapple with the fact that while ethnographic theory now can slash essentialisms with ease, rendering them unforgivably “thin,” these very discounted formula-tions of identity stabilized continue to be powerfully central to new formulations of Dalit political identity (Reddy 2005). The variation of thick and thin seems roughly coeval with such variations in the demand for coherence and meaning that remains stable, at least until the next movement into new disciplinary or conceptual or political space.

“But isn’t this just the distinction between the “etic” and “emic” of classic anthropological theory?” someone asked at my presentation at the Society for Cultural Anthropology meetings in 2006 (which Jennifer Hamilton and I collaborated to co-organize) in which I followed some threads of data as Indianist but in that left out any mention of the outer encasings of HapMap. I take the question as a prompt not so much to choose between etic and emic, or between “traditional ethnography” and ethnography “knowable only within the context of movement and change,” but as a prompt to bring these differentiated frames into conversation (as I then attempted in an essay on blood based on our engagement with HapMap, a necessarily individual undertaking [see Reddy 2007]). It is an awkward task, at best: how does one neatly draw together an apparently straightforward commitment to science and the value of knowledge with, for instance, the (rather too damningly) criti-cal suggestion that Indians were selected as a HapMap population pre-cisely because they were not likely to oppose its ends—to produce what



Jennifer Hamilton once called a HapMap of the “ethically compliant”?10 How would I, as a link between a community of researchers and a com-munity of Indians, convey this unsettling possibility to my interlocu-tors or otherwise take it into account? Such questions notwithstanding, what method emerges from the overlapping contexts of collaboration must necessarily undertake the awkward task of stitching together the differentiated and opposed terrains of collaboration—or the terrains opposed (paradoxically) by the contexts of collaboration. What are the sites that demand coherence? What sort of coherence is it, and how is it enacted, “produced, perceived, and interpreted” (Geertz 1973, 7)? How do subject and object, topic and area interact, and what does their inter-action yield to analysis?

The point is not just that a new ethnographic object comes into view and that that object is HapMap itself. The point is also that the diverse array of collaborations on which HapMap (and a good number of sci-ence studies projects like it) is built yields an equally diverse array of expectations and commitments, professional, personal and variously political in nature. Each of these needs to be negotiated; each of these demarcates a set of parameters which constrain, but also crucially de-fine, the possibilities for ethnographic method and analysis. And each of these needs to be dialogically linked to track an elusive “culture” as it sometimes stands still, and sometimes refuses stable definition.

recoding the Field

The metaphor of the rhizome, thus far buried, bears some unearthing in conclusion. “Every rhizome,” write Deleuze and Guattari

contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified,

territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of

deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture

in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of

flight, but the line of flight is part of a rhizome. These lines always tie

back to one another. (1987, 9)

Collaboration, to my mind, has a distinctly rhizomic flavor: it con-tains lines of segmentarity from which it derives form and by which it is driven; so also does it rely on and produce a field of multiplicities; it contains the mechanisms for deterritorialization. And yet, such lines of



flight as the rhizome sets in motion don’t offer Malinowskian visions of escape. Far from it, they tie back to one another as they are inevitably still part of the rhizome, much as the collaborative exercise necessarily oversees the reconvergence of directional vectors. Dualisms are mean-ingless, but restratification is always imminent.

The value of the metaphor in closing lies particularly in the sugges-tion that the ethnographic field has not only an inherently disjointed quality but is cut into disciplinary pieces so as to be reassembled by the successive arrangements of collaboration itself. The inherited field is also made with the participation of the anthropologists who claim it, debate it, and compete over it. The labor of recoding is, then, guided in no small measure by the expectations, commitments, and parameters generated betwixt and beyond anthropology, by the collaborative ex-ercise: in the case of the ELSI-HapMap, the history of ethical violation that generates (funding for) ELSI, the methodology and rationale for community review, the IRB oversight, the demands made of anthropol-ogy and of anthropologists, by peers within the discipline as much as by colleagues in other fields. What room there is for innovation—and there is this room, more so in our study for the presence of three an-thropologists at the table—is nonetheless guided by the ways in which we are each called upon to be ethnographers within the frames of ELSI research and beyond it: a function of positioning, expertise, and other professional considerations besides. Method comes into being, incom-pletely and never entirely perfectly, in a field defined by such limits.

The rhizomatic character of collaboration is also evident in the fact that it has no real conclusion: such work as ours in the ELSI-HapMap project ends almost arbitrarily when funding runs out (although the Coriell Institute, where the samples we helped collect are housed, pro-vides some funds for continued contact with the community advisory group), and quickly becomes “preliminary data” for new R01s (perhaps the most sought-after category of NIH funding) and RFAs (requests for application) to the NIH. Quite likely, as advisors averred, it was all about positioning. The success of ELSI-HapMap itself makes a case for further research on a now “bioavailable” community, if I may adapt Cohen’s (2005) term for this context: one whose members recognize only too clearly that their very willingness to take part in genomic research posi-tions them strategically, too, to be able to watch science in motion, to be able to ask questions about the scientific logics of sample selection,



or about how further research using HapMap data is being prioritized. Ethical compliance, were we to term Indian willingness as such, does not preclude questioning and demanding more, as I quickly discovered at a community advisory group meeting organized in late April 2008, shortly after the formal conclusion of ELSI-HapMap. The operational-izing of ethnography in the end positioned not just us in the research group but equally those of our interlocutors who wished themselves to be strategically positioned (whether to ask for personal assistance in seeking jobs for nephews and sons, professional aid with writing grants and carrying out other research related to HapMap, assistance in building India studies, or anything else beyond). Collaboration revi-talized obsolete tropes of anthropology and its practitioners paradoxi-cally in service of the futuristic, yielding new bioavailable publics and new objects of ethnographic inquiry alike. It yielded a field of strategic positionings, the fresh allure of never-before-seen-views for all those involved. In this sense, the speed of science, especially of such techno-sciences as genomics, and its own collaborative needs, makes it always already a moving target for ethnography—whose own “unbearable slowness,” as Marcus (2003) puts it, is such that the catalytic powers of collaboration are quite necessary to retain science as a viable object of interest. The lines of flight are many and demanding of pursuit across a field in so many thick and thin pieces. Ethnographic praxis is both sub-ject and object in this landscape, interminably caught in collaboration.

• • • • •deepa s. reddy is an associate professor of anthropology and cross-cultural studies at the University of houston–clear lake, where she directed the Women’s studies program from 2002 to 2004. she has written on the contestations of identitarian politics in india, the globalization of caste via the discourses of race and human rights, and on how sample collection and donor registration initiatives such the international hapMap project and the U.s. national Marrow Donor program facilitate reconceptualizations of bioethics, civic identities, and even the role of the market in medicine and genetics. her book, Religious Identity and Political Destiny, was published in 2006. her current research interests range from (bio)ethics in human and animal research to medical tourism and drug development in india.

notes

Research on which this paper is based was part of an NIH/NHGRI study titled “Indian and Hindu Perspectives on Genetic Variation Research,” conducted in Houston from 2004 onward. My thanks go to our research group in Houston—Rich Sharp, Janis Hutchison, and particularly Jennifer Hamilton—for all the explicit and implicit conversations about



our chance collaboration. This paper began as a Center for Ethnography workshop presentation at the University of California, Irvine in March–April 2006; I owe much gratitude to George Marcus and Jim Faubion (as ever) for providing opportunity, intellectual framework, and impetus to finesse my descriptions of the methodological issues that the ELSI-HapMap project in Houston has raised. A version of this essay is soon to be reprinted in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be: Anthropology’s Culture of Method in Transition (edited by James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus, forthcoming from Cornell University Press).

1. The International HapMap Project (www.hapmap.org) is a collaboration among scientists in Japan, China, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States, formally launched in 2002. Its goal is to create a haplotype map of the human genome, to describe common patterns of human DNA sequence variation. Differences in individual bases of the DNA sequence are called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, or “snips”). Sets of nearby SNPs on the same chromosome tend to be inherited in blocks, and their pattern on this inherited block is known as a haplotype. Blocks may contain large numbers of SNPs, but only a few “tag SNPs” are sufficient to uniquely identify haplotypes in a block. Such reasoning makes it possible to reduce the number of SNPs needed to examine the entire genome from 10 million common SNPs to 500,000 tag SNPS. Genome scans that seek to find genes that affect diseases will therefore become both more cost effective and efficient. The International HapMap Project itself does not attempt to correlate genetic variants with diseases but to make information about variation available to other researchers who may then carry out disease-specific research programs. All samples are stored at and distributed from the Coriell Institute in Camden, New Jersey.

2. And not just my role, to be sure: each of us involved with the ELSI-HapMap study in Houston played broker to greater or lesser degrees. This said, my “ethnic background” shaped my position in ways that set my discomforts and commitments somewhat apart from others in our group, as I am about to suggest.

3. Indeed, we were each interviewed by Jenny Reardon for her own NSF-sponsored research titled “Paradoxes of Participation: The Status of ‘Groups’ in Liberal Democracies in an Age of Genomics” in June 2006.

4. The ethnographic literature on such uncomfortable alliances suggests that such experiences are not exceptional. See, for instance, the essays in the 1998 issue of Science as Culture, guest-edited by Kim Fortun and Todd Cherkasky.

5. Our original research protocol made some provision for collaboration with interlocutors, via the creation of what we called “working groups,” small groups of interested individuals with whom we would work to hammer out the details of informed consent—primarily by creating an informed consent document that was culturally attentive and thus appropriately communicative. We quickly discovered, however, that our interlocutors were hardly concerned with such legal-ethical demonstrations of trust, more than willing to take us and our commitments on good faith (especially since we each were associated with reputed area institutions), and were far more concerned with the greater “good” served by their participation in studies like ELSI-HapMap. Our plans for the working group interactions were therefore melded together with a series of focus groups conducted at specific institutions, and we proceeded to assemble a community advisory group (CAG) slightly in advance of the original plan. The CAG model was less explicitly collaborative: members were to provide comments and feedback, or sanction for any critical decisions we made regarding sample collection, the naming of the samples, and so forth. They represented more of a periodic “community check,” if I



may, in the formally post–data gathering phases of our project. They also have served, far more than collaborators, as the entry points through which to reestablish contact with “the community” periodically, to keep them informed about and interested in the fates of the samples whose collection they helped facilitate. Our last meeting with the CAG was in April 2008, just after the project’s formal conclusion. Its success, as I discovered, was critical not just for its own sake but equally to establish the ethics of ELSI-HapMap: what we showed by staying in touch with our interlocutors was that this was not a model of “helicopter research,” as a colleague later remarked. The two forms of collaboration, one with the community and one with colleagues intersect here: continued community consultation, whatever form this now takes, is instrumental as a response to the critics of sample collection, whether informants or colleagues.

6. But not too vulnerable: Native Americans were deliberately not selected for sampling because of their overwhelmingly critical response to the HGDP (International HapMap Consortium 2004).

7. Of course the comment that “we are not doctors” assumes that only physicians would be interested in the outcomes of genetic research, an interesting perspective in its own right that is, oddly enough, well in line with the emphasis of the International HapMap Project on health-related outcomes. And the comment ignores the number of Indians who are themselves physicians in Houston alone, not to mention the clout of AAPI (American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin) nationally. The simplest reading is that the comment is intended to limit further conversation, but it also points to the disjuncture between “community” and “genetic research” as entities that come to be allied only within the context of community engagement studies.

8. So in the past years cultural performances of music and dance put on by students and local artists have become regular offerings at the Miller Outdoor Theater in Hermann Park, a statue of Gandhi now towers over an odd assortment of busts of Latin American figureheads at the Rose Garden, and the local Kannada organization organizes yearly seminars in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, inviting the participation of scholars from Europe, India, and all around the United States. The initiative to establish an India Studies program and/or chair at the University of Houston is also in the same vein. Finally, we received much praise from community representatives for organizing a Grand Rounds Lecture at Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital on Gandhian ethics of nonviolence and medical practice. The wish clearly was that discussions bringing Indian ideas into other, non-Indian contexts, and encouraging the interaction of “community” with “academia” would continue.

9. And not just to prospecting-based research either: think of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) as an increasingly central sign of business ethics, often demonstrated by the promise of “giving back” in the marketing, CSR rhetorics of companies as ubiquitous as Target and Starbucks.

10. Personal communication.

references

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Fortun, Kim, and Mike Fortun. 2005. “Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology.” American Anthropologist 107 (1): 43–54.

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national HapMap Project.” Nature Reviews Genetics 5:467–75.Juengst, Eric T. 2000. “What ‘Community Review’ Can and Cannot Do.” Journal of Law,

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———. 2005b. “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology.” Current Anthro-pology 46 (1): 83–106.

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———. 2002a. “Intimate Strangers: The Dynamics of (Non) Relationship between the Natural and Human Sciences in the Contemporary U.S. University.” Anthropological Quarterly 75 (3): 519–26.

———. 2002b. “Beyond Malinowski and after Writing Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography.” The Australian Journal of Anthro-pology 13 (2): 191–99.

———. 2003. “On the Unbearable Slowness of Being an Anthropologist Now: Notes on a Contemporary Anxiety in the Making of Ethnography.” Xcp 12:7–20.

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Genetic Research.” Cultural Anthropology 22 (3): 429–72.



———. n.d. Citizens in the Commons: Blood and Genetics in the Making of the Civic. Unpublished ms.

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collaboration today and the re-imagination of the classic scene of Fieldwork encounter

douglas r. holmes, Binghamton University

george e. marcus, University of California, Irvine

Refunctioned ethnography has a more complicated cast of characters than the conversations traditional between the ethnographer and native subjects or informants. In contrast to the bilateral encounter over a camp table, eth-nography for present situations is normally if not invariably constituted by the ethnographer, multiple subjects in some relation to one another (what relation may be self-evident, or may have to be discovered by the anthropol-ogist) and liaisons. The contours of ethnographic fieldwork are determined by the relations the ethnographer establishes with the liaisons and the subjects who provide the material critical to the construction of her project. Rather than a sequence of interviews, refunctioned ethnography is much more like what in theater would be an ensemble production, which works through synchronization, or perhaps better, a film montage, in which rela-tions among disparate and apparently disconnected items are established.

—David a. Westbrook, Navigators of the Contemporary:

Why Ethnography Matters

For us “collaboration” represents not some new or revamped practice to be added to the repertoire of methodological tools available to an ethnographer; rather we view collaboration as central to what we have termed a refunctioning of ethnography (Holmes and Marcus 2005a, 2005b, 2006). Some will see this as merely an argument for the collab-orative relations long embedded in the conditions of fieldwork. This view would not be entirely incorrect, but it would also miss the pro-foundly altered conditions in which relations of fieldwork today must be negotiated and the more dynamic role that a still under-normed col-



laboration plays in the concepts, analytics, and imaginary of ethnogra-phy. Key to this refunctioning is drawing on the analytical acumen and existential insights of our subjects to recast the intellectual imperatives of our own methodological practices, in short, the para-ethnographic practices of our subjects.

Working amid and on collaborations significantly shifts the purpos-es of ethnography from description and analysis, inevitably distanced practices for which it has settled, to a deferral to subjects’ modes of knowing, a function to which ethnography has long aspired. This act of deferral, as a distinctive methodological premise that we have derived from our relationship with David “Bert” Westbrook, a legal scholar who has written a book on this relationship (Westbrook 2008), is thus gen-erative of different collaborative configurations by which, we believe, the architecture of a refunctioned ethnography gains coherence.

Most contemporary ethnographic projects face in their formative moments a distinctive conundrum. The long-established anthropolog-ical archive does little in the way of providing access and, in fact, may frustrate entry to the kind of ethnographic settings that many of us now seek to explore: epistemic communities—in which “research,” broadly conceived, is integral to the function of these communities. The sci-ence lab serves as the paradigmatic example, but we think that an ex-perimental ethos is now built into the structure of the contemporary and manifest in countless settings, ranging from alternative art spaces to central banks, from communities of climate scientists to communi-ties of Catholic political activists. The expert, and the culture of exper-tise that he or she inhabits, is a preferred subject and milieu of contem-porary ethnographic inquiry, because within them emergent social and cultural forms are being devised and enacted.

In such compelling settings, the methodological preoccupations and theoretical conceits that have both legitimated and enabled the pow-erfully imagined scene of fieldwork exchange between anthropologist and subject in the past tend to be of diminished value and may even be useless. Yet, at precisely the moment that we find ourselves bereft of a long-established and even beloved professional research apparatus, we learn that within these milieus of contemporary fieldwork operate reflexive subjects whose intellectual practices assume real or figurative interlocutors. We can find a preexisting ethnographic consciousness or curiosity, which we term para-ethnography, nested in alternative art


holmes and Marcus • collaboration today • 83

space in Tokyo or São Paolo, at an environmental nongovernmental or-ganization (NGO) in Costa Rica, the central bank of Chile and the head-quarters of the major pharmaceutical firm in Zurich or Mumbai. This kind of communicative relationship is anticipated within the Russian Academy of Sciences and a mine engineering department in a univer-sity in Johannesburg. Among junior officers of the Australian Armed Forces just back from a tour in Afghanistan we can encounter a robust critical consciousness and novel registers of politics and experience as well as a taste for Afghan cuisine, all of which can sustain ethnographic collaborations. In the haunts of youth culture in Shanghai or a police headquarters in Caracas, traveling with an itinerate folk opera troupe in northern China or with human rights activists in Chiapas or Darfur, the figure of the para-ethnographer comes into view. If one ventures into the back offices of a French investment bank to converse with the mathematicians who engineer financial instruments, or talks with cli-mate modelers in Boulder or meets with Catholic activists serving the elderly in Milan or Warsaw, one encounters actors experimenting with various narratives of their personal circumstances and the ambiguous conditions framing their expectations and sentiments. Then there are the physicians interpreting new imaging technologies or the televan-gelists mediating the spiritual lives of a globally connected charismat-ic community, both practitioners implicated in technological changes that neither fully understands.

In all of these settings we find figures involved in creative practices that assume intellectual partners, interlocutors with whom a critical conversation can unfold thus anticipating a collaborative engagement. To define conditions of fieldwork in these settings so as to pursue our agendas, we must first meet expectations that anticipate what ethnog-raphy might mean for them and for us. Fitting in so as to be able to do ethnography (nothing new in this!) means doing a kind of conceptual work with partners in fieldwork that both revises preconceived research frames to their core and remains legible in and constitutive of whatever ethnography claims for itself as a product of research.

Constituting scenes of fieldwork out of real life, so to speak, is expe-rienced by many of us today whose fieldwork gains compass and scale by the conceptual work that we do with latter-day “key informants,” who as epistemic partners, instead, define the imaginary and plot of our own inquiries. Hence ethnographic projects emerge out of a series



of in-fieldwork collaborative articulations of orienting questions and concepts that the research situation is felt, if not understood, to present to its partners.

First, “our methods,” that is the practices of ethnography, have been assimilated as key intellectual modalities of our time. Inside bureau-cracies and policy-making circles of various kinds are contests over interpretations of emerging realities. Regardless of winners or losers, perspectives are in play that parallel the curiosities of ethnographers in particularities, the conditions of lived ordinary experience, and a sensi-tivity to the rules of informal culture that dominate governing rationali-ties and formalisms. Therefore, there is little demand for ethnography itself to duplicate, or to operate independently of these para-ethno-graphic tendencies and desires, at least little demand within the scenes of fieldwork, which is not to say that there is nothing left for it to do. Ethnography advances today by deferring to, absorbing, and being al-tered by found reflexive subjects—by risking collaborative encounters of uncertain outcomes for the production of ethnographic knowledge in the forms that have been regulated by the disciplinary communities that propel anthropologists into fieldwork.

Second, within the epistemic communities that we seek to explore, our subjects are fully capable of doing superb ethnography in their own idioms. Within their own situated discourses, the basic descriptive func-tion of ethnography is very likely to be already exercised. Artifactually, books and memoirs emerge every day now from within, so to speak, that explain, with a strong edge of critique, how the most complex and strategic contemporary processes, institutions, and organizations oper-ate and have their own cultures. Anthropologists are not needed to add “critique,” moral injunction, or higher meaning to these accounts.

Third, we must therefore relearn our method from our subjects as epistemic partners, from a careful assessment of how they engage our world and our time intellectually. This presumes motivation, intent, purpose, curiosity, and therefore, intellectual appropriation, on the part of subjects who agree to become part of, or cooperate with, ethno-graphic inquiry.

Fourth, against the prevailing theoretical tides of the last two decades, the ethnographic subject has returned forcefully and persuasively. Put indelicately, the subject is back and fully in our post-structuralist faces. We want this subject to perform an intellectual operation for us that



we cannot do under the established imaginary of the ethnographer’s relation to subject as informant. This renegotiation of the rules of en-gagement with the dialogic, epistemic subject in ethnographic research opens the intellectual space for a rethinking of collaboration beyond the older understanding of it as the subject responding to, cooperating with, and tolerating the ethnographer’s more or less overt agendas.

There are two common senses of “collaboration” to which we take exception in developing ours in this essay. One is the sense of collabo-ration long implicitly embedded in anthropological fieldwork, concern-ing the anthropologist in relation to a less powerful and formally silent subject in traditional ethnography. This sense has been the source of much critique since the 1980s, and is the basis today of restating the ethics of research by recognizing as norm of research practice these long-embedded collaborative relations. In our rethinking of fieldwork relationships, we have a sense of the dynamics of power and the intel-lectual standing of the reflexive subject. For us, collaboration is overt, epistemic, and mutually invested in.

The other sense of “collaboration” that we do not intend is a height-ened contemporary ideology of collective practice, in which all proj-ects of fieldwork define themselves. This is collaboration that defines the pervasive condition of the contemporary social that the (still usually lone) ethnographer wants to work within. Both ideologically and tangi-bly, it is the collaboratory of the information age and the operating ethos of the organizations (corporations, universities, NGOs, etc.), institu-tions, and arrangements that define the processes that anthropologists study worldwide. It is the “ether” of spaces of fieldwork today. Of course ethnographers must blend into this ideological order as the condition of doing fieldwork research, but in so doing, they cannot quite avoid the once deprofessionalizing move of “going native.” This is the problem of not just appearing to go along with the collaborative milieu in order to do ethnography but also responding to the environmental imperatives to work collaboratively, all the while functioning with a reimagined yet fundamentally classic, Malinowskian conception of fieldwork. But be-ing marginal natives or strangers in a world that constitutes itself as col-laborations all the way down just won’t do. Ethnographers need to con-struct models of fieldwork as collaboration for themselves, models that let them operate with their own research agendas inside the pervasive col-laboratories that define social spaces today.



As against these two senses of collaboration—atoning for the past sin of not recognizing collaboration in traditional fieldwork, and going along with “collaborations” as the environment of research, so as to be in control of one’s research as the still lone ethnographer—we want to distinguish a third understanding of collaboration, that remakes clas-sic fieldwork.

For us, the figure of the para-ethnographer changes fundamentally the rules of the game for collaboration, and the mediation of ideas and sensibilities encompassed by and within the ethnographic exchange. We have no interest in collaboration as a “division of labor” among the investigators who control the design of a project, or as the basis for blending academic expertise, or as a gesture to a canonical interdisci-plinarity. The point is, again, to integrate fully our subjects’ analytical acumen and insights to define the issues at stake in our projects as well as the means by which we explore them.

Experimental discourses found in scenes of fieldwork everywhere today, and at least in part impelled by the ideological push for new ar-rangements and paradigms in established organizations as “being col-laborative,” presume a “master interlocutor” to whom these reflexive stories are addressed. The interlocutor can be “real”—a family mem-ber, colleague, patient, client, and so forth—or “figurative”—the mar-ket, public, and so on—but our point is that there is an emphatic pre-sumption of audiences. Such audiences constitute positions into which ethnographers can easily insinuate themselves. Thus, the space of col-laboration is created incidentally for the ethnographer prior to his or her arrival on the scene; the ethnographer is a figure whose presence is anticipated.

a short history of our thinking together into an era of collaborative imperatives

The Late Editions project of the 1990s, produced under George’s ed-itorship at Rice University (see Marcus 1993–2000), was a decade-long experiment and response to the then current intense critique in the academy of realist and documentary representation (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986), yet at a time—the fin de siècle—when there was an equally intense intellectual and public interest precisely in documen-tary accounts of the century’s legacy and new (even millennial) futures



emerging. Through collective and interdisciplinary editorial deliber-ations—a collaborative project indeed, although collaboration at that time was not the pervasive ideological figure that it is now—under agreed topical frames, participants were asked to develop conversa-tions with selected, cooperating subjects throughout the world, and to produce dialogical writings, representations of conversations rather than realities, entretiens, in the French genre, for a series of eight annu-als until the year 2000. The conversational, dialogical (and not simply interview) format of the series, produced documentation of a height-ened sense of global transformations, hedged against the then current and powerful critiques of realist documentary representation charac-teristic of fin-de-siècle ideology.

Whatever the successes and failures of this collaborative experi-ment, for us (Doug was a participant in the project over the years) Late Editions drew critical attention to the present conditions and classic ideology of fieldwork relationships in anthropological ethnography, as the compass and scale of such research was changing markedly through the 1990s. Such questions were a by-product, really, of the specific intentions of the series. While the Late Editions project, be-cause of its origins among anthropologists, asked its various contribu-tors and reporters from outside of anthropology to exercise something like an ethnographic sensibility, we never thought that we were pro-ducing a paradigm for the rethinking of ethnographic fieldwork itself. Instead, we were responding to theoretical critiques and documentary urges of the times.

One legacy of the Late Editions project was the emergence of the scene of fieldwork as a problem for the respective disciplinary projects that we were pursuing at the time. For George, the problem was how to rethink the dynamics of fieldwork relationships in the context of a paradigm of multi-sited ethnography, which he was trying to articulate (Marcus [1995] 1998). Having grown up in anthropology on the study of elites, George thought through a revised scene of fieldwork in terms of a trope of “complicity” (Marcus [1997] 1998) in which the ethnogra-pher allied with the subject as intellectual partner in coming to terms with the understanding of a shared common object of curiosity “else-where.” George’s conceptual work was fed by the co-evolving research of Doug on shifting political trends in Europe, work that required him to think differently about the dynamics of fieldwork than he had in his



earlier research in northern Italy. Doug’s fieldwork at the European Parliament led to scenes of fieldwork elsewhere that coalesced as an ac-count of the social and cultural strength of neofascism in contempo-rary Europe (see Holmes 2000). The key point here is that this latter shift in his research developed because of his rethinking of the dynam-ics of the fieldwork encounter, reported on in the Late Editions series as a conversation with Bruno Gollnisch of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s movement (see Holmes 1993).

George and Doug’s shared efforts of the 1990s have led them to fur-ther develop after 2000 a reimagination of the scene of fieldwork en-counter as collaboration, according to this explicit topical fashion and ideological imperative of the present. Since 2000, the project ve-hicles for our joint reimagining of the scene of fieldwork have been in-creasingly posed in terms of collaboration in which the first section of this essay has been couched. George completed a work, Ocasião, with a Portuguese aristocrat, Fernando Mascarenhas, that on the face of it looked like another in the genre of reflexive, coproduced and even dia-logic ethnography so popular after the critiques of the 1980s (Marcus and Mascarenhas 2005). But for George there were additional princi-ples at work in his epistolary exchanges with Mascarenhas. While much is learned in Ocasião about the world of the contemporary Portuguese aristocracy, the roles of anthropologist and subject in this text are never settled. Instead of ethnographer and subject, we are presented with a game of mutual deferral and appropriation. Ocasião uses this game to explore inchoate norms of collaboration implicit in an ethnography in which the fiction of the ethnographer’s authority is mutually ac-knowledged but is variously interpreted by anthropologist and subject. Elements of this relationship were later to be more fully explored when Bert Westbrook arrived in the realm of George and Doug’s longstand-ing thinking together. And these are the elements that seem character-istic of ethnography as collaboration today.

along came bert: the appearance of a third Makes two, Us and him—What happens to the Fiction of Fieldwork encounter

Over the past four years, George and Doug have had regular and sus-tained conversations with Professor David “Bert” Westbrook, formerly a corporate lawyer and now a scholar of corporations (see, for example,



Westbrook and Lemert 2007) and many other subjects at the University at Buffalo Law School, perhaps the last to sustain the ethos of the Critical Legal Studies movement at its peak in the 1980s. Bert came to George and Doug’s attention in a way quite conventional for many ac-ademic associations: his remarkable work of social and philosophical critique of capitalism and its post–World War II evolution, City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent (2004) informed their own projects, and especially Doug’s on central banking, in its very early stages. But they also found operating within the text something that looked like para-ethnographic sensibilities and, more importantly, they found the outlines of an argument or arguments that might begin to explain the emergence of these intellectual practices that anticipate collaboration. From his own curiosity, Bert perceived that the practice of anthropological ethnography, sensitized and stimulated by its auto-critiques of the 1980s, as intellectual form and distinctive technology of inquiry, could support his growing critique of scholarly work in law schools and intellectual life in the contemporary United States gener-ally. The three of them began mutually beneficial conversations (see for example, Holmes, Marcus, and Westbrook 2006) that are characteristic of academic life at its most fulfilling.

As these conversations developed, Doug and George began to con-struct their relationship with Bert fancifully and fictively “as if ” he were the anthropologist’s classic other. Their relationship to him, though collegial and intellectually satisfying, also seemed to be deeply relevant to the kinds of fieldwork situations and relationships that they were try-ing to understand in their own projects (e.g., the politics of European union, central banking, Ocasião) and in those of their students (e.g., the para-site interventions of the Center for Ethnography, to be dis-cussed shortly), and of many other ethnographic inquiries played out on multi-sited scales. The fact that a similar sort of curiosity seemed to be reciprocal on Bert’s part, and that indeed his areas of expertise and experience were those of the reflexive subjects, the “counterparts,” of so many current ethnographic projects, made this fiction of the scene of fieldwork for George and Doug irresistible.

Yet, this is as far as this fanciful imaginary would have gone had not Bert pushed his inquiry into the culture of anthropology through George and Doug with much more intellectual power than they pushed their fictive inquiry into his space. His aggressive move to understand



and eventually write about ethnography, with George and Doug as in-formants, and its possible uses as a form of critical discourse and in-tellectual work generally, stimulated them to think about their rela-tionship to Bert more seriously, as a vehicle to think systematically and experimentally about the changing nature of fieldwork projects in their own and others’ projects of anthropological research.

So, George and Doug’s relationship to Bert became something akin to a prototype, a simulacrum for thinking through a new schematics of fieldwork alongside or parallel to ongoing projects of ethnographic research with the analogous relations to reflexive subjects mutually recognized as para-ethnographers. George and Doug’s relationship to Bert—call it a collaboration—thus gave them a context to work though certain characteristics of the collaborative norms and forms developing in many projects of ethnographic research today.

A critical turn in this relationship occurred when its reciprocal na-ture became clear, and especially when, with extraordinary rapid-ity in late 2006 and early 2007, Bert produced a book, Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters (2008). This clearly and materi-ally represented an appropriation of George and Doug’s thinking about anthropology for the purposes of Bert’s own intellectual projects in his space. While up to that point only fancifully playing with their relation-ship to Bert as one of anthropologist to subject, contemplating him as (after, Levi-Strauss’s famous quip on totemism) “good to think about their own parallel concerns with,” what were they now to do with be-ing appropriated by Bert’s brilliant act of (counter) para-ethnography? What kind of conceptual work had Bert done for them in producing this text? What did this turn in their relationship to Bert correspond to in the changing dynamics of fieldwork research that they had been try-ing to come to terms with in their own research?

Here it might be useful to attend briefly to what Bert claimed he was doing in providing his account of the contemporary predicament of an-thropological ethnography as understood through his relationship to his informants, George and Doug. It should be clear that Bert was not appropriating ethnography from them so that he could literally become an ethnographer in his own space. Rather he perceived a profound problem of intellectual form and critical acuity of thought in his own milieu, that of legal scholarship and education leading into legal prac-tice, and ultimately of the understanding of politics within the over-



arching frame of markets, corporations, and governance of contempo-rary (Western) society. Through his relationship to George and Doug, and probably before that, he came to reflect on the power of “mere” conversations and the chains of association that they create—call them collaborations—as the contemporary form in which important collec-tive intellectual work could be done. It is the example, ideology—past and present—and the actual practices of ethnography, that have so de-fined George and Doug’s mutual interest that inspired Bert to inves-tigate them in order to understand the value of their thinking about a disciplinary practice for his own scholarly projects. Bert thus brilliantly appropriates their thought about the refunctioning of ethnography and restates it in terms of his own agenda—that is, new ways to have con-versations in “bureaucracies” (like universities and law schools) and against false dreams of intellectual “celebrity.” According to Bert, eth-nography provides collaborations with subjects who provide their own accounts for their own purposes but who in so doing can get at what he calls “present situations” that in turn have broader linked trajectories to other situations and problems in the world (not a bad restatement of George and Doug’s frame, and at the same time the situation of his own relation to them—call it collaboration upon collaboration about collaboration).

So, Bert has performed a kind of tutored appropriation of anthropol-ogy. It wasn’t George and Doug whom he appropriated but an under-standing of their disciplinary culture and practice. This is reverse an-thropology in the finest Malinowskian legacy. Collaboration for Bert has been about discussing the dynamics of relationships, and this is of key conceptual importance to him in thinking about the relationship of the (academic) intellectual in the United States to politics. What ener-gized George and Doug’s thinking together over the years was seized upon by an unanticipated interlocutor who energized himself by ap-propriating them as subjects, so to speak, and restating their discourse in a different terrain, that in turn has produced a surge in their own longstanding conversations about the refunctioning of ethnographic research since the 1980s (this metaphorical language of energy flow to characterize these intellectual exchanges may seem extravagant, but it does capture a sense of the breakthrough satisfaction in the relation-ship after the moment of Bert’s decisive materialization of it in the pro-duction of Navigators).



Now, after Bert has so decisively declared himself about what this re-lationship has meant to him and his projects, let us come back to the question of what this relationship to Bert means for our (George and Doug’s) joint thinking about the changing character of ethnography. Returning to the fiction that our relationship to Bert has been “like fieldwork,” and taking it seriously as a prototypical parallel space of simulacrum, what have we learned about the principles or changing schematics of fieldwork relationships—call them collaborations—that are currently developing alongside our own and others’ projects of re-search? Clearly the relationship to Bert has moved us ethnographically into domains in which we are interested—the law, markets, corpora-tions—in far more profound ways than had the relationship been famil-iarly collegial, more formal, or not gone beyond talking to Bert about his book City of Gold, which stands for him. By the contest of mutual appropriation, which Bert won, so to speak, because he was perhaps more motivated (the language of contest, though perhaps foreign and uncomfortable in speaking about fieldwork relationships is apt, in this case), we were transported more profoundly into a world that we eth-nographically wanted to be in than would otherwise have been likely. Bert has provided us with a compass to construct research in a variety of domains in which our students and we are interested (central banks, NGOs, legal documents and judgments, international regimes of gov-ernance, politics). It is for us to move on from here, but the point of this essay has been to say something about the contemporary dynamics of situating ethnography, the prime purpose of which in the classic era would have been couched in something like working with the “native’s point of view.” The contemporary equivalent of this is something much more complicated and collaborative that our relationships to Bert as a simulacrum has given us the opportunity to explore.

At its most schematic, the relationship with Bert represents a field-work situation where an appropriation by a subject or set of subjects (instead of a “Bert,” perhaps an ongoing collective project in the scene[s] of fieldwork) with what we have termed para-ethnographic curiosity has trumped the authority, or comfortable self-definition, of the ethnographer as the one who conducts the inquiry and shapes the conceptual agenda. The ethnographer, to work “inside” a conceptual space, is now brought into it by an unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfort-able re-negotiation of his or her own framework, which he or she holds



dear. For all of the traditional inclinations in anthropology to be open, to probe native points of view, etc., conceptual work of an altogether different order is going on when the categories that inform the ethnog-rapher’s frame are being appropriated.

For fieldwork to prosper, the ethnographer must defer to this ap-propriation before his or her own pursuits can move ahead. This act of deferral, requires a different sort of imaginary of collaboration in field-work to achieve the core desideratum of ethnography in many research projects today. To fail to reproduce something like working within “native points of view” amid today’s para-ethnographically inclined subjects is to lose the historic distinctiveness of ethnographic accounts, which we want to sustain in these terms. Despite the openness of eth-nography to subjects in the past, we think that the “deferral to appro-priation” as one schematic of conceptual work that defines the heart of de facto fieldwork collaborations today is the “raw material” that the turns in our relationship to Bert provides the project of reimagin-ing the scene of fieldwork today. To be sure, we have focused here only on the collaborative conditions that produce a different sort of terrain and function for fieldwork; how a found collaboratively conceived con-ceptual apparatus plays out in the course of a project is another, more elaborate story. The fact that fieldwork gains traction with something akin to our simulacrum with Bert—the set direction for an ensemble production, as Bert himself characterizes it—is as far as we want to go in this essay.

A final and fair question is how rare is a “Bert” or “Berts” in routine creations of scenes of fieldwork today? Are we drawing too much from an extreme case of serendipitous advantage and fanciful construction? That is, how valid is it, or how far can the relationship with Bert be used as a simulacrum to think about the schematics and dynamics of chang-ing fieldwork situations, especially in relation to para-ethnographically inclined reflexive subjects and counterparts? At stake are de facto norms in play in many current fieldwork projects about relationships that can be called collaborative and that badly need articulation, discussion, and debate. While there are perhaps several genres or schematics at play, we believe that the dynamics of collaboration that we have described in our relationship to Bert gives us a working imaginary for refunctioning ethnography.



post–2000 projects

Since 2000 we have each developed a project or vehicle in which to probe more systematically the changing scene of fieldwork, themed as collab-oration that we had been reimagining together previously. In Doug’s case, it is an ethnography of central banking that demonstrates among other things that “Bert” is, by no means, an oddity or an exception but representative of interlocutors who can be recruited to the refunction-ing effort and to turning the tables provocatively in diverse settings. In George’s case, it is a reconsideration of the pedagogy of graduate dis-sertation projects that strategically bring students into careers of eth-nographic research. These projects have been deeply informed by the schematics of their co-occurring and parallel relationship to “Bert.”

central banking

Doug has examined the collaborative scene that has emerged around an experiment, orchestrated in a group of central banks, by which these institutions recruited the public to confer value on our currencies. The experiment—initially designed and formalized as policy by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand—seeks to influence future sensibilities—not just sensibilities about the future but also sensibilities in the future—to shape expectations that impel the most fundamental dynamic of mar-ket economies: the evolution of prices.

The logic guiding the experiment, which has come to be known pro-saically as “inflation targeting,” goes like this: If the behavior of prices is “expectational,” then a policy that projects central bank action across an explicit time horizon can serve as a means to shape sentiments. As “economic agents”—that is, you and I—assimilate policy intentions as our own personal expectations, we do the work of the central bank. As our expectations about prices become “anchored” by virtue of this kind of communicative action, we confer a continuing value on curren-cies by restraining inflationary pressures that would devalue them. The creation and perpetuation of this regime of value is predicated, in part, on carefully calibrated communications—“econometric allegories”—informed by a keen technical acumen and formulated by a small group of individuals working within these institutions.

Doug’s project is framed not as an ethnography of a central bank or central banking per se but as an ethnography of an experiment, broadly



conceived, that persuaded these famously secretive institutions—insti-tutions that were in some notable cases committed well into the 1990s to a mystique of secrecy as vital to their function—to adopt far-reach-ing communicative practices under the aegis of transparency. The point here is that “our” ethnography can be nested within this kind of experi-mental scene and yet operate independent of it.

Experimentation here is not merely about a formal testing of a par-ticular proposition or hypothesis; rather it is about the continuous evo-lution of a set of social practices and the critical labor by which the per-sonnel of central banks bring to bear new insights and knowledge to modify and refine the assumptions that inform their practices. Within the inflation target framework, there is the possibility for errors of anal-ysis and judgment, infelicitous timing, and imprecise communications that can yield a range of “suboptimal” outcomes and even overt fail-ures. In other words, it is precisely the possibility that this framework can “fail” that underwrites the experimental ethos in these settings and introduces a creative tension within the collaborative scene.

Actors in these institutions are fully aware of the unstable nature of the economic phenomena they are charged with guiding as well as the limitations of their analytical tools to measure, if not predict, its performance. They understand that they must continually create agile theoretical accounts in order to capture the dynamic character of this global system, and they do this with candor and reflexive acuity. The critical discourse that pervades these institutions thus anticipates an interlocutor: a real or figurative interlocutor to whom these practices are explained and justified, and it is this role that an ethnographer is, incidentally, suited to personify. Under the aegis of “transparency” that currently pervades these institutions, the ethnographer has something like an ideological legitimization, if not a full intellectual remit to pur-sue collaborative exchanges.

Doug’s inquiry is about the creation and articulations of value by means of econometric allegories, allegories that constitute far more than mere commentaries, reflections, or analyses of economic phe-nomena: rather, they are themselves economic mechanisms instru-mental for the operation of the global economy. Hence, the creation of these allegories serve as a strategic means for intermediating between micro- and macro-level phenomena as a handful of reflexive subjects create narratives designed to influence financial markets globally. In



the dynamic epistemic scenes of Doug’s project there is an “overlap-ping academic/fieldwork space,” in which practice and critical schol-arship are inseparable and where an experimental ethos is cultivated across what George has termed “para-sites.”

a center for ethnography and para-site interventions in Dissertation research

Upon inaugurating the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine, in 2006, George with others defined one of its key themes, “The Ethnography of/as Collaboration” (see the link at http://www.socsci.uci.edu/˜ethnog/). Under this theme, they sponsor “para-site” events: intervention into the appropriate phases of credential-de-fining first fieldwork projects of anthropologists-in-the-making.1 One of the center’s board members, the anthropologist Justin Richland, ex-pressed the function of the para-site interventions in introducing the center’s second such event:

Ethnography as both theory and method has escaped the disciplinary

borders of its anthropological origins, and even beyond academia. The

notions and practices typically associated with “classical” ethnography

—detailed observation of in situ human action, coupled with a deep(er)

engagement with their subjects—are today a regular feature of the

labor of diversely situated actors. The range of persons and activities

engaging in such para-ethnography is vast, from “brand” capitalists to

ethno-indigenous culture-brokers, and equally recognizable as modes

of state surveillance and certain types of performance art. Moreover,

as the subjects of anthropological investigation become ever more

attenuated from the classical “native on the beach,” ethnographers

increasingly find themselves confronted with people whose everyday

theories and practices appear strikingly familiar to their own. The

time has come for ethnographers to come to grips with the ways in

which some mode of para-ethnography, undertaken by actors who are

collaborators in (rather than subjects of ) our investigations, is always

already a part of sites where our research alights. In so doing, we begin

to take measure of ethnography’s leakages, and particularly the ways

in which they affect our investigations as they are taking place.

The purpose of para-site experiments is to perform just such

an intervention. It is to both ask for and perform a kind of shared



conceptual labor with our collaborator-subjects at key moments

in ongoing projects of ethnographic research. The seminar or

workshop—modalities of the academic setting—becomes a kind of

theater to which non-academic subjects are invited for a temporary

moment of complicities. As theater, the para-site is orchestrated

by the ethnographer with subjects in order to derive a conceptual

apparatus for the ethnographer’s particular work, in ways specific to

the project’s thematic material.

The para-site event is thus a carefully designed intervention into

research projects that are still individually conceived, conducted,

and written up. At the same time, it compels researchers and their

collaborator-subjects to reflect more explicitly upon the intellectual

partnerships at stake in their research relationships. Para-site events

enact a space for a kind of conceptual work that is not derivable

from theory, academic literatures, or interviews. Rather it pursues

those moments of ethnographic investigation that embody its

most thoroughly collaborative norms, serving to operationalize the

conceptual work that these norms always entail and on which the

originality of the ethnographic work depends.

. . . No two para-site experiments are alike. Each presents different

design problems and opportunities in shaping academic contexts

of the seminar or workshop for conceptual work that is both inside

fieldwork and the arenas where it is ultimately received and judged.

(http://www.socsci.uci.edu/˜ethnog/)

So, by 2000, both George and Doug were confronted by new dimen-sions and qualities to the dialogic properties of fieldwork in the context of ethnographic research projects of nontraditional compass and scale. These were very clearly issues about collaborative research norms in fieldwork of a different character than had been critiqued and exposed in various earlier critiques of Malinowskian fieldwork (see Lassiter 2005). The articulation of what these proto-norms at play in contem-porary (now routine) multi-sited research are, and to discern what their implications for the future of anthropology’s distinctive and signature mode of inquiry might be, are only now being addressed in what we consider to be an explicitly ideological era (or perhaps just fashion?) of pervasive collaborative knowledge-making endeavors of all kinds. Certainly, contemporary ethnography presumes collaboration as a per-vasive social condition in the problems and sites where anthropologists



have the ambition to develop their research (it permeates, for example the sites of fieldwork in the range of examples that we offered previ-ously), but to what extent is it necessary to conceive ethnography itself, in its framing and doing, as collaboration. Does “collaboration” now mean more than the trope that has been buried in its humanistic pro-fessional culture and methodological craft of the past?

envoi

As we finish this essay we are embarking on participation—call it collab-oration—in an ethnographic research project that reflects this era’s per-vasive imperatives to collaborate, both in the way that institutional pro-cesses of all kinds are organized, and in the way such imperatives arise from within the ethnographic method itself. As perhaps a special irony, Bert Westbrook will be moving along with us into the growing collabora-tive space of the ethnographers who are undertaking this project.

Pascal Lamy, general secretary of the World Trade Organization (WTO), invited Professor Marc Abélès of the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales, who is known for his many studies of French and European political organization, to undertake an ethnographic study of the WTO, with access to its internal operations at a highly sensitive time in this relatively new organization’s history. Lamy insisted on a team of researchers of broad multicultural makeup. Abélès has invited George to join this team, and George has invited the participation of Doug and Bert, given their past and present experience in studying elite bureaucracies.

The WTO invitation and the underlying expectation of ethnography, we think, is not at all exceptional today. There are emerging institution-al arrangements that make ethnographic expertise attractive in techno-cratic settings, like the WTO. Rather than merely recruiting the ethnog-rapher (in collaborative or consultative mode) to provide an objective and, preferably favorable, representation of these institutional milieus, sponsors and patrons are asking for the participation of ethnographers in internal efforts to refunction key aspects of institutional “cultures.” Under the complex and still poorly understood aegis of transparency, information, knowledge, and the work of negotiation produced at the WTO have acquired new currency as part of the public discourse on some of the most vexatious aspects of globalization. We suspect that



it is for the furtherance of this agenda—essentially the creation of re-flexive knowledge practices inside the WTO that can continually shape public opinion (if not consciousness)—that ethnographers have been invited to participate.

Thus, from the perspective of George and Doug’s earlier projects, they (along with Bert), and the other members of the project, are being asked to participate within the ramifying imperatives of organizational experiments that seek to create an idiom through which a global re-gime of liberal trade gains articulation, a patois, so to speak, by which capitalism can speak reflexively. Call it collaboration within the perva-sive fashion and imperative of the moment, and call it collaboration as an emerging mode within the ethnographic tradition of inquiry, of the sort presaged in the schematics performed by George, Doug, and Bert.

• • • • •douglas r. holmes is a professor of anthropology at binghamton University. During the past two decades, his research has focused on the social and cultural dynamics of advanced european integration. More recently, he has undertaken a multi-sited project that investigates the innovative practices by which central banks formulate and communicate monetary policy. his published works include Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (2000) and Cultural Disenchantments: Worker-Peasantries in Northeast Italy (1989).

george e. marcus was for twenty-five years chair of the anthropology department at rice University. During that period, he coedited (with James clifford) Writing Culture, coauthored (with Michael Fischer) Anthropology as Cultural Critique, inaugurated the journal Cultural Anthropology, published Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, and through the 1990s, created and edited a series of annuals, Late Editions, published by the University of chicago press and intended to document the century’s end by innovations in representing the ethnographic encounter. his most recent books are Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (with paul rabinow, James Faubion, and tobias rees, Duke University press, 2008) and Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be (edited with James Faubion, cornell University press, forthcoming). since 2005, he has been chancellor’s professor at the University of california, irvine, where he founded the center for ethnography, dedicated to examining the vulnerabilities and possibilities of this venerable technology of knowledge making.

note

1. Here, from its Web site, is the informing rationale for the Center for Ethnography’s para-site experiments. Note that the use of “para-site” is inspired by the concept for the eighth volume of Late Editions, the fin de siècle series of annuals edited by George E. Marcus through the 1990s: Para-Sites: A Casebook against Cynical Reason, Late Editions 8, Cultural Studies for the End of the Century (University of Chicago Press, 2000).



While the design and conduct of ethnographic research in anthropology is still largely individualistic, especially in the way that research is presented in the academy, many projects depend on complex relationships of partnership and collaboration, at several sites, and not just those narrowly conceived of as fieldwork. The binary here and there-ness of fieldwork is preserved in anthropology departments, despite the reality of fieldwork as movement in complex, unpredictable spatial and temporal frames. This is especially the case where ethnographers work at sites of knowledge production with others, who are patrons, partners, and subjects of research at the same time.

In the absence of formal norms of method covering these de facto and intellectually substantive relations of partnership and collaboration in many contemporary projects of fieldwork, we would like to encourage, where feasible, events in the Center that would blur the boundaries between the field site and the academic conference or seminar room. Might the seminar, conference, or workshop under the auspices of a Center event or program also be an integral, designed part of the fieldwork?—a hybrid between a research report, or reflection on research, and ethnographic research itself, in which events would be attended by a mix of participants from the academic community and from the community or network defined by fieldwork projects. We are terming this overlapping academic/fieldwork space in contemporary ethnographic projects a para-site. It creates the space outside conventional notions of the field in fieldwork to enact and further certain relations of research essential to the intellectual or conceptual work that goes on inside such projects. It might focus on developing those relationships, which in our experience have always informally existed in many fieldwork projects, whereby the ethnographers finds subjects with whom he or she can test and develop ideas (these subjects have not been the classic key informants as such, but the found and often uncredited mentors or muses who correct mistakes, give advice, and pass on interpretations as they emerge). (http://www.socsci.uci.edu/˜ethnog/)

references

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Holmes, Douglas. 1993. “Illicit Discourse.” In Perilous States: Conversations on Culture, Poli-tics, and Nation (Late Editions, No. 1), ed. George E. Marcus, 255–81. Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press.

———. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Holmes, Douglas, and George E. Marcus. 2005a. “Cultures of Expertise and the Man-agement of Globalization: Toward the Refunctioning of Ethnography.” In Global As-semblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 235–52. Oxford: Blackwell.

———. 2005b. “Refunctioning Ethnography: The Challenge of an Anthropology of the Contemporary.” In Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed. Ed. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, 1099–113. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

———. 2006. “Fast Capitalism: Para-Ethnography and the Rise of the Symbolic Ana-lyst.” In Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, ed. Melissa S. Fisher and Greg Downey, 33–57. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.



Holmes, Douglas, George E. Marcus, and David A. Westbrook. 2006. “Intellectual Voca-tions in the City of Gold.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 29 (1): 154–79.

Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press.

Marcus, George E., ed. 1993–2000. The Late Editions Series: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century.(Vol. 1, Perilous States; Vol. 2, Technoscientific Imaginaries; Vol. 3, Connect-ed; Vol. 4, Cultural Producers in Perilous States; Vol. 5, Corporate Futures; Vol. 6, Paranoia Within Reason; Vol. 7, Para-Sites; Vol. 8, Zeroing in on the Year 2000.) Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press.

———. [1995] 1998. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography.” In Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, 79–104. Princeton: Princ-eton University Press.

———. [1997] 1998. “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scène of An-thropological Fieldwork.” In Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, 105–31. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Marcus, George E., and Fernando Mascarenhas. 2005. Ocasião: The Marquis and the An-thropologist, a Collaboration. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Westbrook, David. 2004. City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent. London: Routledge.

———. 2008. Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters. Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press.

Westbrook, David A., and Charles Lemert. 2007. Between Citizen and State: An Introduction to Corporation Law. New York: Paradigm Publishers.


challenging hegemoniesAdvancing Collaboration in Community-Based Participatory Action Research

jean j. schensul, Institute for Community Research

marlene j. berg, Institute for Community Research

ken m. williamson,University of South Florida

Cultivated on the spikes of social injustice, participatory action research projects are designed to amplify demands and critique from the “margins” and the “bottom.” . . . Legitimating democratic inquiry, PAR signifies a fundamental right to ask, investigate, dissent and demand what could be.

—Michelle Fine and Maria torre, “intimate Details: participatory action research in prison”

The “classroom” with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress.

—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress:

Education as the Practice of Freedom

introduction and Definitions

In participatory action research (PAR), community residents (commu-nity action researchers) and university-trained researchers (facilitators) collaborate in research that supports personal growth, group solidarity, and social action. The approach marries group-implemented social sci-ence research methods and resident-generated local knowledge and so-cial and cultural capital. Critical byproducts are methodological inno-vations favoring collaboration, and locally driven theories and models


schensul, berg, and Williamson • challenging hegemonies • 103

for change. The intent is to use the tools of social science to give valid-ity to local knowledge, thus reversing elitist structures that dominate the production of scientific knowledge and its uses. We have found this form of collaboration to be highly meaningful, both personally and professionally, and at the same time fraught with challenges and con-tradictions. As university-trained research facilitators and “scholar ac-tivists,” we have struggled with our tendencies to privilege our forms of knowledge and knowledge acquisition and our own personal and insti-tutional needs and goals for community change. At the same time our community counterparts have been challenged to learn, adapt, and in-vent new research methods; to go beyond their own experiential knowl-edge; to engage with difference within their communities; and to con-front external barriers to change.

Our essay focuses on a specific form of PAR, the goal of which is to place both the research process and use of the results in the hands of community residents—in other words, to transfer the fundamentals of ethnographic inquiry to lay research activists in a process of mutual learning and knowledge co-construction so that both the process and the outcome are transformational. We (the authors) are applied anthro-pologists from working and middle-class backgrounds who live and work in the city of Hartford, Connecticut. Our community collaborators are groups that have been marginalized, whose voices often are exclud-ed from the “decision-making table” (Kincheloe and McLaren 2000), and who have not had the opportunity to record, conserve, document, control, or represent their historical experiences, cultural capital, their interpretations of causality, or the futures to which they aspire. This form of PAR has an international history, supported by sociologists (Brydon-Miller et al. 2008; Hall 2005), feminist theorists (Harding 1998, 2004, 2006; Maguire 2001), popular educators (Duncan-Andrade 2007; Freire 1970, 1995, 1998; Tandon 2003, 2005), anthropologists (Berg and Schensul 2004; Fals-Borda 1987; Gaventa 1991, 1993; Hale 2006; Park et al. 1993; Reason and Bradbury 2001; J. Schensul and S. Schensul 1992; S. Schensul and J. Schensul 1978) and activists in many countries around the world.

The field of PAR has advanced significantly, especially as a result of the commitment of these social scientists to addressing health and oth-er disparities by bringing communities into the process. Nevertheless, there remain topics that should be addressed to move the field ahead.



For example, how do PAR facilitators, who may themselves differ in values, class background, theoretical perspectives, and approaches to methodology build trusting relationships with each other and with community residents? What factors come into play when these same differences characterize community residents? What needs to be in place to ensure that PAR methodology builds on and strengthens rather than undermines collaboration among all partners? How do power im-balances within a PAR group affect relationships, research, and subse-quent action? How and with whom can collaborative action be concep-tualized in PAR projects to address the inevitable constraints of time, resources, and unsupportive political landscapes? These are gaps in the PAR record that leave researchers (both resident and university trained) to reinvent PAR methodology over and over again. We will use our per-sonal experiences in two case studies to address these questions.

We state from the outset that we write from the research facilitator perspective. The PAR experiences we describe took place some time ago, our PAR facilitator teams are geographically dispersed, and we have lost touch with many of our more than 150 local community part-ners over the years. Our goal is to use this opportunity to reflect on our own experiences with collaboration, both in terms of building relation-ships and constructing knowledge and action. Wherever possible, we present the words and experiences of our community colleagues, based on external evaluation and process documentation.

the setting

hartford, connecticut

The location of our case studies is the Hartford, Connecticut, area. Hartford is the still-impoverished, gentrifying state capital of 124,000 people, located in one of the wealthiest states in the country. It is typical of other former manufacturing and industrial urban areas of the north-eastern United States. The demography of the city is approximately 50 percent Latino, 40 percent African American and West Indian/Caribbe-an, and 10 percent Euro-American ethnic in origin. There are also small Southeast Asian, Polish, and Bosnian immigrant populations as well as a growing African immigrant community of Somalians, Liberians, and Nigerians. Services (financial, insurance, health, education, and food) are the economic underpinning of the city and the region.



Manufacturing, at one point an important source of livable wages, has been exported to other countries, and that which remains uses the threat of globalization to deflate wages as well as union influence in this sector. The city’s institutions (hospitals and schools) are margin-ally responsive to the needs of urban residents but are pressed by fed-eral legislation and private insurance and pharmaceutical interests to reduce costs and achieve unreasonable treatment outcome goals with limited resources. Similarly schools suffer under federal legislation. The school system has magnetized, in an effort to move toward priva-tization and to blur the established boundaries and fences between the city and the suburbs under the voluntary desegregation and school-im-provement program set into motion by the lawsuit Scheff v. O’Neill. This has left core city schools to struggle under the burden of No Child Left Behind, with insufficient counseling, teaching, and support resources, while economically stressed families stretch to survive in a job-scarce environment.

The history of the city and the area as well as national social welfare, economic, educational, housing, and migration policies have all con-spired to make it very difficult for urban low income and working class families to achieve and maintain economic stability. Resident voices, once expressed through avenues created by community organizing, have been silenced as these general organizing entities have been re-placed by advocacy-oriented nonprofits with specific agendas, such as changing punitive drug policies or environmental justice. In the face of these structural problems, however, Hartford’s communities are rich in historical, social, relational, cultural, and experiential capital displayed in the form of voluntary neighborhood community-based organiza-tions (CBOs), social service, and cultural presentation/production or-ganizations and centers, and activists, commissions, and other advo-cacy bodies working on local issues. In cities like Hartford, there is a significant need for strong well-organized resident groups that have a critical perspective and can mobilize to advocate for their own interests rather than being manipulated by others.

the institute for community research

In 1987, the year of its founding as a community-based research or-ganization, the Institute for Community Research (ICR) established a collaborative research mission: to work with community groups and



other supportive institutions to “use the tools of research to promote justice and equity in a multi-ethnic world.” This mission statement was important on multiple levels. First and foremost, we lived in an urban environment in which poverty is concentrated and neighborhood de-velopment has stagnated. We wanted to challenge the hegemony of tra-ditional research structures by basing a research organization outside the academy with the flexibility to hire community researchers to work in an environment that was self-conscious about reducing hierarchy and bridging political, social, and racial distinctions. Hiring commu-nity researchers and collaborating with community organizations en-abled these partnerships to bring local knowledge, experience, and so-cial and cultural capital to bear upon applied social science projects and development perspectives that reflected and resonated with community perspectives. Principles of equity and balance in power guided ICR to develop procedures and actions to ensure shared research processes, methods, and resources, and to privilege the importance of the work in and with the community over other ends.

PAR has constituted a central focus of the organization’s work in transforming social science for social justice purposes. PAR with youth and community residents is explicitly intended to enable community residents to gain control over and to use the tools of research to en-hance their knowledge base, and use it for their own political and social change ends. In its approach, it responds to an interdisciplinary call to recognize that marginalized and often voiceless communities have critical knowledge and intellectual and cultural capital and that ethical social scientists must engage with them to move from margins to cen-trality in research that defines issues and sets policies affecting their lives (see Fals-Borda 1987; Gaventa 1991, 1993; Park et al. 1993; Reason and Bradbury, 2001; J. Schensul and S. Schensul, 1992; S. Schensul and J. Schensul, 1978).

We relate to this paradigm by describing why we ourselves have cho-sen to do this work. We believe in the transformative power of PAR as one very important approach to building community in an environ-ment fragmented by class, ethnicity, and race by creating possibilities for all partners to analyze critically and address together the structur-al factors that impede equitable development. PAR is emotionally and socially as well as intellectually healthy because it allows us to inte-grate the personal and the political, thus moving us toward personal



as well as social cohesion and synthesis. We believe that mutual learn-ing, based on local and technical knowledge, is possible. We agree with John Gaventa that knowledge is power and that PAR can counteract and resist the hegemony of the established research disciplines and meth-odologies, especially when it is embedded in larger efforts to create alternative voices for social change (1991, 1993). We believe that social scientists, taking the standpoint of people who have been intentionally marginalized from decision-making dialogues, have a responsibility to use their technical tools and other resources to create openings for communities to join existing dialogues or to create new dialogues with leadership grounded in indigenous theory and new local knowledge. Research-based knowledge, which drives policy and intervention, does not belong to the academy only; social scientists have a responsibility to demystify research theory, method, and results (i.e., to democratize research) (Schensul 2002) and make knowledge available to disenfran-chised people who wish to influence policy locally and now, more than ever, globally.

adult par at icr

The history of adult PAR at ICR began in 1988. Our first PAR project, the Rapid Sociodemographic Assessment (RSA) Project, was a three-year cost-sharing partnership among more than eighty organizations, thirteen residential neighborhoods of Hartford, and six regional mu-nicipalities. The RSA engaged people in a critique of the census de-mographic short form and the forced ethnic and racial designators in the 1980 census. Working in partnership with researcher-activists, they built locally meaningful surveys and neighborhood histories. The project established ICR’s reputation as an organization committed to negotiating, sharing, and co-creating rigorous research methods rath-er than dictating them. The process also provided communities with experience about how to use research to address their own develop-ment agendas, modeled ways they could argue with technical research-ers about their methodological and substantive concerns, and set the stage for the two PAR projects that serve as our examples, the Urban Women’s Development Project (1989–92)(Schensul 2002) and the Resident Engagement Project (2002–5).

These projects engaged a form of PAR that involves a group process



in which all participants affected by and struggling with social, politi-cal, or environmental inequities use all the tools of research to identify, learn about, understand, interpret, and act upon multilevel causes and community responses to a social problem. They had much in common, although they took place nearly ten years apart. They both involved mul-tiethnic interdisciplinary teams of facilitators, including anthropolo-gists and social workers, working over a period of three to four years with groups of between ten and twenty-five community residents for approximately ten months on issues that affected them. In each case, using slightly different means, facilitators, most of whom lived in the city or had a long history of experience in the city, developed intimate personal relationships with group members and their families, and played an active role in their neighborhoods. In both cases, intragroup collaboration was affected by language preferences, personal style, educational level, and advocacy experience. We introduced the use of Freirian empowerment theory, principles of cooperative and experien-tial education, and group facilitation techniques in the first project, and theorized and implemented them more deeply in the second. During the first project, we learned together how to reflect upon and engage personal, historical, cultural, and political dynamics into the research process. We experimented together with group activities to select re-search issues, to develop “causal” models—group explanations for social disparities—and to identify structural problems that needed to be better understood and addressed. Facilitators introduced and together we worked on interviewing skills and data collection debriefings. In the second, we introduced new methods based on critical theory, such as juxtaposing personal timelines on co-constructed community time-lines. The use of ecological modeling, group construction of data-col-lection techniques, paired pile sorting, and thematic analysis linked research and group solidarity. Both projects involved balancing and supporting personal development, group cohesion, and activist goals and outcomes. Both projects were successful in developing individual voice, and group understanding and cohesion around a significant so-cioeconomic problem that affected them, their families, and the com-munity. And in both cases, though the achievements at the individual and group levels were significant, for very different reasons, they fell short of hoped-for results in terms of translating research outcomes into action and long-term sustainability. On the following pages, we



describe the projects, compare collaborative processes across projects, raise issues in collaboration, and suggest directions for adult PAR in the future.

collaborating with community residents in par projects: case studies

In this section, we will briefly describe our two case studies and turn to a discussion of steps taken to build collaborative relationships within PAR groups and through PAR activities.

a. the urban women’s development project

The Urban Women’s Development Project (UWDP)(1988–92) part-nered with women from the thirteen Hartford neighborhoods to bridge ethnic and racial, cultural, age, and class differences, and build leader-ship and voice through engagement in women-driven PAR projects. The idea for the project arose when the director of the Hartford Permanent Commission on the Status of Women (HPCSW), a woman of color, suggested that ICR join forces with the commission to fill a significant gap in current information on the status of women, especially women of color, in the city. Together we saw this as an opportunity to build a collective of urban women who could define and collect data represent-ing their own views and who could advocate along with the HPCSW on behalf of other women in the city.

Our organizational partners were gender- and ethnic-based organi-zations dedicated to the same mission, including the Black Women’s Education and Legal Fund, the Hispanic Health Council, and the State Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. This coalition pro-vided women from the community with leadership role models, ave-nues for use of their data, and opportunities for advocacy. The involve-ment of the Permanent Commission made possible a broader vision of statewide dissemination of the UWDP, and national links with larger advocacy movements, especially those reflecting the issues of women of color. With four years of public and private funding, each organi-zation hired one full-time or part-time facilitator. Together we formed a team that recruited, supported, trained, learned from, and promoted the advocacy efforts of a truly diverse group of eighty women recruited from every residential neighborhood of the city. Each year, fifteen to



twenty women met once or twice weekly, forging group identity, situat-ing themselves in history and community, and finding commonality in gender-based experiences.

Women were attracted to the program for different reasons. One woman who had observed the program throughout its four years had very insightful comments about empowerment as a motivation for joining:

There were a bunch of women who I think were attracted to the word

empowerment. Some of those women translated that word in very

specific power terms and I’m specifically thinking of two of three or

four women in the group who were interested in political power on

some level or another—a couple who might be interested in running

for office, even that specific. So, empowerment has that specific

sense to them. A couple who were interested in getting empowered

in terms of being involved in those kinds of organizations or agencies

or committees or commissions that make decisions largely because

they felt that they had been disempowered by not being able to be in

those kinds of organizations, which is true. And then there were a few

of us who, I think see those institutions, whether they’re the political

system or the various agencies thereof, commissions or committees

or boards or whatever, as being so corrupted that they’re not worth

anything any more, and we’re interested in aspects of changing

those institutions and when we think of empowerment we think of

that kind of empowerment which is a social change approach that

some of us have come to over a long period of, you know, reading

and philosophical discussion and all that kind of stuff, and we’re

not interested in personal power. There was some, there were some

interesting tensions between people as a result of that. . . . Tensions

may be giving it too much credit, but it was quite obvious that

there were people who were on different tracks, who had different

agendas.

The process varied each year, depending on the configuration of women in the program and the composition of the staff. During the first year, women created a survey and administered it to a random sample of 250 women residents in Hartford neighborhoods. One of the organizations analyzed the data. The women discussed the results, and several presented results to city and state commissions on the status of



women. Topics during the second through fourth years included vio-lence against women, reasons for a pattern of dropping out of school among Latinas, and neighborhood conditions. Women were exposed to research methods and chose from among surveys, narrative inter-views, and photo documentation. In the second year, women created their own survey on abuse against women, administered it to personal networks, analyzed the results, and became involved in advocacy net-works addressing women’s health issues and domestic violence. This topic was a highly sensitive issue for women in the program, most of whom had experienced or were experiencing abuse. They had to con-front their own situations to reach out to others. Doing so required much group discussion, private counseling, and strong motivation to use training sessions to resolve personal issues. During the third year, they analyzed secondary data sources and interviewed Puerto Rican women who had dropped out of school. The mission of the group then became pregnancy prevention highlighting Puerto Rican young women, and it called for linking with pregnancy prevention programs around the city. A photo-documentation project on neighborhood con-ditions was the focus of the women’s group the fourth year.

b. resident engagement project

The Resident Engagement (RE) Project was initiated nearly a decade after the UWDP as part of a twenty-two-site, ten-year multilevel initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) entitled Making Connections (MC). The primary community goal of MC was to engage residents from the poorest city neighborhoods in activities that would strength-en families and involve them in neighborhood and economic planning and development. The intent of the RE Project was to work directly with neighborhood residents, involve them in resident-driven PAR, and link them with local agencies for advocacy and continued leadership devel-opment. We saw this approach as critical to ensuring residents’ equita-ble access to publicly available secondary databases to be accumulated and used for local decision making (mainly by businesses and nonprof-its) under the Casey initiative. We believed that developing resident re-search capacity was a unique and powerful way of creating leadership and community advocacy opportunities for unheard voices represent-ing unutilized cultural capital in a city where community organizing had been stifled.



The AECF agreed to make a five-year commitment to ICR to build PAR coalitions that would produce strong neighborhood voices to take leadership roles in neighborhood and broader MC development ef-forts. Although we foresaw risks involved in this approach, including the potential for local interests to subvert the PAR mission with their own agendas, we believed that the Casey Foundation’s stated commit-ment to long-term investment with us and the city would allow us the time to enable PAR groups to fulfill their mission as strong research-based, informed neighborhood advocates.

Over a two-year period, facilitators worked with four PAR groups, two in the northern area of the city (North End), which was mainly African American, and two in the south-central area (South End), which was mainly Puerto Rican. With careful facilitation, residents developed and used data collection instruments (pile sorts, time lines, narratives, interviews, surveys, and photographic documentation), collected data, analyzed it, presented to the public, and designed action strategies. Each year, the groups met on a regular basis to discover and discuss common concerns and issues in their neighborhoods and to present the results of their work. The first South End group used focus groups with parents and pile sorting to explore parents’ ideas about the effects of school resources and how parental involvement affected student performance. The second South End group conducted a survey of par-ents of school-aged children to determine the type of trainings people desired, mapped key institutions that offer programs and trainings in the neighborhood, and interviewed key informants to explore how the quality and quantity of trainings available in Spanish affected the eco-nomic conditions of community residents. The first North End group examined how home ownership and community involvement affected neighborhood conditions. The group used participant observation, mapping, photo documentation, interviewing, and secondary data analysis from the city assessor’s files to understand this issue. The sec-ond North End group employed individual-level interviews and a survey to explore how family involvement affected student performance. They built action into the data collection phase of their research by preparing a resource guide for parents and by holding group meetings for parents to discuss school issues, distribute resource guides, and simultaneous-ly conduct participant observation.



collaborative par Methodology

In these projects we addressed four issues related to collaboration: training ourselves and our teams as PAR facilitators; building and maintaining strong collaborative relationships among PAR members, including facilitators; creating and conducting research methods that enhanced and reinforced group solidarity; and moving toward collab-orative action.

a. developing collaborative instructional capacity among par facilitators

PAR involves collaboration across class, ethnic, and other boundaries and calls for personal and historical self-reflection and open discussion of class and other differences, their meaning for interaction, and their implications for building and sustaining trust. Critical collaboration re-quires formally trained research facilitators who have deep knowledge of social science research methods, who recognize that there are multi-ple knowledges and “ways of knowing,” or epistemologies (Aikenhead 1997; Brown 1992), and ways of learning (intelligences) (Gardner 1983), and are dedicated to using and inventing research methods and tools to facilitate the emergence of indigenous knowledge (Birmingham 2003; Butt 2006; Carper 2007; Diawara 2000; Howells 2002).

Facilitators must be willing to partner by taking the standpoint of and standing with their PAR community partners to work toward a critical-ly conscious purpose (Duncan-Andrade 2007). They are called upon to come to terms with the idea that their identities (class, race or ethnicity, education, perspectives) and the methods they suggest are in constant dialogue with their community partners and can be challenged by them-selves or their partners at any moment. They come to view themselves as part of and being committed to the communities with which they are working (whether they are members of the community or have earned membership as outsiders through active participation in it). Performing these ethnographically and ethically rooted commitments build trust among facilitators and between facilitators and PAR groups. Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade (2007) refers to this as “duty”—a form of unques-tioned ethical obligation to do whatever is necessary to solve the prob-lem—to live the work. This form of collaboration between facilitators and community residents involves confronting the contradictions stem-ming from obvious power imbalances (Minkler et al. 2002) through



continuous self/other reflection and openness to criticism and feedback, especially on the part of the facilitators, whose roles as insider/outsid-ers involve the complex mix of facilitated instruction, joint learning, and collaboration in change efforts (Hall 2005; Wallerstein 1999).

In PAR, research facilitators should have the methodological skills, relational abilities, and the capacity to model desired learning behav-iors. Not all facilitators are researchers with advanced training, nor are they necessarily familiar with the communities in which they are work-ing. Thus facilitators, as much as resident PAR groups, need training in self-reflection, facilitation skills, research methods, and action plan-ning. PAR facilitators will vary in their mastery of these skills, and thus benefit from a team approach to instruction.

Moving toward this type of reflexive cooperative-learning instruc-tional model was a formidable challenge in our PAR work, requiring that facilitators develop and use a theoretical approach to guided group instruction, instructional skills, knowledge of the community, relation-ships with the PAR groups, and familiarity with ethnographic research methods and action strategies. In the UWDP, our facilitator team of trained female anthropologists from the United States and Egypt, a psychologist, social workers, and community activists developed cur-riculum together, striving for a balance of individual, small group, and whole group exercises and activities. We team-taught sessions, which allowed didactic facilitators and invited presenters to work together with group facilitators. Resident engagement facilitators as well as an-thropologists and social workers shared their methodological knowl-edge and group-work skills. They received formal training in group fa-cilitation skills useful in the co-construction of new knowledge, using a framework that included modeling, scaffolding knowledge, explica-tion (explanation) and reflection on knowledge gained, and the learn-ing process (Nastasi and DeZolt 1994; Schensul 1998). These facilita-tion techniques were important to engaging groups through activities that drew upon and validated the knowledge and experience that resi-dents brought and ensured participant inclusion. They were also useful in resolving idea, emotion, and personality conflicts. Facilitators had to undergo the same process of self-situation and reflection as partici-pants and had to draw on their knowledge of the neighborhoods and history or find others who could.

In both programs, the facilitator team created the core training cur-riculum together, following a standard protocol that included the fol-



lowing core elements: self-representation, history and identity, team- building exercises, discussions about interethnic conflict and cooper-ation in the city, group issue identification, research modeling, intro-duction to and selection of research methods, field training, supervised implementation, group discussion, analysis, presentation, and action planning. Creating the curriculum involved a process of informational exchange and self-instruction, providing a means of sharing and in-tegrating research tools, local knowledge, organizing strategies, and interactive exercises. Joint curriculum development provided facilita-tors with an equal playing field in which everyone learned together. The UWDP curriculum placed more emphasis on gender and lived experience. The RE curriculum, which was centered on neighborhood strengthening, placed new emphasis on history and lived experience, creating exercises that linked lived experience, information about the status of the local communities, and larger historical economic and socio-political trends in migration, immigration, and neighborhood transformations.

b. collaborative research methods

PAR is always characterized by collective engagement in ethnograph-ic research methods. Methods texts including our own (Schensul and LeCompte 1999) describe relationships with communities and re-search ethics, but, with some recent exceptions on group ethnography, they do not describe how these methods can be made participatory. Collaboration in the social construction of knowledge and its appli-cation to change requires methodological, social, and cognitive pro-cesses including familiarity and flexibility with ethnographic research methods, joint problem solving, identification and negotiation of di-vergent perspectives, and persistence in generating joint ideas, norms, and actions (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Nastasi and DeZolt 1994; Rogoff 2003; Vygotsky 1978). PAR facilitators should be dedicated to using and inventing research methods and tools to facilitate the emer-gence of indigenous knowledge (Birmingham 2003; Butt 2006; Carper 2007; Diawara 2000; Howells 2002; Yorks 2005). Cooperative educa-tion guidelines maximize individual, small group, and whole group exchanges and the centralized role of peer education in group learning. Openness to methodological innovation stemming from group sug-gestions or ideas is critical to the PAR process.



Ethnographic methods that encompass strategies drawn from crit-ical theory are central to the PAR endeavor. UWDP PAR groups were exposed to gender-based critique through feminist presenters, includ-ing Permanent Commission directors, followed by a power analysis in which they defined power together and situated themselves along with others in a power grid. RE PAR groups constructed and shared personal narratives and inserted them into a jointly constructed historical time-line. This process offered residents and facilitators an opportunity to reflect on meaningful junctures and experiences in their own lives, and co-construct a joint history of the group’s experience. Missing com-ponents of local, national, and international history (civil rights and migration) were filled in by informed facilitators or invited speakers. Narratives of lived experience also provided a basis for identifying im-portant issues to be addressed.

Ecocritical modeling is a useful research-based technique for identi-fying social entities at the macro, exo, meso, and micro levels that affect individuals and groups, the connections among them, and their manner of exerting power, using a concentric circle diagram (Bronfenbrenner 1979, 1989; Trickett 1997; Trickett and Ryerson Espino 2004). Modeling introduces important ideas related to problem and power analysis, data collection, and action. It illustrates to the group the fact that so-cial problems are structurally as well as individually situated, and are often complex, multilayered, and multilevel. The power analysis used in the UWDP program evolved in the RE PAR groups into the use of a jointly constructed ecological model that situated power and resistance in each “level” of the model. Group discussion helped RE PAR groups use their own knowledge base to identify cultural, social, and political assets, allies, risks, and sources of power both positive and negative in each concentric ring in the model.

Both groups used a community organizing approach for identifying issues by dividing into small groups, each of which came to agreement on a topic by listing and discussing topics using a series of guiding questions. After arriving at agreement, they presented their arguments to the entire group, and the decision was made either by consensus or voting. The issue then became the “dependent variable domain” in a research action model (Schensul and LeCompte 1999). Obtaining con-sensus on an issue without alienating and losing the participation of PAR members was tricky and required considerable facilitation skills.



Facilitators used two main strategies to resolve differences, enabling the group to understand that everyone was affected by the issue that only some thought was important, and showing how, in the develop-ment of a research model, an issue that was not chosen could be in-cluded in the model as an “independent” or “causal” variable.

Collaborative research and action modeling was critical to the PAR process. Creating research models together requires coming to consen-sus on the problem that the group will tackle and sharing ideas about the causes and solutions to the problem. This form of social negotiation requires listening, scaffolding, and synthesizing skills, each of which is needed in any collaborative effort. Drawing from Rossi’s description of theoretical and operational modeling and our own work we introduced a group process of horizontal modeling to UWDP women in which they worked in small or large groups to clarify the “dependent vari-able domain” and identified “causal” factors or predictors and the links between independent and dependent domains (Rossi 2003; Schensul and LeCompte 1999, bk. 2, chap. 3). This negotiated model constituted each group’s indigenous theory of causality and change, which could be checked with others. The facilitation process involved interrogating the components of the domains and reflecting on personal experience in defining domains and discussing links among them (Schensul and LeCompte 1999; Sydlo and Schensul 2000).

The modeling process begun in the UWDP PAR groups became more elaborate in the RE PAR process. For example, after deconstructing pre-dictor domains, PAR members, through dialogue, generated explana-tory hypotheses for the links among domains. Considering which do-mains they might be able to change, and in what ways focused attention on identifying key informants who could be allies in the change pro-cess, RE PAR groups also operationalized domains (vertical modeling) by their meaning, brainstorming their content and considering relation-ships among content subdomains. These exercises produced heated discussion because the models represented their own emotional-laden understandings of the factors that residents believed were responsible for their most serious problems. In describing the process of coming to consensus on an issue to research, one RE participant explained:

Of all of the problems we presented we needed to choose one. After

each person’s presentation based on exploratory research, we realized

that, although we had selected different issues, we were all talking



about the same thing: how these issues impacted our economic

condition. We also realized that there were other things that impacted

our economic condition such as education, the ability to speak

English, discrimination and services and trainings offered in Spanish.

As you can see in our model, our dependent variable is “Economic

Conditions” and our independent variables are: 1) Education, 2)

Language, 3) Discrimination, 4) Trainings offered in Spanish.

Ethnographic data-collection tools call for face-to-face engagement with community members. Direct involvement in the lives of other com-munity members produces new information that contributes to the group’s knowledge base. Further, conversations, surveys, pile sorts, historical narratives, and photo selection may produce surprising, new, discrepant, or disconfirming information that goes beyond personal ex-perience (opinion) and must be addressed. Discussion of these differ-ences broadens and deepens group perspectives and helps PAR groups to understand the complexity of their communities and thus avoid in-advertent stereotyping. Public presentation of results to an audience that includes allies and study participants, using a variety of audiovisual means (performance, slide series, charts and graphs, and personal tes-timony) reinforces group membership and resolve to take action steps.

Most ethnographic methods are readily transformed into activities that reinforce group collaboration with careful advance consideration of group dynamics and group learning and production goals. Both PAR groups used an array of ethnographic tools. Groups learned about meth-ods through presentation and practice through role play or through learning stations at which facilitator resident teams illustrated the uses of observation, interviewing, survey, photographic, pile sorting, map-ping, visual storytelling, and other methods (Berg and Schensul 2004; Bernard 1995; Castleden, Garvin, and First Nation 2008; Rowley et al. 2004; Schensul and LeCompte 1999). Groups then chose one or more methods depending on the issue to be addressed, applied and practiced them with feedback, and implemented them in the community. As one second-year UWDP participant told our evaluator:

Developing the questionnaire was . . . something that we enjoyed

because it, it gave us the opportunity to ask the questions that we

thought were appropriate because most of the women in the project

went through some kind of abusive relationship or struggle in their



relationships. So, that was good because we, you know, put in the

interview according to what we experienced. And it did work. Because

basically that’s what happened when we did the interviews. . . . The

questions, yeah, they went well, and, it happened, the results was

what we expected it to be. All the abuses and all the things that we went

through, the majority of the women went through in the interviews.

A requirement in both programs was face-to-face interviewing to hone communication skills, learn divergent viewpoints, build allies, and expand knowledge of city political structures and decision mak-ing. In both groups, the research process required “studying up” and “studying down,” collecting and analyzing information, and collecting and organizing allies, all at the same time. Role play to embody and improve data collection techniques was an important way to improve the quality of the data, and it also served to create opportunities for ex-changes among PAR group members.

Engaging residents directly in the process of data analysis is perhaps the most difficult as well as the most rewarding aspect of the PAR pro-cess. One primary challenge is the amount of time required to enter or transcribe, read, and summarize data; a second is discomfort stemming from lack of familiarity of PAR group members with technical data entry and analysis procedures. These potential barriers required that facilitators invent creative shortcuts. Level of involvement in analysis varied across the two projects and even across groups. For example, in the first year of the UWDP, the focus of the project on collecting data on a large sample of women in the city produced too much data for a fun-damentally volunteer group. Women learned the data-entry process and interpreted results but did not have time to learn how to analyze this large amount of survey data. The group working on violence against women shared the responsibility of entering survey data and analyzing it with help from facilitators.

RE PAR groups collected more varied qualitative data and fewer surveys. Working in pairs or groups to color code transcribed inter-views and discern patterns of agreement and disagreement, creating and naming clusters that reveal cognitive maps showing associations among items in a domain, or learning how to generate, read, and inter-pret patterns in survey results, resident research-activists brought in-sight to the analysis process.

Involvement in both data collection and analysis was very important



in preparing PAR groups to discuss and present the results. The abil-ity to present data to an invited public audience, and then to smaller public groups on request, enabled them to become more efficacious as individuals and as members of advocacy groups. UWDP PAR groups presented data using more traditional means—charts, handouts, and statements prepared by groups after reviewing the results of their data. A decade later, digital storytelling—dramatic interpretations along with projected visual results of analysis—improved impact and au-dience reception. Several RE groups found ways of performing both their own narratives and the results of their research, both of which called for introspection and collaborative work. From observational field notes:

During one session participants created a dramatic improvisation to

describe their situation. In the scenario three community residents

meet each other in the park. After introducing themselves, they

remark on what a beautiful day it is. One woman remarks on how the

beautiful day reminds her of home. In this presentation, home for

these three women is Ecuador, Mexico and Puerto Rico. They discuss

what they miss about their homelands, what motivated them to come

to the United States, how long they have been here and what they

were hoping to find when they got here. They also realize that despite

their different backgrounds, they have several things in common.

They have difficulty getting jobs or accessing job trainings due to

language barriers. Although all three came to the U.S. to improve their

economic conditions, each has found a harsh reality. Determined to

unite despite ethnic differences they feel it is more important to stand

together to make change rather than to stand apart.

Rigor is an issue in PAR. Rigor in PAR may be defined in relation to learning and desired outcomes. In learning, achieving rigor calls for making sure that the research design and data collection procedures selected by PAR groups are implemented with care. Rigor in relation to outcomes is linked to audience expectation. Both are important. Rigor in our projects was framed by the experience of facilitators, the nature of the problem to be addressed, and the audience for the research. In the first year of the UWDP, for example, the group’s goal was to pro-duce survey data on women in the city that would withstand the scru-tiny of policy analysts. Thus, attention to systematic sampling proto-



cols and survey administration were important to the outcome. In later years, research rigor was balanced with skills development and group process. For example, in the second year, women wanted to use data collected via a survey they created on violence against women to advo-cate on behalf of abused women. Critical to their ability to obtain infor-mation for testimony was the completion of all survey responses since these data provided testimony for the UWDP PAR members as they advocated with others against violence against women. The generaliz-ability of the sample was less important to this group. For RE groups, careful implementation techniques coupled with triangulation of data produced both social validity and interpretational rigor that was highly convincing to audiences.

c. building collaborative relationships

PAR collaboration requires relational effectiveness. Gülcin Sengir and colleagues identify four components of relational effectiveness that are useful guides: communication as measured by the frequency and im-portance of communication among partners; joint work as measured by the frequency and importance of joint activities; quality of interac-tion measured by trust, cooperation, and conflict or conflict resolu-tion; and connectivity of social structure assessed in terms of clarity of structure and roles (Sengir et al. 2004). Their work shows that relation-al effectiveness is “an aggregated outcome of these four components” along with their interaction effects and changes over time.

In PAR groups, in addition to “work-related communication” the importance of continuous and personal involvement of facilitators and PAR group members in each others’ lives and communities cannot be underestimated. This form of involvement calls for personal intimacy and a willingness to blur the lines between researcher/facilitator and participant/community researcher, to blend the personal and the politi-cal (Cahill 2007). Duncan-Andrade considers this form of engagement, which is inherent in all real ethnography, as duty (2007). Lived experi-ence in PAR communities contributes to trust and mutual respect, both critical in reinforcing group interaction, and builds on cultural capital and understood political possibilities and barriers to action. In addi-tion to constant re-equilibration of power and resources, conflict reso-lution depends on intimate understanding of root causes of conflict in communities and among PAR members (usually stemming from im-



mediate, historical, political, or community divisions). These process-es in PAR articulate the intersecting and mutually reinforcing roles of facilitators and PAR members and serve to remove the boundaries es-tablished by class, ethnic or racial differences, and privilege, especially when there is shared movement toward an overarching common goal.

Fundamental to PAR projects were three types of relationships: with-in the staff and facilitator group, between facilitators and PAR mem-bers, and among the participants themselves.

Relationships among facilitators To be effective, PAR requires close collab-orations among facilitators. In the UWDP, facilitators were all women professionals with degrees ranging from BA to PhD. Our disciplines in-cluded women’s studies, anthropology, nutritional science, psychology, economic development, social work, and business. Our ethnic or racial identities were Puerto Rican, African American, West Indian, Egyptian, Euro-American, and Jewish. All of us were working in the local com-munity and had strong ties with ethnic and neighborhood communi-ties as well as other community-oriented professionals. A passionate commitment to gender and development and to the idea of research as empowerment united us. Operationalizing this commitment required us to confront differences in our priorities. For example, social work-ers highlighted group work and individual development and problem solving in their work with women. Women’s studies representatives highlighted leadership development, and anthropologists and psy-chologists were more concerned with research innovations and the research process. These differences in priorities resulted in many de-bates about how to balance and integrate the three agendas into a PAR program. Although the PAR process requires a cooperative learning ap-proach with facilitated instruction, in both groups facilitators had dif-ferent instructional styles, varying in their ability to engage the groups. One important way of resolving differences was debriefing at length by discussing group process, instructional content, participants’ personal situations in relation to the group, and our own reactions to the group and each other. With limited weekly meeting time in both programs, balancing these themes was a weekly challenge.

Relationships between Facilitators and PAR Group Members Relationships between facilitators and PAR group members called for blurring the



boundaries between facilitation and learning. While this can happen in any group, smaller size increased relational intimacy. The UWDP PAR groups were large, twenty or more, making it challenging to develop close relationships with every PAR member. As facilitators, we were ea-ger to develop relationships with UWDP groups. We tended to gravitate toward those women with whom we felt comfortable. For example, those of us who spoke Spanish and who had been working in the Puerto Rican community shared more of our lives with women whose first language preference was Spanish. However, we tried to avoid the appearance that facilitators favored one group over another by dividing our time among groups and sharing leadership in facilitation sessions. Some women were outspoken, commanding attention, while others were more re-served. Most of us developed deep personal relationships with at least one or two women and their families that endured over time.

On a number of occasions, crises and trauma within families or in the community interrupted the lives of some group members and af-fected the group. When these events occurred, everyone was affected, group work stopped, and facilitators spent time discussing and help-ing to make sense of these situations. These discussions built strong bonds in all UWDP PAR groups, and women were anxious for more such times, devoted to their emotional concerns. One second-year UWDP participant commented:

We didn’t really have a lot of opportunity to share like personal things,

like a group therapy thing for the women. Though we did need

it, because a lot of the women were going through a lot of difficult

issues. We needed it . . . but we did have some. And I think if we had

more, that would be helpful—more opportunities to share with each

other.

Even though bilingual community psychologists were available to provide counseling sessions for each PAR group member, and some took advantage of it, counseling sessions did not always satisfy wom-en’s desire to share experiences in a group setting.

The RE PAR groups were smaller (ten to twelve people), which pro-vided more time and opportunity for development of personal relation-ships between facilitators and groups, during and between sessions. Facilitators and resident researchers got to know each other well, at-



tended each others’ family events, and visited each others’ homes. The close relationships between facilitators and group members made it possible to address personal or community crises. Facilitators also were committed to supporting residents through the difficulties they faced with illnesses, job loss, and poverty.

Because personal relationships between facilitators and group members were important in attributing meaning to the work, staffing changes were disruptive to neighborhood groups. It was inevitable that groups that had worked with one facilitator were not as connected to others who joined later, with the result that some disengaged and be-came less involved in the work. Additionally, gender played a more sig-nificant role in the South End, where the lead facilitator, a Latina with a background in marriage and family counseling had developed strong and empathic connections to the participants, some of whom felt aban-doned when she left. They had less affinity for her male Latino replace-ment, who focused on community organizing.

Facilitators continually emphasized and acted upon the fundamen-tal principle that the research was the residents’ work that they devel-oped, owned, and had responsibility for using, unlike other projects over which they had no control, and the results of which they never obtained. This emphasis was especially important in the first African American group that consisted of activists who were quite suspicious of research and its uses. The male African American anthropologist (co-author Ken Williamson) who facilitated this group employed a patient approach that acknowledged the group’s historical distrust of research and allowed its members to develop trust in him and the research pro-cess slowly and through direct participation in and ownership of it.

Intragroup Collaboration Intragroup dynamics in both programs were complicated by education, language, ethnic or racial identity, person-al need, and advocacy stance of participants, but some women viewed this as one of the positive aspects of the program. A first-year partici-pant commented:

“I loved this [diversity]. . . . It was wonderful.” Tensions arose but

we “worked through them together,” [and] became a “tight knit

group” especially those who stayed all the way through. Because

of this diversity, many issues arose when we were trying to define



questions for investigation. I think this was “important.” Women’s

issues are diverse. It is important to reflect this. [The] best part was

this interaction with other women . . . . “feisty women.”

In the UWDP, women in the first year constituted a tightly knit group and saw themselves as advocates, working for the benefit of other women in the city. They were very ready to support a member of the group who had fallen behind in meeting her target survey numbers. In the second year, the group was divided into those in favor of the topic of violence against women, led by a well-known and very outspoken Latina advocate, and those who were in disagreement but not unified in selecting another topic. Eventually this conflict was resolved when fa-cilitators helped the group recognize that nearly every member had ex-perienced some form of abuse, and worked separately with those who were in abusive relationships at the time to help them confront their situations outside of the group setting and depersonalize their work on the issue.

Language also impeded intragroup communication. In the UWDP, especially in the second year, newer arrivals who were most comfort-able in Spanish could not communicate with other PAR group mem-bers without translation. Facilitators and other PAR group members were bilingual, and small group work made it possible for the several Spanish speakers to work on issues in Spanish, but it was difficult to conduct a completely bilingual program. Nevertheless, Spanish speak-ers remained in the second-year PAR group and were able to commu-nicate the results of their work to others in Spanish, promoting PAR activities in more isolated sectors of the Latino community. RE Latino groups conducted their work in English and Spanish, depending on the comfort level of the participants with the topic being discussed—though primarily in Spanish. This enhanced trust between group members and facilitators but called for patience and trust on the part of English-speaking facilitators who could not participate and relin-quished control over groups when only Spanish was spoken.

RE PAR groups were generally cohesive and demonstrated a great willingness to work within and across city and ethnic lines. They dif-fered within group mainly in terms of advocacy experience, education, employment experience, length of time in the city and country, and lan-guage capacity. They differed across group by ethnic identification, lan-guage, recency of arrival, and action research priorities. Relationships



between groups were affected by language use (Spanish dominant in the south part of the city and English in the north end) and by residents’ level of experience in promoting their own views in a public setting.

Facilitators worked with their groups to create a common meeting agenda. In general, both facilitators as well as the project director went to meetings of all groups, and in the process modeled intergroup com-munication and cooperation. Latinos visited African American organi-zations and met through Spanish/English and English/Spanish trans-lation. When meeting together, groups were able to share stereotypes and misunderstandings about their respective areas of the city; for ex-ample, that the North End was more organized than the South End and that the Latino mayor favored the Latino South End with more public support, such as Christmas lights provided at the neighborhood level only on the main South End thoroughfare. The research helped them recognize that they shared common concerns about their neighbor-hoods, economic development, and the education of city children. The logistical and emotional dimensions of bringing together groups with different histories, fears, and concerns to share data, perspectives, and a common advocacy strategy were challenging but rewarding as long-standing prejudices across groups were overcome.

d. collaborative action, context, and power

We can think of PAR as transforming individual and group conscious-ness and as organizing for transformational change. Judy Burgess and others refer to these as first-, second-, and third-person research (Burgess 2006; Heen 2005; Reason and Bradbury 2001). Many PAR re-searchers including Michelle Fine, Paulo Freire, Patricia Maguire and others find that the first two levels are sufficient to support resistance and to negotiate and confront power (Fine and Torre 2006; Freire 2005; Gatenby and Humphries 2000; Harding 2006). Some noted that it was not possible to move toward broader action without coming to terms with their own issues first. A UWDP participant, when asked about the importance of community activism, told us:

You gotta learn about yourself more, what you can do to improve

yourself, and to come up with solutions for your, you know, your

situation that you’re in. And then, then you can have an open mind to

learn about the system, and how the system operates.



PAR groups along with their allies made modest inroads in initiat-ing social change efforts, and some moved to leadership positions. The UWDP was based in a politically dedicated, community research orga-nization committed to long-term social change through resource and power sharing and action research. It received support and endorse-ment from women’s advocacy organizations, and it was widely popular with a diverse group of community women, many of whom achieved personal and political rewards through their participation. During its lifetime, it offered eighty women the experience of crossing sociogeo-graphic boundaries, finding common ground, expressing common frustrations, creating collective knowledge, sharing their experiences and findings with different publics, and entering into the political are-na of policy making and advocacy. Some women who began as com-mitted activists expressed disappointment with the collective organiz-ing and mobilization capacity of the program. For others who were not yet prepared to become independent activists, the program provided the tools to express their views and to critique, and it encouraged many women who had reservations about speaking English to do so in public settings. As a first-year UWDP participant said:

The reason I got involved is I saw myself going through a lot of

struggles in my relationship with my marriage, so I got interested in

learning more about the issues of women, how, for my own benefit,

too. I said this program is probably going to benefit, is going to be a

start for me, to learn more, to get involved, to empower myself. And

that’s how I decided to, and I knew it was going to be a good program

because they offered credits, you know, from the community college.

So, I knew it was going to be a good program.

The program enabled some women to gain upward mobility in their work, their education, and their political aspirations (several have run for office). And it provided a model for agencies with different mis-sions, structures, members, and concerns to overcome their differenc-es and work together toward a common research and action goal.

The UWDP experience reframed our thinking about resident PAR activist readiness, and we identified and recruited known activists in the RE project by working with CBOs, block clubs, and statewide eth-nically and racially based advocacy organizations, and through key in-formants and public community events including community health



fairs, community events, and block club meetings. With identities as advocates already established, group members could assist each other in strengthening their resolve and could support growth in those less advanced in their ability to advocate. A number of PAR activists felt that undergoing the research process resulted in greater understanding of their own history and attachment to their neighborhoods. As one RE participant put it:

We introduced each other, we got to know each other, we said where

we come from, where we are from, we shared little stories from each

one of our lives. That was what I liked the most because we are from

different countries and I liked getting to know other people’s tradition

and to come to understand our shared experiences in coming here

and in our current situations.

Many experienced a sense of empowerment and agency in using their knowledge of research to question the basis of the data and re-ports that people introduced to justify changes in their neighborhoods. Residents gained skills, and facilitators both supported them and en-couraged them to support each others’ group efforts as well as to devel-op cross-city and cross-ethnic alliances. A number of resident research activists continued their work after the training period and generated small-scale action projects based on their research. One group devel-oped a small grant program to support development of projects based on their research. It allowed community parents to organize a school store that engaged parents and provided an experiential learning envi-ronment for students as well as a Spanish-language culinary arts pro-gram. Other groups created a cross-city resident newsletter, resource packets for parents of school children, and advocacy efforts to develop a comprehensive community school learning center.

PAR groups in each of the programs encountered similar structur-al problems that plagued efforts to accomplish real transformational change. In the case of the UWDP, the program came into existence at a time when gender-based advocacy was shifting from widespread po-litical mobilization around women’s issues to institutionalization in the academy. Recognizing that the national women’s movement had not taken into consideration the voices of women of color, and that the academy was unlikely to address this issue, Washington-based national advocacy organizations were enthusiastic about what they perceived to



be a community-based approach to joining the voices of white middle-class women with those of low-income women of color. This position was endorsed by state and city Commissions on the Status of Women, both of which were headed and staffed by women of color. Declines in the national women’s movement were matched with related declines in the activity of local nonprofit organizations to support gender-based ad-vocacy. Despite the best efforts of the staff and partner organizations, the UWDP was only partially successful in meeting the challenge of bringing to fruition activism stemming from PAR activities. Women in the program felt empowered to speak both individually and as a group, but there were not enough opportunities for them to express their voice, so the social transformational ability of the UWDP model was only par-tially realized. Nevertheless, this model of collaborative development through PAR—if integrated into a larger gender-based and ethnically based state or national movement—has considerable power to bring about long-term changes in the health and welfare of urban women.

A significant challenge to RE PAR stemmed from the contradiction between the ICR PAR approach, which was based on empowerment through independent issue identification and research development, and the MC initiative, which planned to evaluate project outcomes in six main areas. The MC initiative wanted residents whose work was aligned with national priorities, while PAR residents wanted to work on and speak about their own concerns. This unresolved difference be-tween ICR’s RE PAR approach and the MC working groups undermined the newly evolving critical voice of residents. Residents who joined MC groups were not ready to counter preexisting agendas with their own perspectives and were actively discouraged from doing so. This con-flict undermined the emergence of real resident leadership, led to to-ken resident membership on MC committees, and interfered with col-laboration among the residents, ICR PAR facilitators, and the rest of the initiative. In this case, the absence of strong local, state, and na-tional movements linked to their interests impeded the ability of fledg-ling activist groups to gain the support they needed to make significant changes through PAR in their own communities. To experience success in transforming economic, political, and social issues required more time to work with these groups and the ability to form and sustain a cross-city PAR alliance to provide more significant support to resident voices in mainstream decision-making arenas.



Discussion

These case studies outline a specific collaborative approach to conduct-ing PAR with adults in community settings based on the use of social science research methods to support the development of individual-level critical consciousness, group identity and solidarity, collective learning, and community analysis and social action. At its best, PAR engages people who have been disenfranchised or silenced in defining issues from their own lived experience and perspective, using group ethnographic research methods to examine and contextualize the prob-lem and its multiple causes and effects, and collectively taking action. Through the learning and reflection process that characterizes PAR, in-dividuals develop the critical consciousness that enables them to resist rather than to internalize oppression and to bridge racial, ethnic, and other social boundaries, linking their lived experience to larger forces. We believe that participatory action research offers one of the strongest approaches to inquiry intended to move groups of people “from the margins to the center” in seeking solutions to redress historical inequi-ties and injustices.

We can think of PAR as representing first-person (personal reflec-tion and development), second-person (group consciousness and mu-tual support), and third-person research (organizing for action on be-half of others) (Burgess 2006; Heen 2005; Reason and Bradbury 2001). Our experience over the years, and reflected in these two projects, has shown us that our PAR model can be very successful in fostering first and second person research and in building the social and conceptual infrastructure for significant collective social action. Making the transi-tion to third person research and structural transformations, however, is very challenging. Why?

We explain the difficulties as stemming from several structural prob-lems. First, project-based PAR is often limited and constrained by fund-ing, staff resources or student schedules, and advocacy opportunities created by other organizations or alliances. The process of moving from the margins to the mainstream in terms of voice is a long one, especial-ly for those who do not initially view themselves as advocates. Funders, facilitators, and communities need to recognize that PAR projects need time, resources, and continuity to develop authentic activist voice and strong alliances.

Second, advocacy infrastructure can be lacking. Both programs have



shown that there are limitations to collaboration with sympathetic ac-tivist organizations. All PAR efforts are assisted by external organiza-tions, agencies, policy makers, and media representatives who are will-ing to assume their mission and stand ready to support them (Maton 2000). As Gaventa has noted, collaboration with organizations com-mitted to supporting the work, development, and proposed actions of community research activists and to engaging in honest and open dia-logue and negotiation can help to sustain and expand small-scale lo-cal changes into more systemic processes and effects, especially when linked to larger local, national, or international movements (Gaventa 1991, 1993).

Like community groups and researchers, however, organizational partners have their own agency missions, goals, objectives, obliga-tions, limitations, and funding sources, which may, intentionally or otherwise, subvert, undermine, or co-opt the newly emergent positions of community groups. The UWDP organizations that formed an advo-cacy alliance, and that had advocacy or action capacity themselves, were weakened in the contemporary urban climate, and several shifted their priorities during the life of the program. The RE PAR effort showed that other organizations that could have engaged the work of PAR groups had policy or advocacy agendas whose timelines or topical issues were not synchronized with the interests of PAR groups.

Third, our commitment to making sure that PAR groups owned all aspects of the research called for their own selection of the issue they wanted to tackle. This was important for building group allegiance and loyalty. Further, for us it symbolized a deeply rooted desire to reverse elitist power structures in science and to address genuinely felt con-cerns across neighborhoods and in the urban environment. Most PAR groups felt passionate about the issues they selected. More problem-atic, however, was the fact that each group chose a different specific issue. These choices, though important at the PAR group level, made it difficult to link efforts across neighborhoods or across program years, thus reducing options for bringing about short-term transformational change. The short-term challenges we faced in connecting groups and individuals to external advocacy or social change organizations with similar interests resulted in large part because of our own loyalty to PAR ownership of the issue selection process. Linking PAR work to larger social movements (some current examples are immigration policy and



prison reform) or having time to build wider alliances would have gen-erated broader collaboration for social transformation. But at the same time it would have precluded the formation of independent critique stemming from each group’s social analysis and research efforts.

Constraints in staffing and staffing retention affect the quality of partnerships both with organizations and PAR community groups. Facilitators may not have the experience to model advocacy nor suffi-cient political power and social capital to make a difference in advo-cacy settings. Committed community workers with research skills are difficult to identify. Minority researchers with graduate degrees remain few in number, and many African American, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian researchers prefer the status and prestige of larg-er institutions or other settings. The community work required, and the constant pressure of training, meetings, output, and evaluation by funders can produce a high burnout rate. Building trust is a continuous process, and researchers face challenges to their identity, which can be painful. Insider/outsiders also have to be open and expose themselves, their histories, and stories if they are asking others to critically reflect upon sometimes painful individual and familial histories. Research fa-cilitators have to believe in the legitimacy of local knowledge, even as they introduce new knowledge that may change, alter, or expand exist-ing knowledge, and they must do so in ways that build upon continual co-construction rather than replacement with dominant knowledge systems or frames of reference. Insider/outsiders are expected to be available to participants who have multiple needs—many beyond the ability of insider/outsiders to respond to—on an almost continual ba-sis. In attempting to establish boundaries, they may at times become less engaged than is ideal for effective partnership development. These are limitations to collaboration and to achieving both short-term and long-term outcomes.

The case studies offer some important lessons for building collab-orative PAR projects with marginalized communities in local and na-tional systems: PAR requires good facilitation to ensure collaborative relationships and methodology. To be effective, PAR requires constant self and group reflection on process, methodology, context, and de-sired outcomes. PAR requires privileging local knowledge while find-ing ways of integrating local and scientific tools to co-construct new knowledge and social critique in a participatory process. Strong inter-



sectoral relationships are helpful in creating social capital that can ac-cess resources, build alliances, and forge change. To accomplish short-term transformational goals, PAR efforts should be linked to activist networks from the outset. And to accomplish long-term transforma-tional goals, PAR efforts should be devoted to building strong commu-nity-resident alliances that can move “from the ground up” to engage with local political and policy change efforts, and to social movements of their choice (Dobson 2001).

We live in a time when civil liberties that we take for granted are be-ing challenged and opportunities for voice and participation continue to be eroded. Dissent is questioned as unpatriotic, and more central-ized control of media and other channels of communication define “truth” rather than offering opportunities for critique. Anthropological approaches can counter these trends by rendering voice to the unheard and offering multiple ways of seeing and understanding. We started these endeavors with a commitment to employing participatory ethno-graphic action research partnerships with affected people and commit-ted organizations for the purpose of challenging hegemonies through the co-construction of transformational knowledge and action. Along the path, we have encountered small-scale successes, primarily in the form of individual growth and advocacy and the building of meaningful relationships among facilitators and between and across groups. At the same time, we have faced many barriers to effecting truly transforma-tional change.

To move forward, we must study and negotiate more deeply and rig-orously with partnering agencies. We must build in processes that en-courage all collaborators, including ourselves, to examine our beliefs, ways of operating, and willingness to challenge and reform our priori-ties and policies as a way of responding to PAR community voices. We need to advocate with funders for longer and broader commitment to community knowledge development and associated authentic leader-ship, and for the value of efficacy of local knowledge that brings the standpoint and lived experiences of people on the margins into a sup-portable and sustainable research agenda. Conducted in isolation from national movements, PAR projects constitute important exercises in critiquing the present and envisioning the future, in strengthening community groups and community voices, and in identifying path-ways to resisting discriminatory structures and removing barriers to



the achievement of social and political justice. To be strong and sus-tainable, they must resonate both with local residents and commu-nity groups, and emergent national and international social justice movements.

• • • • •jean j. schensul, an anthropologist, is founding director (1987–2004) and currently senior scientist at the institute for community research, an independent international research organization based in hartford, connecticut, where she has guided the development and implementation of its collaborative research and public art program. schensul has received many national institutes of health, substance abuse and Mental health services administration, and other federal and foundation collaborative research grants. she has served as president of the council on anthropology and education and the society for applied anthropology and in other capacities in the american anthropological association (aaa). among her publications is the seven-volume Ethnographer’s Toolkit, coauthored with Margaret lecompte. schensul also holds appointments at Yale University and the University of connecticut.

marlene j. berg is associate director for training and a cofounder of the institute for community research in hartford, connecticut. an anthropologist with a methods, community organizing, and urban economic development background, she has directed more than ten long-term federally and state funded intervention studies involving adult and youth action research. For nearly two decades, she has trained youth, youth workers, teachers, community residents, and university students and faculty in participatory action research. recent publications include a special issue of Practicing Anthropology on the subject of youth action research, for which she is lead editor, and a chapter on process evaluation in The Ethnographer’s Toolkit, book 7.

ken m. williamson is currently an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of south Florida. previously, he worked at the institute for community research for four years, primarily as a research educator, conducting participatory action research with community residents on the resident engagement project in hartford, connecticut. Williamson has also conducted research in salvador, bahia, brazil on race and ethnicity, social movements, and afro-brazilian identity and mobilization, and on diaspora studies, anthropology and education, applied anthropology, and community-based research.

We wish to acknowledge the contributions of the women of the Urban Women’s Development Project, and all of the community residents in both the North End and South End of Hartford, without whose participation this paper could not have been written. We also express our appreciation to UWDP facilitators and instructors Sandra Cooper and Miriam Torres (directors), Georgina Burke, Candida Flores, Maria Borrero, Arlene Harris, Wenzola Lowe, and Fredericka Gray, and to Resident Engagement facilitators Nelba Marquez-Greene, Federico Cintron-Moscoco, Franklin Torres, Reinaldo Rojas as well as Maritza Lopez, Bildade Augustin, and Robert Rooks.



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“You can’t put a price on it”Activist Anthropology in the Mountaintop Removal Debate

samuel r. cook, Virginia Tech

On a late August afternoon in 1996, I pulled off Route 52 in Mingo County, West Virginia, into the tentatively defined gravel drive in front on my great uncle’s house. I had watched the small house change over the years as the modest four-room company house with only a hand pump to provide water gradually accumulated additions and luxuries. While each visit throughout my life may have revealed some subtle change to the house and surrounding land, nothing could brace me for the shock I received upon rounding the hillside into the drive that sum-mer day. Part of the mountain behind the house was missing.

The usual long embrace and salutations that accompanied my visits to Uncle Thurman’s home were cut short by my dumbfounded state-ment. “What happened to the mountain?” was the only thing that I could manage to say with any degree of articulation.

“They’re blasting it off and long-walling underneath us,” respond-ed Josephine, my great aunt. “If they don’t blow us up, I reckon they’ll sink us.”

Admittedly, it had been two years since my last visit to their house. Graduate school had drawn me away from usual summer gatherings and family reunions; ironically, it also brought me back to this place to scrutinize the political economy of West Virginia for my dissertation (Cook 1997). However, this new, rude revelation changed the course of my studies. As the weekend on Pigeon Creek progressed, everything was changed. As usual, my uncle lifted his wiry frame off of his porch swing now and then to pump his Daisy BB gun and give his milk cow a friendly warning that she was too close to the road. As usual, the cus-


cook • “You can’t put a price on it” • 139

tomary corps of weekend house guests snored away in the spare room or on sofas as the police scanner buzzed with news of car wrecks and petty fires all night. As usual, Uncle Thurman pulled out the old photos of our great-great-grandparents and reinforced our knowledge of who we are. Unfortunately, the routine was disrupted by periodic blasts that shook the house so hard that the floors exhibited four or five inches of play and glasses toppled in the cabinets.

What was worse, the land that I had grown up knowing as a symbol of rootedness and family unity was going away. As I had grown older, Uncle Thurman’s little six-acre tract grew proportionately smaller, but it never lost its situated charm. Somehow it extended beyond its legal boundaries into the mountains beyond, where I remember my cous-ins building the largest tree house—real or imagined—that I have ever seen, and where we used to chase Uncle Thurman’s ponies with the un-derstanding that we could ride them if we could catch them. Now on the mountain beyond, there was nothing to sustain so much as a rab-bit. “He’d have to tote his dinner with him,” my uncle remarked.

With this singular experience, my academic path changed profound-ly and permanently. Here, I discuss that change and the existential factors that may drive academics (in this case, anthropologists) to as-sume a decisively activist role. Specifically, I discuss my own work as an anthropological activist in dealing with the mountaintop removal (MTR) surface-mining debate in the Appalachian coalfields and how that role has evolved to refine my understanding of collaborative theo-ry and praxis. Notably, I assume the position of a “native” anthropolo-gist trying to make sense of the balance between “scientific” research and moral obligation. Although a vital component of my decision to assume an activist position has been a personal attachment to place, it is difficult to articulate that attachment in a brief space without obscur-ing methodological arguments. Therefore, my primary focus is on the evolution of my approach to collaborative/activist anthropology and to expand on existing arguments concerning the potential contributions of such methodological pursuits to the discipline.

activist anthropologist or anthropological activist?

In 1977 Paul Rabinow prescribed a tenet that has become, at least in theory, a staple of anthropological practice today: “We can pretend



that we are neutral scientists collecting unambiguous data and that the people we are studying are living amidst various unconscious sys-tems of determining forces of which they have no clue and to which only we have the key. But it is only pretense” (1977, 152). It is hard to imagine that our predecessors could find this concept of intersubjec-tivity—the notion that fieldwork is an interaction between living, sen-tient agents—such a novel idea, and it is all the more unbelievable for the anthropologist whose ties to a research community (or a significant portion thereof ) are defined by kinship and platonic relationships with the other agents in the ethnographic equation.

My vested interest in the mountaintop removal debate is clear; ac-ademic credentials notwithstanding, I entered the dialogue with an emotional affinity for the alleged victims of this practice. On the other hand, that realization ultimately gave me an advantage, I believe, as I came to understand a degree of professional responsibility. Many an-thropologists have deliberated the breech between being a “participant observer” and understanding the emotional experiences that can only be understood within very specific cultural matrices (Lassiter 2005, 99–104). Initially, however, my genealogical connection to the campaign to stop mountaintop removal gave rise to a certain professional arrogance on my part because there existed no struggle to understand how emo-tional dynamics might drive “subjects” to engage in certain extreme ac-tivities (although I have yet to hear of anti-MTR activists, grassroots or otherwise, engaging in overtly violent forms of resistance). However, as an anthropologist, I found that my emotional tie to the crisis helped me to critically examine the force of emotion “with a view to delineating the passions that animate certain forms of human conduct” (Rosaldo 1989, 19). I considered myself (and to some extent, still do) to be a “na-tive anthropologist”—a concept that has yet to be fully problematized (Clifford 1997; Kuwayama 2003; Medicine 2001; Trask 1999; Weston 1997). However, as I will discuss, because of my position within the academy—that is, situated primarily without the communities of ethno-graphic interest—I found it difficult to assume true “native” authority because, as Narayan points out, “the very nature of researching what to others is taken-for-granted reality creates an uneasy distance” (1993, 682). To be sure, I found that my reception even among close relatives when breeching the subject of MTR could become politely distant or subject to a measure of scrutiny intended to determine the extent of my sincerity or naïveté.



Nonetheless, my entry into the MTR debate was framed not only by vested familiar ties to the crisis but by the very activist spirit of some of the foundational works of Appalachian studies (e.g., Lewis, Johnson, and Askins 1978; Gaventa 1980; Fisher 1993), which in turn had a pro-found bearing on my prior and existing research concerning the politi-cal economy of the region (Cook 2000). Thus, I entered the debate with the simple assumption that I was an academic whose training in the study of human cultures made me particularly suited to add an air of professional “legitimacy” to the voices opposing MTR—an admitted-ly paternalistic stance in retrospect. It was also a stance that beckoned some very humbling experiences in the field, and as I will describe, in-augurated introspective concerns about not only who I purported to represent as an anthropologist but the very medium that constitutes ethnographic text.

As I will illustrate, my initial involvement as an organizer-activist in the MTR debate was tempered by a realization that I was in danger of abandoning my role as an anthropologist entirely in the name of justice, when in fact, prevailing currents in anthropology offer a critical means to that end. While the polarity of activism and anthropological research will seemingly always be a point of contention, a growing number of ethnographers see cultural critique itself as a form of activism because such inquiries often explicate the epistemological roots of power strug-gles (Hale 2006; Speed 2006; Simonelli 2007). Specifically, in terms of our role as advocates in human rights issues (and the MTR crisis is very much one of human rights), Wendy Brown and Janet Halley argue that the critical analytical tools of our discipline provide the very means by which we may challenge the reductionist tendencies of predominantly Western legal systems to delineate culture and identity in the law as “a stable set of regulatory norms” (2002, 24). In this context, activist an-thropology is as much a contribution to the people with whom we work as collaborators and advocates as it is to the discipline itself. “In the phrase ‘activist anthropology,’” writes Charles Hale, “activist is an ad-jective. To me, the word conveys an intention to modify anthropology, to transform the conventional practice in methodological terms” (2007, 105). Specifically, Hale argues that the practice of activist anthropology involves “a basic decision to align oneself with an organized group in a struggle for rights, redress, and empowerment and a commitment to produce knowledge in collaboration and dialogue with the members of that group” (2007, 105).



Hale’s definition is in many ways in line with larger disciplinary cur-rents regarding collaborative ethnography. However, the practice of ac-tivist anthropology as he defines it beckons deeper questions of rep-resentation and suggests that in many such cases the anthropologist finds himself or herself under greater restrictions vis-à-vis community scrutiny than those merely seeking to develop a more collaborative ap-proach to cultural interpretation. In other words, activist anthropol-ogy is necessarily collaborative, but the boundaries of such collabora-tion may well be concentrated around very specific research agendas, whereas collaborative ethnography, as an ideal form of inquiry, may pur-sue more holistic but generalized visions of given communities. As I illustrate, these constraints—complicated by the divergent voices I sought to engage in dialogue over the MTR debate—served to hone my approach to activist anthropology.

the predicament of Mtr

Mountaintop removal is a method of surface mining that entails the lit-eral removal of up to 800 feet (and in at least one instance, 1,000 feet) of a mountain’s top to gain quick access to the coal deposits that lie be-neath it. Core drills are used to set deep explosive charges that typically result in a force one hundred times greater than the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing. As a result, layers of rock and soil, or “overburden” in industry terms, are loosened and scooped away with crane-like machines called “draglines,” some of which have the capac-ity to move the equivalent of twenty-six Ford Escorts two hundred yards away in a single scoop. Excess soil and waste are dumped over nearby hillsides, forming so-called “valley fills.” Although valley fills are sup-posed to be carefully terraced and engineered with water diversion ditches, they frequently bury both intermittent and permanent streams. According to the most recent figures available, more than 1,200 miles of streams have been buried in the Appalachian region, and possibly as many as 700 miles in West Virginia alone (EPA 2004, 4; OHVEC 2008; OSMRE 2007).

Industry officials and certain policymakers (most conspicuously in West Virginia, where a majority of legislators and executive officials have direct ties to the coal industry) argue that there is no evidence that MTR is harmful to the environment. They argue that the resulting flat



land is necessary and good for development in an area lacking an ade-quate infrastructure for “sustainable development.”1 When opponents pose formidable threats to certain operations through lobbying and public protests, industry officials often threaten (and sometimes exe-cute) layoffs, an action that has divided coalfield citizens and created rifts in the miners’ union.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, often focus their opposition to MTR on water quality issues, arguing that common sense dictates that burying the headwaters of streams causes irreversible damage to regional ecozones, and that the sheer act of blasting away layers of mountains permanently removes vital layers of once pristine aquifer. The most gripping voices of opposition, though, are those living in proximity to these mines. Not only are they concerned about the aes-thetic quality of their surroundings, but many fear the loss of their heri-tage, which stems from the land. Many coalfield families have lived in their respective communities (or in the general vicinity thereof ) for at least seven generations, and thus continue to derive the core of their familial and individual identities from being situated in that locality. Likewise, while any form of strip mining increases the possibility of flash floods, the problem has compounded for residents living close to mountaintop mining sites, although the standard industry legal mantra in cases of damage to property and loss of life caused by mining-related flooding is that such events constitute an “act of God.”2 Coalfield resi-dents also complain that blasting from mountaintop operations creates an excessive amount of dust in their communities and has caused many residents’ wells to go dry or become contaminated. And there have been a number of instances when rock from these blasts (called “fly rock”) has fallen into people’s yards, sometimes damaging property.

A related concern is the increasing presence and size of coal slurry impoundments that hold wastewater and other toxic chemicals used to clean coal before shipping it. While such impoundments are not ex-clusive to mountaintop mining operations, the latter produce a great-er amount of coal at a faster rate than underground mines, and hence, greater volumes of waste. A prime example is the Brushy Fork Slurry Impoundment near Whitesville, West Virginia, where the largest slur-ry impoundment built to date—holding a record 3.5 billion gallons of toxic slurry—looms directly above Marsh Fork Elementary School. This school has been the focus of a great deal of controversy for years



because of a coal processing plant that was built less than one hundred yards away and has been credited with a significant increase in respira-tory illnesses among students. Local residents and their allies fear that the possibility of the slurry impoundment collapsing is likely, and that no emergency evacuation plan can prepare for the disaster that would ensue. These fears are certainly not unfounded because one of the worst human-made disasters in West Virginia (and national) history involved the collapse of a slurry impoundment along Buffalo Creek in Logan County in 1972, resulting in a virtual tidal wave that killed 125 people and left 4,000 homeless (Erikson 1976). Subsequently, slurry spills have become commonplace, despite greater federal regulation on impound-ment construction. In fact, perhaps the greatest environmental disaster in North America occurred when a slurry impoundment that had been haphazardly constructed on top of an abandoned underground mine collapsed in Martin County, Kentucky, and sent more than 300 million gallons of sludge charging toward the Big Sandy River—and ultimately the Ohio River. Needless to say, all aquatic life along 110 miles of that stream was extinguished. Miraculously, no human life was lost, but many homes were destroyed (EPA 2004).

In 1977, after years of pressure from grassroots activists from throughout the United States and from a handful of concerned policy-makers, Congress passed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). Prior to that, there was no legal apparatus to regulate surface mining. Although some opponents of unchecked surface min-ing regarded SMCRA as a victory, it was not what most activists who had lobbied for federal intervention wanted (indeed, many had sought an all-out ban on the practice). The major provisions of the act called for the establishment of the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) as a regu-latory agency under the U.S. Department of the Interior and required all operations using surface mining methods thereafter to restore mined sites to their so-called “approximate original contour” (AOC) after mineral extraction.

However, two major loopholes in SMCRA are at the core of the cur-rent legal crisis in the Appalachia coal belt, which spans West Virginia, southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky, northeastern Tennessee, and western Pennsylvania. The first is a provision allowing state environ-mental agencies to assume primary responsibility for regulating sur-face-mining activities within state boundaries. The second is a provi-



sion that essentially exempted mine operators from the AOC rule if the task of exposing mineral deposits renders AOC restoration unfeasible. In such a case, mining operators are to request a “variance” when ap-plying for mining permits and to submit a detailed post-mining devel-opment plan for factories, schools, shopping centers, industrial parks, and so forth on the resulting level land, or to contribute substantial funds for post-mining development on the sites they wish to mine. Recreational areas and wildlife reserves were not included as accept-able forms of post-mining land use under the provisions of SMCRA; however, many companies in Kentucky and West Virginia have pursued this tenuous and inexpensive reclamation option (which often simply involves hydroseeding stripped lands with a grass that will grow on the nutrient-depleted rubble and help prevent further erosion but nothing more to promote the regeneration of native species) with no opposition from state regulators.

Ironically, perhaps the greatest catalyst for the expansion of mas-sive mountaintop operations was the Clean Air Act of 1990. By impos-ing more rigorous environmental standards for coal-burning plants— especially utilities—Congress unwittingly boosted the market for the low-sulfur, clean-burning coal that underlies most of Central Appala-chia. To compete with other producers of low-volatile coal (including Wyoming and Australia), eastern operators immediately sought the quickest possible means to gain access to coal seams. Mountaintop re-moval was the answer.

armchair activism, reflexive organizing, ethnographic introspection

While an impressive thrust of investigative journalism brought the MTR crisis into the limelight at the turn of the twenty-first century (Loeb 1997; Ward 1998–99), Shirley Stewart Burns (2007), in the only comprehensive scholarly work about the surrounding debate, succinct-ly chronicles the rise of grassroots opposition to MTR in the mid-1990s through such organizations as the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OHVEC), the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy (WVHC), and the Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW)—an organization, though fund-ed by a mainstream environmental organization known as Appalachian Voices, that is composed almost exclusively of residents of the Coal



River basin who are directly and adversely impacted by MTR. In fact, it was in cooperation with Stewart Burns that I became directly involved with these organizations when we organized a session on MTR for the 1999 Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) meetings. Previously, I had devoted quite a bit of time to penning letters to editors of regional newspapers, opinion editorials to the same, and memoranda to various policymakers. The gathering at ASA was significant not only because it afforded me exposure to a diverse array of individuals and organiza-tions opposing MTR but also because for most of us, it was the first time we had gathered in the same space. Indeed, our panel was but one of two major sessions devoted to the crisis, and as the final MTR ses-sion concluded, I proposed coordinating a gathering of all parties in-terested in reforming surface mining and ending MTR entirely. While it was not my intention to become the key organizer of such a gathering, I seem to have momentarily forgotten the unwritten maxim of my own mountain culture—that to suggest is to volunteer.

Hence, with the priceless assistance of Janet Fout and Laura Foreman of OHVEC, I embarked on a four-month mission of letter writing, phone calling, and budget crunching that challenged all of the con-ventional skills I had accrued through my training as an anthropolo-gist. My vision was admittedly ambitious: (1) to form a grand coalition of all grassroots and mainstream environmental groups and commu-nities seeking relief from the intrusions of MTR; (2) to facilitate dia-logue with policymakers who could conceivably affect surface mining reforms; (3) to develop practical visions for sustainable post-mining economies in the Appalachian coal belt; and (4) to provide a mitigat-ing presence for dialogue between mine operators, their employees who stood to lose jobs with the closing of surface mines, and pro-coal policymakers and lobbyists—most notably the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). What I found almost immediately was that the last goal was the most unrealistic for the time and will remain so until the third goal of building sustainable economic alternatives to mining of-fers some promise for those beholden to a single-industry economy. And that goal, in turn, was rendered problematic by the recalcitrance of policymakers toward change in a state and region whose political economy is based on mineral extraction. This became woefully appar-ent during the first evening of the Interstate Summit for the Mountains, as our gathering was called, when a large group of participants arrived



bruised and battered from a confrontation with local officials in Logan County, where they had participated in a march commemorating the historic drive to unionize southern West Virginia mines in 1921.3

Nonetheless, the first Interstate Summit for the Mountains provided me with important lessons in the art of organizing and the unpredict-ability, fragility, and volatility of human nature. In addition to repre-sentatives from the aforementioned organizations, a number of social scientists from the University of Kentucky and Marshall University were on hand, as well as representatives from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC)—a well-established grassroots organization that was initially fueled by the drive to halt surface mining in the 1970s— the Citizens Coal Council (a national mining reform lobby), and repre-sentatives from older anti-surface-mining coalitions (including former West Virginia House of Representatives delegate Ken Heckler, who was the key legislative proponent behind SMCRA). Although my interest in the gathering was personally and morally motivated, the prospect of being able to bring some of the theories and methods of applied social sciences into play was also an attractive possibility.

The field of Appalachian studies has consistently provided a cru-cible for the development of participatory research models, some of which date back to the formation of the Highlander Folk School in the 1930s, which eventually became the Highlander Research and Education Center (Horton 1993; Gaventa 1991, 1993; Gaventa, Smith, and Willingham 1990; Couto 1999; Halperin 1998, 2006). While con-temporary participatory research models are often genealogically linked to Paolo Freire’s landmark Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), ap-proaches vary. Until recently, most models have focused explicitly on confronting skewed development patterns in oppressed communities (e.g., Friedmann 1992). It was precisely such models disseminating out of Appalachian movements (in the spirit of Friere) that initially moti-vated my research prior to and during my first years of involvement with the anti-MTR movement (especially Gaventa and Lewis’s [1991] model based on their tenure with the Highlander center). However, the opera-tive concept in participatory research is community empowerment, a concept that recognizes “people themselves as the only effective agency for change” (Veltmeyer 2001, 3). Indeed, in organizing and cofacilitat-ing the summits, I was unwittingly privileged to be part of a larger aca-demic paradigm shift resulting from recognition that the ultimate goal



of participatory research is to create community narratives (as opposed to scientific metanarratives) for understanding and coping with the problems confronting specific communities—narratives that may take the form of storytelling or artistic expression but are narratives no less legitimate than those produced by outside professionals (Banks and Mangan 1999; Cornwall and Jewkes 1995). It was a shift that came also from recognition that for outside professionals such as myself, some-times our very limited role is to serve as one of many agents linking community social capital to outside resources (see Flora et al. 2007).

The last realization became woefully apparent as the first Summit for the Mountains unfolded that late August weekend in 1999. We convened at the Appalachian South Folklife Center, a facility originally created to help grassroots organizations mobilize. Unfortunately, the chasm be-tween professional environmentalists and academics on the one hand and grassroots citizens on the other became clear after the first morning sessions: the grassroots voices were being compromised for the sake of academic debates. While the professional environmentalists serving as key facilitators did an admirable job of orchestrating creative venues for articulating community problems (e.g., through small group plays and presentations), there was a collaborative disjuncture between residents of endangered communities and institutional voices. At times, some of the discussions digressed into academic debates, which although valu-able, were out of context in the company of grassroots citizens whose agendas were guided by sheer pragmatism. As a key organizer, I was compelled to refrain from excessive comment simply because I felt un-comfortable doing so. It became clear to me that the role of the “outside” consultant or professional in any participatory research scheme was only to facilitate on a very limited and flexible basis and ultimately to “hand over the stick” and urge community members to take over, set research agendas, and take the lead in collecting, compiling, and analyzing data pertinent to their concerns in whatever form (Chambers 1997).

While the first Summit for the Mountains did succeed in creating a network of anti-MTR activists that aggressively and—in the short run—successfully lobbied Congress to uphold certain court-sanctioned re-forms in valley fill restrictions (Cook 2001), it also brought about a shift in the composition of future summits. Grassroots leaders played a stronger role in organizing subsequent gatherings, and the presence of academic representatives was conditionally limited. I voluntarily receded into the background of organizing this gathering until I was



able to leave the organizing committee without inviting resentment or the feeling that I had shirked responsibilities. Meanwhile, each subse-quent summit became more focused on narrowing the chasm between professional environmentalists and grassroots activists and heighten-ing the participation of the latter. This proved to be a very important development in many ways. First, the ensuing participatory model did afford grassroots activists and their constituents a greater degree of confidence and willingness to speak out publicly against MTR when many had been met with coercive threats for doing so. In fact, these gatherings often focused on training grassroots citizens to effectively influence the political processes that had an impact on them, whether through tracking new mining permits, filing complaints with the state department of environmental protection, testifying in public hearings, or organizing mass lobbying efforts in the state capital and other po-litical centers. As Melissa Checker (2007) points out, the legitimate concerns of grassroots citizens are often alienated or, at best, obscured by mainstream scientific discourse that is usually directed against their interests. In this case, the training that the summits and related ven-ues provided coalfield residents offered a competitive edge to local discourses regarding MTR, as evidenced by the fact that Julia Bonds, an activist with CRMW, received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2003, the highest award in the nation for environmental activism.

The summits also made professional activists more keenly aware of the extent to which coal mining is ingrained in the culture of southern West Virginians, and that any opposition to mining is bound to be in-terpreted as an affront to local culture. This lesson constituted another layer of humility for me when I made a blanket statement at the third summit in the fall of 2000 implying that our nation needed to end its reliance on coal once and for all. Patty Adkins, a potential activist who had survived the Buffalo Creek tragedy of 1972 (she was twelve years old at the time), rose to her feet and succinctly rebuked me: “How are you going to tell that to all of our fathers and brothers working in the mines, who are proud of their heritage? That’s all we’ve known for a hundred years, and that’s our history. Who the hell do you think you are?”

Feeling the blood rushing through my face, it took me several sec-onds before I could issue the words, “you’re right.” And I knew bet-ter. Unfortunately, my life of brokering the complexities of the MTR debate had led me to challenge those from beyond the region to real-



ize how their consumption patterns affected those within the region to the point that I had become engaged in a de facto rhetorical campaign against all coal mining. I had fallen into a myopic trap inherent in the middle-class roots of mainstream environmentalism (Checker 2004), one that obscures narrowly tailored environmental agendas for work-ing people (White 1996). I also realized, as did Lila Abu-Lughod (1986) in her complicated efforts to gain acceptance into a Bedouin community in the 1980s, that the anthropologist’s assumption of native status can be a self-inflicted booby trap. Subsequently, Patty and I became the best of friends and agreed that the question was not one of halting mineral extraction, but how to prepare for that inevitability. Nonetheless, that more than any moment made me realize that my goals as an anthro-pologist involved in the MTR debate were too ambitious—that rather than expecting to provide a mitigating link between disparate voices, my rightful and modest role in the anti-MTR movement would be one of opening ethnographic conduits for grassroots voices to air their real-ities without the hermeneutic fog that often covers the ethnographer’s lens. I found myself in search of a more collaborative methodology and epistemological trajectory.

toward an ethnography of Mountaintop removal?

On a chill morning in late April 2000, I accompanied twenty-two stu-dents taking my Appalachian Communities class to Kayford Mountain, West Virginia, where grassroots activist Larry Gibson has been defend-ing the last fifty acres of his ancestral farm from the MTR operations sur-rounding his home on all sides. This was the first of many such trips.

Larry welcomed everyone with a single request: “I want you to think of something that means so much to you—that you hold so dear in your circle of life—that you would give your life for it.”

Most of my students had never given this question much thought. Likewise, most had never heard of mountaintop removal until taking my class and had assumed that my vivid descriptions constituted just another act of classroom hyperbole until they saw the magnitude of the operations around Larry’s home. Kayford Mountain was once the shortest mountain in the portion of the Coal River basin occupying the Kanawah–Raleigh County line. Now it towers over a moonscape of barely rolling hills.



“The coal company’s offered me over $200 million dollars for this place,” Larry explained, “and I told them what I’ll tell you: the land ain’t for sale. You can’t put a price on it.”

That phrase had been—and continues to be—Larry’s mantra since I first met him in 1999, and I began to realize after the first trip with stu-dents to his mountain that it provided the operative phrase for a unique ethnographic perspective on communities coping with MTR, one that would transcend questions of regional identity politics and explicate the workings of groups engaged in cultural activism.

Faye Ginsberg (1997) has described “cultural activism” as a process by which groups use art forms such as music to advance culturally rel-evant political agendas. Such a perspective acknowledges the immense diversity within specific groups rather than reifying images of “identity politics,” and that cultural activists are actively “working to change [op-pressive] discourses and to stake their claim in an ever evolving public sphere” (Checker and Fishman 2004, 2). Accordingly, anthropologists who embrace and work in conjunction with this perspective realize, as Checker and Maggie Fishman point out, that “cultural activists often do not work through political channels, but develop their activism around cultural forms that are more immediately available to them” (2004, 4). Such cultural forms may include music, storytelling, and oratory, all of which have been used by grassroots activists to disseminate informa-tion on MTR.

In pondering fieldwork at home, George Spindler and Louise Spindler argued that “when we write about our own cultures we are ourselves ex-pressions of what we are writing about” (1983, 50). Although this dic-tum seems straightforward, my concern was with how accurate my ex-pression might be. To the extent that I could admit to “being native,” I was once removed. I could enter and exit the coalfields as I pleased. I did not have to contend with blasting, contaminated flooding, threats from surface mine employees, and related nuances except when I was visiting the coalfields. Most of my own relatives, whose plight prompted me to get involved in the anti-MTR campaign in the first place, were reluctant to even talk about MTR for fear that county officials would associate them with “subversives” and take coercive action. I realized that whatever I had at stake, my relatives and the rank-and-file victims of MTR had more at risk, and that I must submit to an agenda set by those victims. Thus, my deep friendship with Larry Gibson increasing-



ly evolved into a collegial partnership, which, I argue, has developed into a fluid, if unorthodox, approach to understanding MTR through an ethnographic lens.

Indeed, scholarly works on MTR have been limited to a handful of law review articles (Hasselman 2002; McGinley 2004) and some light-er creative renderings that lack a critical analytical edge (Reece 2006; Johansen, Mason, and Taylor-Hall 2005), as well as a journalistic ac-count of a long-running court battle to ban valley fills (Loeb 2007). The only truly critical work is that of historian and coalfield native Shirley Stewart Burns (2007), who, to her credit, incorporates a significant amount of ethnographic material in her work. Likewise, ethnographer Bryan McNeil (2005) has conducted extensive research in collaboration with the Coal River Mountain Watch that promises to yield an innova-tive manuscript chronicling CRMW’s environmental activism defined by a history of labor organizing. These works, however, are exceptions to a surprisingly sparse field.

Ironically, there is no paucity of ethnographic data from grassroots organizers and their families confronting MTR. Scores of documenta-ries and full-length interviews have been recorded by interviewers from all over the world, including numerous interviews complied on CD to raise money for OHVEC and CRMW. What this reveals is that the peo-ple in prospective research communities are more than willing to talk, but that they insist on conveying their realities in their own words, on their own terms. Stated simply, this is a key objective of collaborative ethnography.

Certainly, as Les Field and Richard Fox (2007) point out, ethnograph-ic research has always entailed an unavoidable degree of collaboration with research communities. However, the current dialogue emphasizes not only “multivocality” (e.g., Tedlock 1983; Lawless 1992), it is also, as Luke Eric Lassiter (2005) argues, an “approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration [with native consul-tants] at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it—from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, and, especially, through the writing process” (16). The emphasis on collaborative text is at once promising and challenging, for as Joanne Rappaport argues, “such writing does not purport to transgress the boundaries between applied and ‘pure’ research. Rather, its fundamental goal is the production of a new kind of ethnography geared largely to a scholarly readership—



that is, a new kind of pure research” (2007, 22). Rappaport proposes a method that entails “co-theorizing” with community collaborators to address real problems, if we are to admit to a truly engaged ethnogra-phy. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s (1991) concept of “situated theoriz-ing,” Rappaport argues that the “ultimate objective . . . is political, not intellectual . . . [a practice in which] not only does intellectual practice emerge out of the theorists’ ethnic positioning but, more importantly, political activity is guided by their research” (27).

With these positions on collaborative praxis and writing in mind, the most pressing question is, what constitutes a legitimate ethnographic text? If we truly embrace native and community collaborators as “co-in-tellectuals” (Lassiter 2005), then they should play a plenary role in de-termining what media may be regarded as the ultimate ethnographic expression. With this in mind, I have sought for the past eight years to affect an ethnographic method that represents the realities of anti-MTR community activists and their neighbors in the most direct context pos-sible—the field.

This, of course, is the obvious and preferred medium for anti-MTR activists to convey their concerns to an uninformed public, although it is not always practical. However, from the first time that I accompanied students to Kayford Mountain and adjacent communities, I noticed a measurable difference in the degree to which that experience affect-ed them compared to those who, at best, became aware of the issue through graphic documentaries. Indeed, at least two of my undergrad-uate students went on to pursue graduate careers in law and sociolo-gy, producing research focusing on this issue (Keaton 2005; Williams 2007). After observing this difference, I conferred with Larry Gibson and Maria Gunoe—a coalfield activist from Bob White, West Virginia, whose ancestral home has been plagued by numerous floods from an MTR site above her home—to develop a critical ethnographic model for conveying the realities of those confronting these destructive min-ing practices and the political economy that sustains such practices. To that end, my students have been as much a part of the collaborative process as coalfield residents themselves, although the role of the for-mer has not been as consistent.

The practice of engaging students in field studies for pedagogical and applied purposes is as old as the discipline of anthropology itself. While numerous anthropologists have written about this practice and



its manifold goals and variations (e.g., Baer et al. 1995; Bakalaki 1997; Mazur-Stommen 2006; Upham, Trevathan and Wilk 1988), there is a growing emphasis on community empowerment through student en-gagement while simultaneously encouraging and preparing students to embrace their education to become active agents of change in the real world. (e.g., Nichols 2004; Hathaway and Kuzin 2007; Lassiter et al. 2004; Rodriguez 1996). Student engagement of this nature is impor-tant precisely because of its potential to address community agendas for the long term—that is, it wields the potential to spawn a genera-tion of citizens who may be actively cognizant of the issues confront-ing specific communities or localities and will seek to remain part of the process of addressing these issues proactively over the long term rather than studying them for the short term. This kind of multifaceted collaboration is both invigorating and complicated, and requires a sin-cere commitment from all parties involved. Thus, it becomes very diffi-cult to sustain such commitment from large groups of students. On the other hand, if such a model is successful at engaging students, I argue that it can be a valuable means for engaging larger publics.

For the past five years, my Appalachian Communities class has served as the “pilot” audience for developing this model, but we are beginning to work in collaboration with a student organization called Mountain Justice to develop a template for public field trips and sym-posia. Essentially, I begin in the classroom by presenting students with introductory material on Appalachian culture and globalization. This is followed by concise readings and documentaries that explain MTR and convey the complexities of the issue (e.g., national dependency on coal-powered electricity, potential job loss resulting from the closure of mines, and so forth). This preliminary material serves as a metanar-rative for the actual experience of visiting communities and landscapes affected by MTR.

However, before making the journey, I require students to gener-ate a set of research questions to help them understand the intrinsic concerns of those fighting to maintain their homes. On one occasion, in 2004, as my students and I ascended Kayford Mountain with Larry Gibson, one student asked Larry if he opposed all coal mining. Larry abruptly stopped and asked everyone to gather around him. He pro-ceeded to devote several minutes to listing the historical atrocities for which the coal industry could be credited, all the people he had known



who were injured, had lost loved ones in the mines, and had suffered from black lung disease. He succinctly ended this eloquent act of ora-tory by stating: “You ask me if I’m opposed to all coal mining? The an-swer is yes!”

The trip into the coalfields provides a physical context that is foreign to most students, who find it hard to believe that the depressed lines of homes along Cabin Creek Road—on the way to Kayford Mountain—are commonplace throughout the state’s nine southernmost coun-ties. On one occasion a student innocently compared the region to the Third World. Larry’s response was swift: “We’re not the Third World. We’re right here in your own backyard. And we’re not just sitting by and watching this place get exploited. The coal companies can keep on doing what they’re doing, but they can’t keep us from fighting.”

With that, Larry succinctly stated the problems with imposing co-lonial models on the Appalachian region for the sake of explaining underdevelopment—a trend that was quite popular in the formative decades of Appalachian studies (e.g., Lewis 1983). In sum, he made it clear that he and his neighbors were active agents in a political context pitting local culture against material wealth.

Equally as important as the field experience is the follow-up discus-sion, which usually involves Larry Gibson or Maria Gunoe coming to the classroom. This is important because the coalfield activists willing-ly place themselves in a vulnerable position—that is, they leave the con-text of their home territory and find that some students may be more willing to ask difficult, potentially loaded questions that they would not ordinarily ask in the context of the coalfields. In one instance a student asked Larry and Maria if they were being selfish by trying to deny energy companies access to the coal that keeps the rest of the nation supplied with energy. Maria was blunt: “I don’t owe anyone anything. My fam-ily and I worked hard for what we have, to keep our land. We live in the richest state with the poorest people. We don’t get anything, anything, for all that coal they pull out of our state. I don’t think we owe anyone a damn thing!”

The important point to emphasize here is that MTR activists like Maria are willing to put themselves in tight situations in order to convey the urgency of the situations they seek to alter. In fact, they insist on it. It is in this manner that we continue to develop an organic model for an in-teractive and engaged ethnography of mountaintop removal. As stated,



we are currently working with the student organization Mountain Justice to make this model viable for a wider public. Our institution is close enough to MTR sites and affected communities that we can com-fortably travel there and back in one day and can viably arrange over-night lodging at community facilities. We are also privileged to live in a community that is, by and large, eager to learn—that is, to take ad-vantage of public programming offered under the auspices of our uni-versity. Mountain Justice has had overwhelming success in drawing non-university participation in fieldtrips to coal communities, and with that in mind, our next step is to offer extended symposia to the public that would incorporate the aforementioned model based around a field experience.

The shortcomings of this model are obvious—namely, that it cannot be applied universally to all cultures or crises. However, it does offer a challenge to the way that we conceive of ethnographic text. At the same time, it points to the profound significance of collaborative ethnography as an important model for research and praxis. Collaborative ethnog-raphy, as Lassiter defines it, is an ideal. It may be difficult, if not virtu-ally impossible to pursue each component of this definition in an un-impaired and holistic manner, but it recognizes first and foremost that the constituents of research communities are intellectual agents, and it establishes a set of flexible boundaries that require all other parties involved in the collaborative process to share in the native intellectual process rather than to pursue or impose a divergent path.

conclusion

On the day after Thanksgiving, 2005, my wife and I wove our way down Route 52 through McDowell and Mingo counties to my Uncle Thurman’s home on Pigeon Creek. My visit was one of urgency since Uncle Thurman had terminal lung cancer and was expected to live only three more months. Up to that point he had been reserved in his comments about the coal industry and MTR, possibly fearing retribu-tion from county tax assessors with major interests in the operations surrounding that valley. On that day, however, he opened up with lit-tle provocation: “I never met a coal operator that wasn’t crooked as a snake. They’s every one of them filthy!”

Five minutes later his son and my cousin’s husband came in the door.



We exchanged our customary greetings, including inquiries about what each had been up to. Both informed me that they were gainfully em-ployed with Mingo-Logan Mining Company—the Arch Coal subsidiary that had wreaked havoc on the ridge above their house a few years ago. I could only nod. I think we all understood the awkwardness of the situ-ation, and none of us felt like we were in a position to argue.

Indeed, my personal interest in the crisis and the concomitant an-ecdotes lend testament to the crisis of late capitalism. Traditional no-tions of community are challenged on a daily basis by globalization, and much of the scant ethnographic research on Appalachian com-munities falls short of acknowledging the magnitude of these changes (Hicks 1976; Beaver 1986), with few exceptions (e.g., Anglin 2002; Keefe 2005). Even Kathleen Stewart’s (1996) treatise on the impact of late cap-italism and neoliberalism on a coal community in Raleigh County, West Virginia, fails to dispel static images of the region and tends to under-emphasize the deliberate nature of community agency as opposed to external forces. In fact, in a field such as Appalachian studies that has often been plotted along an activist trajectory, only now are a handful of scholars explicating the contradictions of Appalachian identity poli-tics and calling for a redirection of research agendas that problematize the entire concept of “Appalachia” and aim to address local realities and agendas in proactive ways (Reid and Taylor 2002; Smith 2002).

Mountaintop removal is an acute manifestation of globalization, as McNeil (2005) makes quite clear in his provocative research. However, the challenges that this widespread mining practice imposes on com-munities offer a compelling vision of local epistemologies and activ-ism when juxtaposed with other currents in ethnographic research, particularly the relatively recent emphasis on the anthropology of place (Rodman 1992; Feld and Basso 1996; Gupta and Ferguson 1997). On one level, the local movement against MTR epitomizes specific places as sites of power struggle (Rosaldo 1980). However, the sheer refusal of community leaders like Larry Gibson and Maria Gunoe to leave their ancestral homes evokes a greater consideration and scrutiny of mate-rialist arguments concerning the practicality of human attachments to place, and serious political considerations of the right to be rooted. And it is precisely such existential understandings and sensibilities that are most challenging to ethnographers in their efforts to convey other realities.



• • • • •samuel r. cook is an associate professor in the Department of interdisciplinary studies at virginia tech, where he directs the american indian studies program. he is also chair of the Kentland historic revitalization project in collaboration with the college of agriculture and life sciences, an interdisciplinary project intended to generate templates for culturally pertinent, sustainable local economies. cook’s works include Monacans and Miners: Native American and Coal Mining Communities in Appalachia (University of nebraska press, 2000) and numerous articles concerning the political economy of appalachia and of indian country.

notes

1. Economist Herman E. Daly (1997) has devoted much of his career to a compelling scrutiny of the oxymoronic concept of “sustainable development,” or what he terms “an impossibility theorem.”

2. The phrase “act of God” first came into use as a quasi-legal buffer for mining companies to cite natural disasters instead of industrial negligence in fatalities and damages caused by mine-related flooding when in February 1972 an illegal coal slurry impoundment collapsed along Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, after a period of torrential rains. The ensuing wall of sludge claimed 125 lives and left 4,000 homeless. Pittston Coal Company officials not only refused to claim responsibility but did not bother to express concern for people in the disaster zone. In coining the phrase “act of God” in reference to this disaster, company lawyers unwittingly created a first line of defense for mining companies faced with similar situations that echo through the West Virginia mountains on an annual basis (see generally Erikson 1976).

3. The participants in this reenactment were commemorating the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, which resulted from more than a decade of violent labor strife in the southern part of the state known as the West Virginia Coal Wars. In 1921, more than 10,000 miners organized a well-trained army and marched from Charleston into Logan County with the intention of liberating thousands of miners in the state’s southern counties who were held captive in systems of debt peonage by heavily armed mine guards and corrupt local law enforcement. The ensuing clash at Blair Mountain saw four days of continuous gunfire along a ten-mile front, which became the largest armed confrontation on American soil since the Civil War. The battle was halted by intervention from two divisions of the U.S. Army (see Savage 1990).

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reFlection anD coMMentarY

reflections on collaboration, ethnographic and applied

james l. peacock, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Ethnography for me began with collaboration as a necessity, but lately collaboration has become an end—part of relationships and “applied” work—with ethnography as a byproduct: a move from collaborative ethnography in a narrow sense to collaboration per se in a broader sense with possible ethnographic aspects. A reason for this shift is a move from research to applied work, with “applied” being a facet of a larger focus on social issues.

I’ll trace some ways this has unfolded.My first fieldwork was in Indonesia back in the early sixties. My wife

and I lived with a family in a slum in Surabaya. We developed strong ties to each other so that collaboration was an end in itself, part of liv-ing together, but it was also a necessity, just to get by and get my work done. In 1983, one of the twelve children in that family moved to the community where we live. Sharing bonds to his mother and father, we became close friends; the ethnography part has almost disappeared or folded into our relationships, although it has reappeared in reverse; the grandson recently proposed to interview me about his grandparents because we lived with them. So the ethnographer becomes a source for a latter-day ethnography.

On a wider scale, the book I wrote on my work there, Rites of Modern-ization (Peacock 1968), which focused on Indonesian working class the-atre and society, was translated into Indonesian and recently has been discussed in the Indonesian magazine Tempo, so my ethnography has been absorbed into wider collaborations that are part of the culture’s reflections, its own ethnography. Joining that national cultural discus-sion is another level of collaboration.



My second period of fieldwork was also in Indonesia but this time with a different group, members of a somewhat fundamentalist move-ment called Muhammadiya. Muhammadiya is a social movement, now claiming 35 million members. They were and are rather intentional about collaboration. After seven months with them I participated in sev-eral of their training camps. The last camp was for branch leaders, and the trainees, whom I got to know, invited me to speak at their branches. I did so, throughout Java, evaluating the movement. Thus my analysis and their own actions and analyses merged somewhat. A sign of that collaboration is given in a short book I wrote about Muhammadiya, Purifying the Faith (Peacock 1978). One of the leaders wrote a preface to that book in which he described my role. That book was also translat-ed into Indonesian and has been part of Muhammadiyan discussions. Recently I received an e-mail from a young leader of Muhammadiya, and he recounted that at their recent congress in East Java, they re-called my response to one of their questions. A kind of jury or com-mittee had asked me, early in my fieldwork, “What is your religion?” I replied “My religion is anthropology,” explaining that my purpose was to study them. Our collaboration was very explicit. I made clear that my purpose was research. At the branch leaders’ training camp, where I did everything the trainees did except the prayers, they had a session about research; they joked that I was their research branch. However, I felt gentle pressures to convert to Islam, and they joked about that too in the camp, that I “kenak da’wa,” “was hit by evangelism.”

After I returned from Indonesia, I continued to do fieldwork but lo-cally, in North Carolina and Virginia, mainly among Pentecostal and Primitive Baptist Christians. I and my colleagues would explain care-fully that we were doing research. Members accepted that but would fre-quently envision a deeper collaboration, that we would convert and even witness. Doris, a large black Pentecostal preacher, grabbed my friend Ruel Tyson and me in each arm and spoke: she said she knew we said we just wanted to interview her, but she had a vision of us playing a larger role, witnessing. Mamie, a Primitive Baptist in the mountains, told our colleague Beverly Patterson that she knew we were doing research, but she detected an interest deeper than that: “I sense they are interested in the service just for itself.” Elder Evans told Beverly’s husband, Dan, that he could sense that deep inside he was really a Primitive Baptist.

In the nineties I became involved in local action work, not necessar-


reflection and commentary • 165

ily related to anthropology. I had been department chair twice then, and became chair of the faculty for the university as a whole—about 2,500 faculty subsumed into fourteen schools, including medicine, law, so-cial work, public health, arts and sciences, all represented by a faculty senate and other governmental structures. Later I became director of a center for international studies and international affairs, which was also university-wide.

My mission in both jobs, which were part-time, on top of teach-ing and research, reached across the state, region, and world. Hence I collaborated with, and sometimes conflicted with, a wide range of groups and individuals. When I was elected faculty chair, for instance, several kinds of collaboration needed repair: with legislators, admin-istration, and alumni, including citizens. The reason was that as the university had gone the way of most universities in becoming increas-ingly research- and discipline-oriented, it had also become non-local in orientation. Therefore, faculty had become increasingly isolated and aloof from those who supported them—legislators, administrators, staff, and alumni. I simply pitched in, at first alone and then eventu-ally through organized groups, to build these relationships. Three ex-amples come to mind.

The first pertained to legislators. In company with a renowned chem-ist colleague, I created a task force of a dozen faculty who became a lob-bying group with the legislators, making presentations that informed legislators of what faculty actually did. Many legislators appreciated our efforts; some noted they had never before actually met a “profes-sor.” We did not just meet and inform, however; with the help of two old hands usually ranked as the two top lobbyists, we crafted several bills that led to a jump in salaries (which had become near the bottom for our category) and in graduate student stipends. At first, we clashed with a very powerful administrator—the president of the university sys-tem—who objected to faculty “lobbying,” but eventually, with support from a trusted advisor, he affirmed that we were an effective arm. After I ended my term as faculty chair, our task group crystallized into a paid employee; however, a later administrator, chancellor of our campus, terminated this effort, and faculty once again have diminished their lobbying work. The distinguished chemist who became a high-level administrator continued and accelerated our work, however, partner-ing with one of the most powerful legislators. He was fired for over-



stepping his bounds, and no administrator would accept responsibility for his firing, attributing it to the above-mentioned chancellor who had suddenly died.

During that same period, I dealt with estrangement from the admin-istration by creating a new committee, the Faculty Executive Committee (FEC), which broke through the estrangement by asserting faculty lead-ership in company with the top administrators; that is, we met with them regularly as opposed to always meeting separately. This seemingly mild and obvious step was at first met with harsh opposition. I recall confronting two of the opposing administrators in a sort of cage at a football game on this subject. Eventually, again, we prevailed, and this group remains the most powerful and effective faculty group—now a trusted partner of the administration, none of whose current members were present during the stormy beginnings.

Later, as director of International Studies, I led efforts to international-ize the campus and, again, met strong opposition from administration, primarily deans, each of whom protected his or her school and sabotaged efforts at cutting across them. This effort, too, eventually met with con-siderable success, signaled by the construction of an 82,000-square-foot hall, the FedEx Global Education Building, which integrates the various international programs. The atrium is named for my wife and me, recog-nizing leadership in the internationalization effort.

Working at these tasks, I did not intentionally do ethnography, but I couldn’t help but learn some things about collaborators and their lives and work. I’ll probably never report most of what I learned, but some of it has become ethnography of a sort that informs a recent book of mine, Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World (Peacock 2007). While writing that book, and since it was published last summer, I have enjoyed many more opportunities to collaborate in a way with people from the region which is the subject of the book. I’ve heard lots of sto-ries, jokes, comments, and manifestos from those people who discuss the book with me.

There’s another feature of these more recent collaborations: as the ethnographic aspect has been less, the action aspect is more promi-nent. After all, I was trying to accomplish some organizational goals. With the faculty senate, for example, I was trying to increase faculty and staff salaries for the whole state university system of sixteen campuses and to establish reduced tuition for out-of-state graduate students. I



did that, and thousands continue to benefit. Work with the legislators was both rewarding and fruitful in systematic results.

With the international work, I set up a nine-step plan to change a state and regionally focused university into one with a global or inter-national orientation and identity. The FedEx Global Education Building is only the most recent result, which stemmed from another collabora-tion. It was funded primarily by a bond package that had to be approved by all one hundred counties of the state. In this way, millions of citi-zens, most of whom would never attend the university or see our build-ing, but some of whom hoped their children or grandchildren would, entered a certain collaboration.

issues and limitations in collaboration

So far, I have accentuated the positive—how collaboration has contrib-uted usefully. Obviously problems arise, aside from the kinds of conflicts I’ve noted. A basic one is the clash between reporting and doing or relat-ing. When and how does the ethnographic goal of reporting interfere with relationships and goals of practice, accomplishing things in the world?

The action collaborations mentioned above entail no intentional or explicit ethnographies or ethnographic discernment; I can’t do that very much, and I worry that it is unethical—either to report publicly about one’s activity or to secretly do ethnography (keeping a diary or notes, for example) while collaborating on activity explicitly identi-fied not as ethnography but as work, achieving some goal. Following the Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, one should be open about what one is doing, so if I were doing ethnogra-phy I’d feel the need to say so, and if I said so, I think it would confuse everybody and get in the way of the task; what if I paused in the midst of a heated argument to take notes or change cassettes or ask ethno-graphic questions?

An example involves one alumnus who anonymously donated mon-ey to build an auditorium he named for Nelson Mandela, as part of our FedEx Global Education Building. He wanted anonymity, not eth-nography. Of course, he may change his mind as he grows older and then welcome a record for posterity that includes mention of himself, though the kind of record he might welcome will probably not resem-ble ethnography so much as eulogy.



This divide between doing and reporting may, of course, blur. Maybe in the future somebody will encounter sort of postmodern administra-tors, alumni, workers, Muhammadiyans, and others who want to do things and study them at the same time, thus inviting collaboration in doing ethnography and accomplishing tasks. So far, my experience has not encouraged this kind of collaboration, but it is logically feasible. A simple model is the clinician in an academic hospital who examines and treats a patient while interns and residents watch, thus combin-ing teaching, research, and service in one act of a certain collaboration. The obvious question for the clinician, as for the fieldworker, is to what extent the act is a true synergy in which the collaborations enhance all elements—teaching, research, and service—and does not diminish any one by including the other. Ethnographers can learn from the analogy of the clinician if they wish to seek situations in which they are “heal-ing” in some sense while learning and teaching. The recent push for a collaborative ethnography should lead us to such situations.

To explore issues in collaboration through “applied” anthropology, I turn to two cases.

case a. anthropologists and the Military/intelligence communities

On November 4, 2007, a commission that I chaired, the Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with U.S. Military and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC), submitted a report to the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which addressed the question of how anthropologists do and should relate to the mili-tary and intelligence communities. Later that month at the annual meeting of the AAA, on Wednesday, November 28, the Executive Board approved placing the report on the AAA Web site; and on Thursday, the commission held an open session to discuss the report with AAA mem-bers. On Friday, at the business meeting, one particular recommenda-tion was voted in for consideration by the Executive Board—namely, re-inserting into the AAA Code of Ethics an admonition against engaging in research that is kept secret, as is sometimes the case in military and intelligence activity. Various sessions and discussions were held during and after the AAA meetings and had been ongoing before the meetings



began. A summary pre-report had been published in Anthropology News and over the year each month AN published a commentary by a member of CEAUSSIC.

One particular project of the military, the Human Terrain System (HTS) Project, provoked considerable debate, and one group of “con-cerned anthropologists” formulated a pledge that anyone could sign to signify that the signer would not participate in the HTS Project. The Executive Board also issued a statement opposing the project. Within the commission’s report, the project was briefly examined (it had sur-faced after the report was drafted), and ethical issues were noted (as had been stated in a letter written by me and Alan Goodman to the New York Times in response to its October 5, 2007, article, “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones”); but it was also noted that since the HTS had surfaced after the report was drafted, it was not carefully studied by the commission. Persons involved in the project asked the AAA Executive Board why it had issued a condemnation without consulting the project principals and finding out more about it.

Key conclusions and recommendations are detailed in a report posted on the AAA Web site (see Peacock et al. 2007). The most important point is that the commission recommends engagement of anthropologists with the military and intelligence communities, and does not recommend de-tachment. It also insists on honoring two crucial principles stated in the AAA Code of Ethics: namely, do no harm to those whom one studies or with whom one works, and be transparent—honestly report to all con-cerned what one is doing. Further recommendations are procedural and include ways the AAA can and should implement these points.

These recommendations may seem mild or commonsensical to some, while they may anger others for either selling out to the military or being too spineless and detached. Several points are interesting to consider in context.

A key point is that the commission itself affirms collaboration. It does so despite (1) the controversial character of the collaboration, that is, with the military and intelligence agencies; and (2) the wide spectrum of attitudes represented by the board. On the second point, commis-sion members’ affiliations range from two who are actually in the mili-tary (Kerry Fosher and Laura McNamara) to one who has historically been notably critical of collaborations (David Price) and include one leader in theorizing ethnography (George Marcus) and one authority on ethics (Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban).



The case of anthropology and military collaboration deserves some historical context too. During the past one hundred plus years, an-thropology and the military have both passed through watershed changes. The early period was marked by colonialism, often served by both, sometimes collaboratively. World War II saw the end of colo-nialism and the mobilization of both anthropologists and citizens, in general, in common cause against the Axis; patriotism was the value served (though sometimes ambivalently) by many iconic figures, such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Benedict (all under the command of Cora Dubois). The post-colonial Cold War epoch from a military and diplomatic standpoint was marked by opponents at the nation or empire level (United States and the USSR), with nuclear threats and treaties as the mode of operation. Localized conflicts, as in Vietnam, brought in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations with collaboration—either actual, sought, or accused—with anthropolo-gists or the CIA masquerading as anthropologists. This evoked repudi-ation of collaboration by many. Currently, however, the Cold War epoch has given way to so-called “new think” strategies and tactics. National actors are less prominent, local ones more so, and the thirty or forty localized wars or conflicts in the world often turn on ethnic, tribal, or sectarian divides. This would seem to call for insights and skills drawn from anthropology, and military and intelligence do indeed seek collab-orations at various levels. The commission reports on kinds of collabo-rations already in existence, including teaching in military training pro-grams (such as the Air University), working on computer modeling (as at Los Alamos Sandia Laboratories), and preparing manuals or “smart cards” to inform military operations in the field. The HTS Project is re-portedly unusual in that anthropologists are actually embedded with soldiers in the field. There they apply anthropology collaboratively, at-tempting to improve conditions (creating health clinics is an example), mitigate conflicts, or alert troops to cultural issues.

This latter collaboration is controversial for several reasons. First, in-volvement in HTS could potentially violate key tenets of the AAA Code of Ethics—namely, to “do no harm” to those one studies or with whom one works, and to do our work with transparency, to honestly report to all what one is doing. Critics allege that upholding such tenets is dif-ficult when one is under the sword and moving toward the point of the spear—that is, under control of armed forces and moving toward an



objective of harming enemies. Second, the HTS Project could brand an-thropologists as spies or quasi-military, which could cripple fieldwork everywhere inasmuch as fieldworkers claim neutrality.

While anthropologists may see such perils in engagement, others see perils in failure to engage. The following excerpt from a letter to the chancellor and the provost of my university forcefully states that view. The letter is from an alumna, who refers to the statement opposing the HTS Project, which was issued by the AAA Executive Board, not by the committee I chaired, but which was attributed to that committee and me. This alumna concludes her letter by stating that “Leftist, adoles-cent whining like this piece—notably capped off by an admission that the committee hasn’t actually studied the situation in any great detail—is why I have no interest in donating one thin dime to my alma mater.”

What, then, are the opportunities, as contrasted to the perils, of col-laborations with the military and intelligence communities? The com-mission report names many. Perhaps the simplest and basic argument is that if one abjures involvement with major forces of the world, one risks irrelevance; anthropology becomes or remains quaint and aca-demic rather than having an impact on the world. Sketching the broad-er world situation suggests why anthropology could be relevant. The military and intelligence communities join corporate organizations (Eisenhower’s military/industrial complex) and religious groups as ma-jor forces in the world, and one has to think globally, not just nationally about this. Military governments are frequent in the world; the United States may spend more money on the military than all other nations, but the role of the military within national governments is very large globally. Therefore, just as anthropology must engage with the other world forces so, one might argue, it should engage with the military in some way. One way, of course, is to criticize, to analyze; another way, in a mode of applied anthropology, is to engage, work with, and per-haps change or shape—or, and this is the peril, be changed and shaped toward doing harm ourselves. The two approaches are, of course, not mutually exclusive.

case b: the nike collaboration

An economist friend asked me, “What is the ethic of anthropology?” I replied “Do no harm,” to which she responded, “We economists do



harm all the time!” She might have added, “and sometimes do good.” Being proactive as opposed to detached has that possibility, obviously, along with dangers.

Here is a second example of collaboration that illustrates a critical as well as proactive approach.

Our university signed a contract with Nike, which students protested on the grounds that Nike ran sweatshops. Three of us on the faculty launched a seminar to examine the issues. Twenty students enrolled, ranging from first-year undergraduates to MBA and graduate students. On the last day of class, the students presented their recommendations. A surprise visitor was Phil Knight, chief executive officer of Nike. He listened to their critiques and proposals for reform. Several days later he announced at a national press conference in Washington that Nike was launching reforms, and he credited the students with the role of catalysts.

This event, in turn, stimulated many developments led by a remark-able person, Rutledge Tufts. Tufts became manager of the Fair Labor Association (FLA). The FLA is a complement to the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), both based in Washington, DC. In brief, they differ as follows.

WRC monitors factories that produce goods that bear insignia of universities. Universities pay an annual fee to WRC for this service. When WRC finds violations of labor codes, the university partners can terminate contracts or otherwise apply sanctions to the company that is in violation of the code.

FLA also monitors such factories. However, it also includes corpora-tions, such as Nike, in its process. Thus, if violations are discovered, it can, along with the universities, apply sanctions, but it also has training programs for working with the factories to reform and reshape work-places within their cultural contexts.

For a decade, I have co-chaired the licensing and labor committee at my university, which is one of the largest licensors among universities in the nation and world. We work with both FLA and WRC. Our com-mittee is composed of students, administrators, and faculty. Frequently we are picketed or threatened by certain activist groups who favor WRC and related programs that are critical of the corporations and the facto-ries and wish to impose certain strictures. While sharing the intention of critique of factories, so far our committee has resisted overly nar-



row strictures that if applied would seem to lead to unemployment and unworkable arrangements. Instead, we have balanced monitoring and sanctions with shaping processes in context toward improved condi-tions while maintaining the opportunities for employment. (For ex-ample, on discovering violations by a certain major manufacturer, we terminated the contract but prescribed corrections which, when made, resulted in reinstating the contract.) Doing so has demanded not only monitoring but also collaboration. This is needed because the corpora-tions themselves have the clout to reform, as they can terminate con-tracts with factories. Thus, when workers struck at a factory in Mexico, it was Nike that was crucial in improving conditions because Nike could threaten to terminate the contract. As we were negotiating with Nike, protestors were marching around us with signs that demanded Nike get out of Mexico; yet Nike was the weapon we had which could and did improve the conditions. Nike did not own the factory, so if Nike had left it, conditions would have worsened, or the factory would have closed, leaving workers unemployed; precisely this result is fre-quently observed when contracting companies “cut and run,” moving their work to factories that are more profitable and less problematical. Working with Nike, we encouraged the company to stay, resulting in benefits for the workers. Still, we were condemned as collaborators even as we shaped reforms.

lesson: studying Up or Working With?

The famous admonition of Laura Nader to “study up” usefully guides anthropologists to learn about those who wield power. Yes, agreed! Further, as Eric Wolf and thousands of others argue, in studying up, be critical and do not lose your independence as observing critics. Paul Hardin, a former UNC chancellor, would add: try to be neither an un-loving critic nor an uncritical lover—implying that participant observa-tion entails not only critically observing but also joining in, participat-ing, guided by critical and ethical intelligence and values, of course.

The notion of collaboration, I suggest, can be broadened beyond ethnography to applied work in a broad sense. Engagement positively as well as negatively or critically entails relationships with those who have power. Such engagement is obviously fraught with dangers and difficulties: will one be co-opted? Will the critical edge be blunted?



Anthropology and anthropologists bring incredible resources to such work. They have learned from fieldwork ways of balancing par-ticipation and observation that no other field or method can match. Collaboration is a concept that harvests fruits of thousands of field experiences. What I argue here is to extend that harvest still further in exploring—always critically, of course, but first creatively—the poten-tial to extend collaboration in diverse domains.

The notion of collaboration is easily accepted by us anthropologists when it is the “people,” our “consultants,” with whom we collaborate; less easily accepted by many are the situations in which the collaborators are deemed powerful and oppressive: collaboration joined with “study-ing up.” Even more vexed, perhaps, is collaboration with the powerful and oppressive in work that may powerfully oppress, for example, with the military or corporations, at which point we seem to become quis-lings (referring to the infamous collaborator with the Nazis). Yet that treacherous ground too may be trod if a more searching and compre-hensive assessment of ethics and social needs leads us toward it.

• • • • •james l. peacock is a Kenan Distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of north carolina at chapel hill. he has done fieldwork in indonesia and appalachia and has authored numerous books, including Rites of Modernization: Symbols and Social Aspects of Indonesian Proletarian Drama (1968); Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijan Movement in Indonesian Islam (1978); with ruel W. tyson Jr., Pilgrims of Paradox: Calvinism and Experience among the Primitive Baptists of the Blue Ridge (1989); The Anthropological Lens: Harsh Light, Soft Focus (1986, 2002), and most recently, Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World (2007). he served as the president of the american anthropological association from 1993 to 1995 and received the Franz boas award for exemplary service to anthropology in 2002.

references

Peacock, James. 1968. Rites of Modernization: Symbolic and Social Aspects of Indonesian Prole-tarian Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1978. Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijan Movement in Indonesian Islam. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings.

———. 2007. Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World. Athens: Univer-sity of Georgia Press.

Peacock, James, Robert Albro, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Kerry Fosher, Laura McNa-mara, Monica Heller, George Marcus, David Price, and Alan Goodman (ex officio). 2007. Report of the Commission on Anthropology and the Military and Intelligence Communities, American Anthropological Association. http://dev.aaanet.org/issues/CEAUSSIC-Final-Report.cfm.


collaborative anthropology as twenty-first-century ethical anthropology

carolyn fluehr-lobban, Rhode Island College

Since 1991 I have argued that collaborative research—that is, research that involves research participants/collaborators as partners in the re-search process—is “ethically conscious” research (see Fluehr-Lobban 1991, 2003). Not only is collaborative research ethical, and thus morally preferable to historical models of research, but it is better research be-cause its methodology emphasizes multiple, polyphonic perspectives, which will leave a richer heritage of ethnography to subsequent genera-tions of ethically conscious researchers.

Collaborative research involves the people who are studied in an active way, as individuals or groups having vested interests in the project through their participation in the research design, execution, publica-tion, and outcomes potentially related to community or individual im-provement of well-being. Collaborative studies can potentially inform or affect social policy. Often, jointly directed and jointly authored proj-ects replace the older, more hierarchical model of research planned, executed, and published by the anthropologist alone. Community or individual collaboration in research—with partnership incorporated in every phase of the research—becomes a condition for its success, not simply a fortuitous by-product of work with communities. This newer model of research presumes, for the most part, a literate, socially con-scious set of partners who not only participate in research but read and critique drafts of publishable results. However, literacy among research participants is not essential to its viability or success, as openness and mutual exchange of research ideas and outcomes can be communicat-ed without the ability to read.

Collaborative research stands in dramatic contrast with most his-



torical models of Boasian anthropology—especially those with empha-sis on “informants,” “ethnographic subjects,” and a central objective of data collection. It also contrasts sharply with European social an-thropology methods with their linkages to colonialism and latter-day postmodernism. Uniquely, the subfields of applied anthropology in the United States and development anthropology in Europe have rec-ognized and embraced the value of collaboration in research, as it is necessarily attached to applications of anthropology to institutions and agencies—governmental and nongovernmental—whose mission is to promote the well-being of humans. It is this mission of research de-signed to promote human well-being that has led critics to view col-laborative research as advocacy, confusing anthropology with social work (Gross and Plattner 2002). Others view collaborative research through the lens of the same history of anthropological research and would argue that the approach reflects an increasing decolonization of the discipline.

Neglected by the Euro-American dominance of the discipline and profession of anthropology are the numerous examples of practice by indigenous anthropologists, many trained in the Euro-American “clas-sical” tradition but who are active as collaborative anthropologists in environments where, of necessity, researcher and researched are co-citizens with a shared heritage and common futures. Anthropological practitioners approach research with a greater emphasis on national priorities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where practical outcomes favoring improvement of societal well-being replace older colonial and neocolonial models. Examples of collaborative projects reflect nation-al interests, such as the status and rights of native peoples to land and resources; conflict resolution and the condition of internal displace-ment of peoples; and public health, family planning, and the well-being of women and children. For example, Ahfad University for Women in Sudan has mobilized an interdisciplinary research group of social sci-entists, with key roles played by local anthropologists, who design and carry out research focused on women as peace-builders, to ultimately as-sist with the development of policy initiatives. This research is grounded in models of feminist, collaborative research and is part of a long-term project titled Building Peace through Diversity Series. Their recent proj-ects have been in conflict-ridden regions of South Sudan and Darfur. The funding of such projects may be external—in this case, Oxfam, the



Netherlands—but the research and publications outcomes are decided-ly local (Badri, Jamal, and Martin 2005). Indigenous anthropologists are also employed providing vital cultural and linguistic links between hu-manitarian aid organizations and vulnerable local communities.

In the twenty-first-century, postcolonial, “emerging markets” global context, collaboration is the key to the sustainability of anthropological fieldwork and research, and perhaps for anthropology as a discipline. Voluntary, informed, negotiated, open, reciprocal research, based on locating a common ground of mutual interest and benefit between re-searcher and research populations, is increasingly supplanting the indi-vidual, self-generated, and externally funded research of previous gen-erations. The unequal-partners-in-research model, with its top-down approach and hierarchy between researcher and “subject,” is shifting substantially toward greater equity in the research relationship. This is not necessarily a result of moral or political motives, but it is emerging as an increasing imperative for garnering research permission and the conduct of research between the traditionally unequal researcher and “the researched.”

Feminist pioneers in collaborative research Models

A debt of acknowledgment and thanks must be paid to “second wave” feminist methodology and epistemology for the novel approaches in research methods and outcomes generated by collaborative anthropol-ogy. Feminist methodology employs inductive strategies to elicit voic-es, narratives, and perspectives of the historically suppressed collective voice of women in the West and elsewhere. A classic synthetic work in feminist methods, Feminist Methods in Social Research, features chap-ters on feminist ethnographic and interview strategies, cross-cultural research, oral history, and action research (Reinharz and Davidman 1992). Indeed, feminist research and collaborative anthropology offer multiple areas of mutually reinforcing approaches. The weakness of Western feminism has been its Euro-American centrism, thus a fem-inist anthropology had an opportunity to step into this ethnographic vacuum. Collaborative anthropology benefits from the dual strengths of an infused feminism for its non-Western research and the transfor-mation of the research relationship that it represents. A majority of American anthropologists are women, and this demographic transfor-



mation is also a factor in the increasing use of feminist, more collab-orative models of research that are gradually displacing older, hierar-chical—“masculinist”—research models.

Central to a feminist approach to research is its egalitarian, nonhier-archical methodology that tends toward a view of “informants”—who were often women like the researcher—more as “participants” with whom the researcher engages in mutual exchange and sustained trust-building conversations. This groundwork of trust and mutual confi-dence can readily evolve into long-term, trusting relationships in which research codesign, execution, and publication embrace both commu-nity-based as well as theoretical interests. The latter result is both desir-able and potentially transformative.

For example, years ago I began collaborating with the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, where we discussed research and approaches to non-Western cultural ideas and practice of vio-lence against women in order to offer more appropriate interventions. During the last two years, the coalition has explicitly requested more theory so as to develop strategies that address the root causes of the social-historical roots of patriarchy and violence against women.

Novel approaches are guaranteed to result. Feminist sociologist and ethnographer of Inuit women Janet M. Billson has practiced for some time a collaborative method of data collection and analysis, and standard procedure includes her collaborators reading and approving the final drafts of manuscripts for publication, including material for both ethno-graphic monographs and more summary and analytical books (Billson and Mancini 2007). Co-researching, co-theorizing, and ultimately co-authoring works based on a mature collaborative anthropology meth-ods are destined to result.

From subjects and informants to participants and collaborators

If a central goal of collaborative research is to work for as well as with research communities and to develop reciprocal relationships that al-low projects to be initiated, discussed, reviewed, and evaluated through a process of continuous consultation and collaboration, then the lan-guage of the research relationship needs to evolve and change. At the core of collaborative research is informed consent in the broad-



est meaning and application of the concept. I have written elsewhere about the resistance among anthropologists to informed consent (see Fluehr-Lobban 1994, 2003), which has happened in part because of the perceived nonapplicability for the social sciences of biomedical mod-els of research, where the concept originated. Although widely adopted by the social sciences, anthropology lagged behind and did not adopt language on informed consent until it formulated the 1998 American Anthropological Association (AAA) Code of Ethics. The reason for the slow pace may be our tendency toward anthropological exceptional-ism—the notion that anthropology fieldwork ethics are unique—or from a latent paternalism or maternalism among anthropologists sug-gesting that the researcher knows what is best for the research popula-tion. The obvious lack of agency afforded to the research population from this foot-dragging was less of an issue in finally adopting the informed consent doctrines than the necessity for anthropologists to comply with federal guidelines regarding informed consent. Critical discussion of mechanical forms of applying informed consent in bio-medical research—especially as used in research among vulnerable, non-Western populations—justifies some of the reservations by an-thropologists that consent is a one-way street, where unilateral, signed forms are used more to protect the researcher rather than the human participants.

Such forms have conventionally reflected a one-way strategy empow-ering the right to conduct the research, in a formulaic way promising confidentiality and anonymity (usually without asking the “informant” if he or she desires this) and self-defining the project as involving “min-imal risk.” This language suits the federal regulators more than the in-terests of the researched and appears designed to meet the concerns of the members of institutional review boards (IRBs) over those of the research population.

The powerful alternative of collaboration in research is embedded in reciprocal informed consent, which would establish the mutual interests, rights, responsibilities, and potential joint outcomes of the research reciprocally and collaboratively. Confidentiality and anonymity, for ex-ample, would be negotiated as desirable or unnecessary, if a joint pub-lication is to result. “Risk,” if it exists at all, would be neutralized as an issue, as the mutual right to withdraw from the research would be negotiated, together with the mutual responsibility to design, conduct,



and publish the research. It is self-evident that reciprocal informed consent presupposes an environment of openness; mutually informed agreements as to the conditions, timetable, and expected outcomes of research; and dynamic, sustained conversations about all phases of the research project.

This spirit of informed consent is reflected in the terminology that defines the nature of the research relationship. In traditional and still extant models, the researcher is powerful and in charge, and the “sub-ject” is structurally acted upon and is relatively or absolutely power-less. Traditional hierarchical models emphasize the agency of the re-searcher and the passivity of the research population. Indeed, federal regulation of research is monitored by mandatory university and insti-tutional “Human Subjects Committees,” dreaded by graduate students and some anthropologists so much that gaining the requisite approv-al brings relief not unlike that felt after a successful rite of passage or dodging a bullet. Unfortunately, the IRBs, structured and composed by institutions, are often driven by a narrow view of informed consent as obtained mechanically through a signed form. This reinforces the co-ercive, “one-way street” idea of the researcher informing the “subject” of the terms of research. The standard language of a form may include the “right” of the subject to withdraw from the project at any time, or state that the subject’s identity is absolutely protected, a right often not sought by the researched, either the relatively vulnerable or more empowered.

The standard anthropological reference to information providers as “informants” has not been subjected to much debate. “Informant” con-jures notions of a special, proprietary relationship between researcher and researched, akin to spying and devoid of the “covenantal” relation-ship that some admire in the anthropological fieldwork experience (ar-gued by Murray Wax and reflected in the 1998 AAA Code of Ethics, A.5). However, a terminological and thus ideological shift from “informant” to “collaborator” or “participant” may be underway, spearheaded by such journals as Collaborative Anthropology. But the fundamental para-digmatic change in research methods and analysis that is represented by this shift is fundamental and radical, and is therefore not to be seen as easy or inevitable.

The process of this change is both moral and political, though. About fifteen years ago, while I was chair of my institution’s IRB, I was allied



with an activist group of medical practitioners (nurses and health care professional educators) to change the name of our committee from Human Subjects Committee to Committee on Human Participants in Research. It is worth noting that for years after the name change the committee continued to be referred to by my colleagues as “Human Subjects,” not, in my view, simply because of institutional lag but be-cause of a wider federal and disciplinary view of the nature of the social scientific research relationship.

better research, better ethics, a better “product” for applications

The practical applications of collaborative research are not difficult to imagine, and if their effect is realized as a twenty-first-century standard of research practice, it could be transformational. New centers could offer services, especially in the field of public health research, to as-sist agencies and contractors with collaborative initiatives in complex multicultural, cross-cultural communities. Entrepreneurial efforts in collaborative anthropology are capitalizing on the value added by this approach and are filling a void left by a general failure of the discipline and profession of anthropology to adequately train the latest genera-tion of anthropologists either in theoretical or professional ethics—in all of its present complexity—or in the alternative of collaborative anthropology.

Collaborative research may becoming a decisive trend for American and global anthropology in the twenty-first century. This historic shift results from the feminization of anthropology; from decolonizing the-ories as well as methods; and from a growing recognition that collab-orative research methods result in not only more ethical research but better, more reliable research results. The benefits of collaboration in terms of social scientific reliability and authenticity of voice are already evident, but the benefit of developing better theory from collaborative research can only be imagined.

• • • • •carolyn fluehr-lobban is a professor of anthropology and african and afro-american studies at rhode island college. she is the author, coauthor, or editor of eleven books, including two editions of Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology (Dialogue for a New Era in 1990 and Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice in 2003); several works on sudan, including Islamic Law and Society in the Sudan (1987, arabic



translation 2004), Historical Dictionary of the Sudan (1991, 2003), and Race and Identity in the Nile Valley (2004); and the textbooks Race and Racism: An Introduction (2005), Female Well-Being (2006), and Islamic Societies in Practice (1994, 2004). With haitian collaborator asselin charles, she published in 2000 the first major work of anthropology by a scholar of african descent, antenor Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races, originally published in 1885 in French as De L’égalité des Races Humaines.

This essay expands upon a commentary on papers offered in the Presidential Session titled “Collaborative Anthropologies, Public Engagement, and Epistemologies of Equity,” chaired and organized by Luke Eric Lassiter, at the 2007 annual meeting of the AAA in Washington, DC.

references

Badri, Balghis, Atif Jamal, and Charlotte Martin. 2005. Inter-communal Conflict in Sudan: Causes, Resolution Mechanisms and Transformation. Omdurman, Sudan: Ahfad University for Women, Building Peace through Diversity Series.

Billson, Janet, and Kyra Mancini. 2007. Inuit Women: Their Powerful Spirit in a Century of Change. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn, ed. 1991. Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for a New Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

———. 1994. “Informed Consent and Anthropology: We Are Not Exempt.” Human Or-ganization 53 (1): 1–10.

———, ed. 2003. Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice. Walnut Park, CA: AltaMira Press.

Gross, Daniel, and Stuart Plattner. 2002. “Anthropology as Social Work: Collaborative Models of Anthropological Research.” Anthropology News (November): 4.

Reinharz, Shulamit, and Lynn Davidman. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. Ox-ford: Oxford University Press.


book reviews

Jordan E. Kerber, ed. Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States. Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 2006. 379 pp. Paper, $24.95.

jon daehnke, Stanford University

The call for greater collaboration between archaeologists and Native American communities was first meaningfully sounded by Native American activists concerned about the mistreatment of ancestral re-mains by archaeologists and the lack of recognition of the sovereign right of tribes to control their own histories. Following this initial round of tribal activism, “collaborative” efforts were driven primarily by the necessity of compliance with cultural resource legislation that mandated consultation with descendant communities. In recent years, collaborative projects between archaeologists and Native Americans that are voluntary rather than compliance driven have appeared with increasing regularity. All three of these drivers of collaboration— Native American activism and sovereignty concerns, cultural resource compliance, and voluntary partnerships—are apparent in Cross-Cultural Collaboration, a publication that provides a very useful and engaging dis-cussion of Native American involvement in the practice of archaeology in the northeastern United States.

Cross-Cultural Collaboration is a compilation of twenty case studies that highlight the nature and details of collaborative projects in eleven northeastern states as well as parts of southeastern Canada. The con-tributing authors represent a diverse set of professional backgrounds; they are academics, state and federal archaeologists, contract archae-ologists, tribal repatriation coordinators, and tribal historic preserva-tion officers. Of the thirty-three authors whose writings appear in the



volume, nine are Native American. The book is divided into three main parts: collaboration and regulatory compliance within the context of burials and repatriation, collaboration and regulatory compliance with-in the context of sites and places, and voluntary collaborations in re-search and educational outreach.

The first section of Cross-Cultural Collaboration focuses on repatria-tion and human burials in both NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) and non-NAGPRA contexts. Richard W. Hill Sr.’s excellent opening chapter addresses the difficulties that the Haudenosaunee Nation has faced in their efforts to repatriate an-cestral remains and describes the stonewalling tactics that some muse-ums, archaeologists, and state organizations have used to prevent the repatriation of human remains and cultural items to Native American populations. Hill’s chapter helps to set the tone of the book, demon-strating that the goal is not to present a simple celebratory image of the collaborative process, but rather to look realistically and critically at collaboration as a process that remains troubled, especially within the context of the repatriation of human remains.

Other chapters in the first section continue this cautious tone, not-ing the challenges of attempting to make the supposedly uniform bu-reaucratic process of repatriation compatible with the specifics of tribal sovereignty and politics (Nina M. Versaggi), wrestling with repatriation to tribes that are not federally recognized (Ramona Peters, Brona G. Simon), and the reluctance of some archaeologists to relinquish con-trol over the disposition of human remains (John B. Brown III and Paul A. Robinson). While all of the chapters in this section are interesting and useful, the most helpful discussions focus on NAGPRA repatria-tions to nonrecognized tribal nations (which is important, given how often it is incorrectly stated that NAGPRA precludes repatriation to nonrecognized groups) as well as the use of state unmarked burial laws to repatriate human remains outside of NAGPRA contexts. The choice to put this section first is important, as it emphasizes the idea that re-patriation—especially the repatriation of human remains—is the most fundamental and central form of collaboration. If we as archaeologists cannot collaborate with tribes by standing up for tribal primacy in de-termining what happens to human remains, then our other forms of collaboration become much less relevant.

The second section focuses on collaboration and regulatory compli-


book reviews • 185

ance in the context of sites and places. Chapters in this section discuss the challenges and rewards of collaborations on large-scale highway survey projects (Robert L. Dean and Douglas J. Perrelli, Ira Beckerman), dialogue between tribal and archaeological voices over differing values and interpretations (David M. Lacy and Donna Roberts Moody), con-tract archaeology on Martha’s Vineyard (Holly Herbster and Suzanne Cherau), the exploitative and patronizing nature of viewing Native Americans as “informants” rather than partners (Cara Lee Blume), and the ways that collaborations can lead to more meaningful interpreta-tions of archaeological phenomena (Michael D. Petraglia and Kevin Cunningham).

As is the case in the first section, all of the chapters in section 2 pro-vide interesting and useful case studies. Beckerman’s discussion of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s changing views on col-laboration perhaps best fits the cautious tone of the volume. Beckerman notes just how slowly PennDOT has moved in establishing meaning-ful collaborative relationships with tribes, and suggests that “without the force of law, it is unlikely that PennDOT or any other agency would fulfill its obligation to bring an interested party into consultation on a project” (193). Despite this, Beckerman offers some guiding princi-ples to follow for tribal consultation and notes that PennDOT is slowly learning to follow these principles and that collaborative projects are optimistically moving forward.

The final section of the volume focuses on voluntary collaborative projects—those collaborations that occur outside the parameters of regulatory compliance. Chapters in this section discuss partnerships between Colgate University and the Oneida Nation in the creation of a summer workshop as well as ongoing museum curation (Jordan E. Kerber), collaborative projects driven by the Mashantucket Pequots (Brian D. Jones and Kevin A. McBride), the effects of collaboration on archaeological methods at field schools (Elizabeth S. Chilton), and the value of collaboration for the study of place and language in the Passamaquoddy homeland (David Sanger, Micah A. Pawling, and Donald G. Soctomah). Bernard Jerome and David E. Putnam’s chapter on consultations with the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet Nations is very use-ful, not only because it explores the challenges of collaborations across international boundaries (U.S. and Canadian) where there are also dif-fering tribal versions of homelands but also because it stresses the im-



portance of following traditional protocol in the collaborative process and the ceding of authority by archaeologists. Jerome and Putnam ar-gue that “archaeologists should meet with Native people on their own turfs and never summon them to ours. Allow elders to officiate the meetings and adhere to their rules of protocol” (304). Perhaps the cen-tral message of both this section and the volume as a whole is found in the chapter on collaborative projects in the Cayuga heartland by Jack Rosen. Rosen notes that true collaboration comes when archaeologists strive “to find out what topics or research questions are interesting or important to Native people” and that Native people “are not against ar-chaeology per se, but against archaeologists running excavations with-out their knowledge or advice” (256).

Interest in collaborations between archaeologists and anthropolo-gists and descendant communities has grown dramatically in recent years (as the creation of Collaborative Anthropologies attests) and has been accompanied by a corresponding growth of scholarly publica-tions on collaborative projects. One of the most enjoyable aspects of Cross-Cultural Collaboration is that it tends to avoid the self-congratula-tory tone that occasionally plagues this growing body of collaborative literature. Perhaps the sense of humility present in this volume reflects the diverse makeup of the authors, who come from a wide range of pro-fessions and backgrounds, many of whom wrestle with collaborative questions—both theoretical and pragmatic—on a daily basis. There is a sense of authenticity about these case studies and a willingness by the authors to recognize that while meaningful collaborations be-tween Native Americans and archaeologists exist, there is still a long way for us to travel as a discipline, and mistakes continue to be made. This volume also clearly demonstrates that Native American popula-tions are not necessarily opposed to archaeology but rather opposed to lack of respect, lack of control, and lack of meaningful participation in the process. Because of its realistic and inclusive tone, Cross-Cultural Collaboration ultimately presents the reader with a balanced and helpful view that is at the same time both sobering and optimistic.

• • • • •jon daehnke is a postdoctoral fellow at stanford University and a graduate of the University of california, berkeley. Daehnke’s research interests focus on archaeology and the law, heritage and memory, and the interactions between descendant communities and archaeologists.



Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and T. J. Ferguson, eds. Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities. Lanham, MD:

AltaMira Press, 2008. 317 pp. Paper, $34.95.

joe watkins, University of Oklahoma

Defining “collaboration” as “a range of strategies that seek to link the archaeological enterprise with different publics by working together” (1), the editors have put together a collection of essays that offers a wide “range of strategies.” Most of the twelve chapters discuss North Ameri-can situations, but others include African and Australian examples. And, while the collaborations are between archaeologists and descen-dant communities, not all are Indigenous groups: in this volume, “de-scendant community does not strictly refer to biology so much as to a self-identified group of people in the present that link themselves—so-cially, politically, economically—to a group of people in the past” (2).

The first chapter by Michael Adler and Susan Bruning focuses on collaborative research as people and groups involved “constitute and apply the concept of ‘cultural affiliation’ in present-day understand-ings of the past and present” (35). While “cultural affiliation” may be considered to be “a relationship of shared group identity between two or more groups” (36), that linkage between past and contemporary groups requires an acknowledgment of “identity” that must somehow be “discoverable” by the archaeologist. Identity, as many (most?) an-thropologists will agree, is fluid, and yet questions of cultural affilia-tion imply a rigidity that probably does not exist. This often becomes a formality rather than a reality as archaeologists try to extend group identification into the past. One outgrowth of their research program, according to the authors, is that it “provided an effective means for us and for our research partners to create value that can benefit the de-scendant communities as well as the discipline of archaeology and the larger public” (52).

Larry Zimmerman’s chapter discusses the very real disservice that arises when archaeologists respond inappropriately to people who don’t believe the “pasts that archaeologists construct for them . . . no matter how well reasoned the archaeological arguments are or how solid the evidence” (55). While using the Kensington Runestone as an example, Zimmerman’s chapter can (and should) be applied to the peoples’ “beliefs . . . and how they affect collaboration between archae-



ologists and communities” (56). One of the primary foci of the text is the very real difference in application of terminology scientists take for granted, including “hypothesis,” “truth,” and “validity,” and the very real issues created when scientists conflate “hypothesis” for “truth,” and confuse the differences between the search for “truth” with that for “validity.”

Norm Sheehan and Ian Lilly’s chapter looks at “approaches to the in-tegration of Indigenous and archaeological theory by considering how an understanding of contemporary Aboriginal perceptions of the land-scape can affect the ways in which archaeologists find, excavate, and in-terpret sites of past human activity.” In addition, it looks at ways that “the physical landscape appears to Aboriginal people—its visual organiza-tion or structure—reflects spiritual aspects of the organization or struc-ture of the landscape that constrain people’s behavior” (88). Their dis-cussion of Indigenous knowledge and the very different way it operates from Western knowledge is useful for archaeologists struggling to come to terms with the call for more “indigenization” of the discipline. They close with a deceptively simple phrase, but one that resonates through-out the entire volume: “One learns to collaborate by doing it” (107).

In her chapter, Dorothy Lippert discusses what it is to be a “Native American person who wishes to work in repatriation [who] frequently walks a tightrope between what she believes to be true and what she can demonstrate archaeologically” (121). By discussing the differ-ence between “responsibility” and “authority,” she makes it clear that Indigenous participants in archaeology operate with a perspective of-ten unlike that of mainstream archaeologists: while our training may give us the “authority,” it carries with it a “responsibility” to the people whose remains we study (or are entrusted with caring for).

Meskell and Masuku Van Damme examine the sorts of issues that arise when heritage environments change as a result of social and political upheavals, focusing on “sets of relationships between descen-dant communities and a familiar arm of the government in the form of national parks” (131) in South Africa. Their perspectives of “cosmo-politanism,” wherein its practitioners “advocate the survival of cultural diversity, value the inherent differences between societies, and support the maintenance of those differences” (132), recognizes that archae-ologists, ethnographers, and heritage practitioners should not expect to assume the role of cultural arbiters but rather the role of facilitators



toward opening dialogues. In their final thoughts, they note “a just re-lationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples is one that involves dialogue, which must occur under conditions that are accept-able to both parties” (147).

Leigh Kuwanwisiwma’s interview provides an example of what collaboration means from the other side. As the director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Kuwanwisiwma views collaboration as “a partnership that is equal and also one of reciprocity” (154). Going beyond merely offering words about why collaboration is important, he delves into other realms: the incorporation of traditional knowl-edge into research, differences in Western and traditional knowledge systems, conflicting claims on heritage resources, ethical practice of archaeology, and the importance of a common goal between archae-ologists and the Hopi Tribe (specifically) and Native American tribal groups (in general).

Claire Smith and Gary Jackson’s article “considers the implications for cultural and intellectual property issues in international collabo-rations . . . grounded in the rights of Indigenous peoples to control their cultural and intellectual property” (172). Again, through a seem-ingly simple statement, they offer another aspect of collaboration: “Successful collaborations don’t just happen—they must be formed” (172). Their “Barunga Protocols” are appropriate for anyone who works with Indigenous populations in field situations (177–92). While they might need amending for particular situations, they ring true for anyone who wishes to create true collaborative research programs—“grounded in respect by both groups for the achievements and abilities of each as well as for the solid appreciation of each for their own skills and endeavors” (196).

In a chapter describing the “Americanization” of African descent groups, Thomas W. Cuddy and Mark P. Leone describe some of the results of a partnership between researchers and community part-ners—one whose dialogue “is not about the meaning of archaeology as a process but of the motivations of the archaeologists who do the work” (205). Their work with the unique creations African Americans produced in their search for spiritual empowerment and meaning, manifested in collections of objects called “hoodoo caches,” provides “a more holistic perspective on African American belief systems and practices . . . and demonstrates how an active discourse with descen-



dant communities leads to a richer understanding of society” (206). Ultimately, their work “is more appropriately seen within a tradition of equality . . . not protecting differences so much as . . . working among equals” (221).

Paul Shackel and David A. Gadsby discuss their work in Hampden, Maryland, as “part of a growing tradition of programs that incorpo-rate community dialogue in their projects” whose goal is “to become actively engaged in the community, help revive the community’s class-consciousness, and participate in social movements and support new ones” (226). Through their work, they note, the community is actively engaging in dialogue about gentrification, labor, and race as well as maintaining educational opportunities for local teenagers who are at the point in their education when many of their peers drop out. In this way, they “provide a practical service by creating honest discussions about the past and present that allow for a conscious and respectful un-folding of the neighborhood through the processes of change in which it is already enmeshed” (239).

In his discussion of his work in the South American Amazon, Michael J. Heckenberger “promotes engaged and participatory strate-gies of knowledge production and politically frank engagement with policy making, conservation, and development” (244). Within his work, “archaeology is critical as virtually the only means through which to contextualize deep (Indigenous) histories, critically important in discussion of cultural heritage and property rights” (248). It is this role of archaeology as a community endeavor and social commentator that “makes it all the more urgent to bring the archaeology of these peoples to bear” on issues of critical importance (268).

The final chapter in this volume offers reflections by three who have been deeply involved in collaborative work throughout their careers. In working from the perspective that collaboration “means more than just working together” (273), the authors share the insights of ones who have been involved in work with (George P. Nicholas), for (John R. Welch), and by (Eldon C. Yellowhorn) descendant communities. The chapter highlights the importance of “focusing collaborative initiatives on building individual and institutional relationships and capacities” (291) and offers a brief look at “best practice approaches” to collabora-tion. In closing they offer: “We think that archaeology of a given group or region has a greater prior probability of producing useful and mean-



ingful knowledge when it is pursued, at least in part, by members of descendant communities and for their benefit” (294).

The volume successfully fulfills the editors’ aims set out in the intro-duction: “to fill a gap in the current literature . . . [by providing] a theo-retical perspective and broad interrogation of collaboration’s multiplex applications” (2). While it is more concerned with “explaining why and how we do what we do than it is in providing a ‘how-to’ manual” (2–3), it provides “some direction for the willing and some compelling argu-ments for the suspect, inspiring further dialogue about collaborative archaeologies and the possibilities of engaging descendant communi-ties” (22). In this it is sure to succeed, especially for those archaeolo-gists who take this volume to heart.

Especially important to note is a line on the book’s back cover, itself an indication of forward-thinking collaboration: “Royalties from the sale of this book go to the Society for American Archaeology Native American Scholarships Fund.” By joining other authors whose work affects or relies on Native American communities, the authors contrib-ute in a meaningful way to furthering the educational opportunities of Native American students interested in finding out more ways of using archaeology, its methods, and theories, or its possibilities for improv-ing their communities’ involvement with the science of the past, pres-ent, and future.

• • • • •joe watkins is an associate professor and director of the native american studies program at the University of oklahoma. he is half choctaw indian and has been involved in archaeology for forty years. he received his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of oklahoma and his master’s and doctorate degrees in anthropology from southern Methodist University, where his research focused on archaeologists’ responses to questionnaire scenarios concerning their perceptions of american indian issues. his current research interests include the ethical practice of anthropology and the study of anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and aboriginal populations.



Larissa Petrillo, in collaboration with Melda and Lupe Trejo. Being Lakota: Identity and Tradition on Pine Ridge Reservation. Lincoln: University

of Nebraska Press, 2007. 176 pp. Hardcover, $35.00.

r. d. theisz, Black Hills State University

The body of American Indian life stories continues to grow. These texts have been referred to as autobiographies, first-person narratives, as-told-to narratives, and self-written narratives (Brumble 1998, 17); or as “Indian autobiographies,” resulting from “the principle of origi-nal, bicultural composite composition” versus those autobiographies “by Indians,” that is, “individually composed texts” (Krupat 1994, 3); or even as “bi-autobiographies,” a result of the “collaborative venture” that has brought them forth and is characteristically marked by an intro-duction which in varying degrees credits, explains, and acknowledges the roles of all involved (Theisz 1981, 67).

Focusing on the Lakota, in this case, if we arbitrarily take Black Elk Speaks (1932) as a starting point and sift through some of the major Lakota autobiographies, such as those of White Bull, Lame Deer (John Fire), Madonna Swan, Frank Fools Crow, Wallace Black Elk, Severt Young Bear, Mary Brave Bird, Pete Catches, Russell Means, Delphine Red Shirt, and Floyd Hand, to name the most widely known, we begin to see the evolution of the Lakota autobiography in its various permuta-tions. If we can posit a pattern along the way, it seems to me that three strains of scholarship have led to an increasingly reflective and critical evaluation of autobiographies. The first strain is that of postcolonial theory of the likes of Said, Bhaba, and Spivak, which has foregrounded the issues of appropriation, the ethics of colonialism, the imbalance of power, the deconstructing imperialist ideology, the commodification of indigenous expression, the reduction of identity, and the like. The sec-ond of these strains may be followed with the Lakota/Nakota/Dakota studies scholarship provided by the likes of Vine Deloria Jr., Patricia Albers, Raymond Bucko, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Raymond DeMallie, William Powers, Beatrice Medicine, Julien Rice, and others. The third strain provides a special focus on bicultural collaborative research and expression by the likes of Larry Evers, Barre Toelken, Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, Arnold Krupat, H. David Brumble III, Luke Eric Lassiter, Duane Champagne, and others. In the interaction among these three, we begin to see the shift from emphasis on the cultural content provid-



ed as this is filtered by the frame of reference of the cultural insider—in this area of the Lakota/Nakota/Dakota, the spiritual orientation of the holy man, the deeds of the warrior, the role of the traditional feminine, the dimensions of tribal/federal politics, and the like—to an increas-ing attention to the manner of production of the resultant texts. In this regard, specifically, the collaborative strategies in the bicultural under-takings featuring a Native narrator or performer and non-Native edi-tor or investigator have received increasing scrutiny and interpretation. Two of the more well-known concerns surround the editorial produc-tion of Black Elk Speaks raised by Sally McClusky and William Powers, and the problems concerning the authentic voice in Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, as discovered by Julian Rice. To her credit, Petrillo cites these three strains of influential scholarship in her alternating chapters as she seeks to illuminate the Trejos’ narratives. On the other hand, at times, her commentary is not warranted by the Trejo narratives.

Against this background, then, Being Lakota: Identity and Tradition on Pine Ridge Reservation offers yet another model of representation. In her commitment to ethical transparency, the primary “author,” Larissa Petrillo, introduces her exploration into “contemporary Lakota identity and tradition, as informed by the life story narratives of Melda and Lupe Trejo” (xi). It is clear that Petrillo has shared a warm and ongoing rela-tionship with members of the Trejo family. In keeping with her intro-ductory announcement, the cover lists Petrillo as the author but adds “in collaboration with Melda and Lupe Trejo.” Perhaps all should have been listed as coauthors in the egalitarian collaborative spirit that does not grant primary authority to the outside academic or investigator. She then proceeds to share her goal: “In this book I provide an interpretive framework, supported by life stories as well as critical and ethnograph-ic material, for the analysis of Melda and Lupe’s account” (xi). She de-scribes her method as “retaining the original language used by Melda and Lupe in an effort to convey the particular qualities of their speech” (xiv). The bulk of the text is then divided into the three broad sections: family, identity, and tradition.

Part 1, the family section, begins with an introduction to the project by Petrillo and some anticipation of the framework of the book. This introduction is followed with “Impressions,” again by Petrillo, which situates what is to follow in the Pass Creek district of Pine Ridge. After that we have three chapters of narration and dialogues by and between



Melda and Lupe Trejo. The first two and then the third are each, in turn, followed by Petrillo’s chapters providing academic analysis, contextu-alization, and theoretical grounding.

Part 2, titled “Identity,” also consists of two chapters narrated by the Trejos, and again each of these is followed by Petrillo’s commen-tary, as is part 3, “Tradition.” Thus, the rhetorical strategy of the book is to present the remarks by Melda and Lupe Trejo about their lives—three sections in part 1, two sections in part 2, and two sections in part 3—and then to provide alternating academic critical and theoretical commentary. The last four pages of the text, titled “Conclusion: Talking Together,” reiterate Petrillo’s methodology. In this regard she reflects:

I recognize and respond to subject positions other than my own:

I have had to learn from different perspectives. . . . In this project I

have followed an introspective, recursive methodology in which early

research decisions are analyzed in the light of what I have learned in

this apprenticeship in the Lakota community. . . . My own methodology

has been informed by my commitment to being respectful, a value

that pervades Lakota social relations, but my understanding of the

issues has developed throughout the course of this project. Even

during final revisions, I continued to notice times when an analytical

tendency might overwrite Melda and Lupe’s stories or when my own

ideas about identity and tradition might overwhelm Melda and Lupe’s

account. I cannot claim that these sort of academic lapses have been

entirely removed; rather, I hope that my intentions, coupled with the

textual results, might be instructive. (135–37)

Petrillo’s concern that she may be “overwriting” the stories by Melda and Lupe has some merit as her expansion of their narration in her alternating academic scholarship chapters at times goes somewhat far afield and implies the need to upgrade their remarks via extensive scholarship. These reflections are followed by notes and references.

The concept of this text is to provide interwoven personal life-sto-ry narratives by Melda Jane Runs Along the Edge Red Bear Trejo and her husband Lupe Trejo. This Lakota/Cheyenne woman, who had a Mexican great-grandmother, and who spent much of her life away from Allen, her birthplace, in Denver and Scottsbluff, Nebraska (from 1954 to about 1990), and then returned to Allen in 1989 or 1990, begins to tell the story of her experiences in part 1, “Family.” Lupe Trejo, her hus-



band, then recounts his Aztec ancestry along with his working in fac-tories and fields in Texas, Oregon, Nebraska, Arizona, and Colorado. Along the way he met Melda in 1957, married her in 1979, and also ex-perienced a four-day, life-changing encounter with an eagle. As a result of the latter, he began to participate in the traditional Lakota spiritual life of the sweat lodge (purification), Sun Dance, and other ceremonies, and was adopted as a brother by Ruben Fire Thunder, a Lakota spiritual leader. In between their stories, Petrillo’s academic emphasis and clar-ification seeks to show readers that the combined lives of Melda and Lupe are anything but stereotypical monocultural experiences, and in-stead represent a syncretic interweaving of cultural traditions culminat-ing in their shared dedication to the traditional Lakota ways within the network of their extended family.

Subsequent disclosure by Melda and Lupe in part 2 features their commitment to the Sun Dance and the ways of the Sacred Pipe in an engaging, understated style that welcomes all participants in a benevo-lent manifestation of the famous Lakota phrase of “Mitakuye oyasin,” or “All my relatives or relations.” Part 3, “Tradition,” features the daily, seasonal, and generational recounting of their lives by Melda and Lupe. Traditional Lakota values of patience, humility, respecting the land; re-ligion, generosity, selflessness; and respecting the older generation, being thankful, and “praying with a good heart and good mind” per-meate the accounts (121).

The total effect of laying bare the details of their shared lives, their hardships and their optimism, tempered by their cultural strength and devotion to spirituality, leaves readers with an enlightened as well as inspired reaction that is then articulated and garnished with academic research and theoretical reflection in the Petrillo chapters. The alternat-ing effect of the personal narration of two Native elders set against the published related academic research recounted by Petrillo provides a vibrant and novel collaborative model of assuring informed access to their lives and to the worldviews they engage with.

• • • • •r. d. theisz is professor emeritus of english and american indian studies at black hills state University in spearfish, south Dakota, and was chair of its Department of humanities. his areas of interest and research are lakota literature, art, and music. since 1972 he has been a member of the porcupine singers, a widely recognized traditional lakota singing group.



references

Brumble, H. David, III. 1998. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press.

Krupat, Arnold, ed. 1994. Native American Autobiography: An Anthology. Madison: Univer-sity of Wisconsin Press.

Theisz, R. D. 1981. “The Critical Collaboration: Introductions as a Gateway to the Study of Native American Bi-Autobiography.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 5 (1): 65–80.

Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy. Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America. Seattle: University

of Washington Press, 2007. 330 pp. Paper, $30.00

ho ts’ui-p’ing, Academia Sinica

Fieldwork Connections tells of the collaborative relationship among three Yi researchers—Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy. The Yi, one of China’s fifty-six nationalities, live mostly in the southwestern prov-inces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou, and according to the 2000 census, has a population numbering as high as 7,762,286. Stories of collaboration in this book begin with the description of Harrell’s field-work project on ethnic relations in southwestern China (1991–94), are developed and enhanced through his sponsoring of the International Conference on the Yi in Seattle in 1995, and continue up to the exhibi-tion and publication of Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China (2000), which was written by Harrell and Bamo Qubumo and Ma Erzi. (Nuosu refers to “an ethnic group of about two million members” who are “part of the Yi” nationality [309].) Bamo Qubumo is a folklor-ist and Bamo Ayi’s sister.

Among scholars doing research on China’s southwest, the teamwork of Harrell, the Bamo sisters, and Ma is well known. They gained international fame from influential academic exchanges by holding international conferences on Yi studies. After Seattle (1995); Trier, Germany (1998); and Yunnan, China (2000); the Fourth International Conference on the Yi was held in 2005 at Meigu, Sichuan, one of the fieldwork bases of Harrell, Bamo, and Ma, where 104 papers or abstracts were given. In China, accounts in newsletters or on Web sites of their collaborative research (see http://www.yizuren.com), articles coauthored by Bamo Ayi and Harrell, and translations of Harrell’s



articles and books are widely read and easily accessible. The par-ticipation of Father Benoit Vermander from Taipei Ricci Institute has further enhanced the collaboration between Harrell and Ma to social services. Together, they built an elementary school in 2000 and a “global village” in Yanyuan, Ma’s hometown (Vermander 2005, 171–88). Fieldwork Connections details the germination and development of their relationship in specifically shaping Harrell’s book Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (2001), the collaborative Yi exhibition, and the coauthored book on that exhibition. Most importantly, the book exemplifies how a long-lasting collaboration begun from fieldwork connections is enhanced through conscientious and sincere efforts in reciprocity.

In the preface, Stevan Harrell tells how the book originated, was written, and organized. Harrell emphasizes the book’s goal in inviting readers to “think about ethnography” rather than contributing to any theoretical discussion on ethnographic problems (xi). The main body of the book is in three parts, with nineteen chapters and an epilogue. Part 1, “Origins” (chaps. 1–3), gives an account of each author’s upbringing in an ethnic environment, leading to careers in anthropology (Bamo and Harrell) and teaching in middle school (Ma). Part 2, “China” (chaps. 4–14), begins with Bamo and Harrell individually relating their research in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, and moves on to their encounter with Harrell’s fieldwork on ethnic relations and education in 1991, 1993, and 1994. The book’s title, Fieldwork Connections, originated from these chapters, in which Ma and Bamo Ayi are shown as indispensable to Harrell’s fieldwork. Part 3, “America” (chaps. 15–19), has each author, and Bamo Qubumo, contributing one chapter on their reflections of their first contact in the United States (Ma), the first research trip to the Seattle Methodist Church (Bamo Ayi), and the collaborative exhibition of Nuosu material culture, Mountain Patterns, at the Burke Museum in Seattle (Ma, Bamo Qubumo, and Harrell).

Bamo Ayi tells us in chapter 1 how she, being half Yi from a noble Yi class, was raised in the predominantly Han environment. At their father’s urging, the three sisters formed strong bonds in their Yi identity and careers in Yi research. In chapter 2, Ma tells of how he grew up under the Han shadow, where tension, mutual contempt, and conflicts between Han and Nuosu were most common, and how his education was jeopardized by the general political turmoil and his classification



as the descendant of an exploitative slave-owning landlord. Harrell gives his account in chapter 3 of being white without any “ethnic” identity problems, and becoming an anthropologist doing fieldwork in Taiwan.

Part 2 begins with Bamo Ayi’s career in anthropology and research on the ritual specialist Bimo (chap. 4). Harrell then tells of his 1987–88 fieldwork project in southwestern China on the influences of economic modernization on family structure, the fieldwork situation, and the networks established (chap. 5). From this trip, Harrell begins his fieldwork connection stories in Chengdu, Panzhihua, in Sichuan. Chapters 7–13 revolve around Harrell’s later ethnic-relations field trips in Sichuan from 1991 on, during which Ma, Bamo Ayi, and Harrell’s relationship began to form and were gradually strengthened through their work together. Each chapter has interesting anecdotes that lead to their mutual commitment to reciprocity and the ongoing collaboration described in part 3. Abundant examples of reciprocity among Harrell, Bamo, and Ma are documented. Ma leads, accompanies, and translates for Harrell on his field trips of 1991, 1993, and 1994, all of which first began as an assigned duty from his unit (chaps. 7–10 and 12–13). In acknowledging Ma’s “ethnographic authority” as a native scholar and his direct contribution to Harrell’s knowledge of Yi, Harrell reciprocates first with an invitation for Ma to attend the First International Conference on Yi in Seattle (chap. 15), and then for the collaboration on the Exhibition on Yi in Seattle (chaps. 17 and 19). Reciprocity between Harrell and Bamo Ayi begins with Harrell’s invitation to her, the first Yi with a doctorate to already have extensive fieldwork experience, to participate in the First International Conference on Yi; Bamo reciprocates and accompanies Harrell to Yi fieldwork sites (chaps. 11 and 12). Bamo Ayi also translates Harrell’s book into Chinese, coauthoring with Harrell the Chinese publication. Harrell then sponsors Bamo’s research trip in Seattle on the Methodist Church, arranges for her boarding with a member of the church, and establishes a solid foundation for her research (chap. 16). Ma quite appropriately titles their mutual assistance to each other in China and America as “horse leading” or being “horse leader” to each other (100ff.). In all, eleven out of nineteen chapters in the book are about how mutual trust and respect were formed through “horse leading,” and the strong bond woven by mutual, conscientious efforts in reciprocity. The



collaborations follow later, starting especially from when they worked on the museum exhibition together.

In part 3, three chapters document each curator’s views on the museum exhibition. Ma first describes in detail the process of buying items for the museum collection in 1999 (chap. 17). In his usual responsible and frank style, he records his ambivalent feelings about buying artifacts on a limited budget from his relatives and experienced sellers or middlemen. The former usually left them to decide the price, while the latter began bargaining by setting an outrageous price initially. He also records the incessant self-doubt of whether the Seattle audience of the Burke Museum can comprehend and share what he experienced with the Nuosu artifacts collected, and his unwavering belief in the importance of claiming Nuosu culture’s position in the world through these beautiful collections (255–56).

In chapter 18, “Conceptualizing Mountain Patterns,” Bamo Qubumo writes about the process of designing and putting on the exhibition. Her description of the conflicts, their resolution, and the never-ending brainstorming and negotiations among Harrell, museum professionals, and herself on various issues, vividly depicts the process of creating the exhibition. The issues include why certain themes, pictures, and artifacts were chosen and displayed the way they were, how the display plan was designed, and how controversial effects of the exhibition on the audience were resolved. It also tells us how, when differing opinions on exhibition themes occurred, the decision to follow the “native scholar”—Bamo Qubumo—was made. In the exhibition, Bamo considers herself to be carrying out her mission to “‘defend’ the essence of my culture . . . with the minimum possible loss of cultural meaning” (260). The revelation of “caste” ideology in clothing, and the controversy in displaying the funeral pyre exemplify Bamo’s position on exhibition in a most lively way.

If any unease about the general direction of the exhibition results from reading the chapters by the two curators of Mountain Patterns, it is quite nicely relieved by the third curator’s delineation in chapter 19, “Celebrating Mountain Patterns.” Harrell defines the exhibition as “celebrating” the survival of Nuosu culture in China. Harrell says, just as Nuosu celebrate social immortality at funerals by wearing their best attire show their bravery and beauty, the exhibition intends to show that “the magnificent arts of the Nuosu live on, enduring first the Cultural



Revolution and now globalization. In Mountain Patterns we, too, celebrate” (285).

The epilogue places the book against the background of anthro-pological discussion on the epistemological problem of knowing the subject of research, the rhetorical problems in argument, the emotional problem of personal relationships, and the ethical problem of sensitive topics. Harrell clearly states the book’s purpose is not to analyze any of the problems, or to provide any answers to these problems.

This book is useful to everyone interested in ethnographic fieldwork. However, based on my own experience reading this book, I can offer a suggestion to readers in anthropology. I paused many times while reading part 2, in which Ma starts his “horse-leading” job with Harrell, and found it useful to have read the epilogue first to better follow the rest of the book, despite Harrell’s design of the epilogue as optional reading (xi). I also found it difficult to relate Bamo Ayi’s chapters on her research on the Nuosu ritual specialist Bimo (chaps. 4, 6, and 14) to the general theme of the book. It seems a shame to read Bamo’s intense accounts of her work on Nuosu Bimo in monologue, without any exchange of ideas between Harrell, Ma, and herself. Nor did her research in Seattle on the Methodist Church (chap. 16), even with Harrell’s arranging the perfect family to stay with, offer any intellectual dialogue.

One can’t but admire the wonderful collaborative relationship formed by Harrell, Bamo, and Ma; the impressive funding and pub-lishing support Harrell was able to secure, and finally, the effective, solid results the team was able to deliver. Three books directly related to this collaboration have already been published. The University of Washington Press published the first book, Mountain Patterns (2000), to accompany the Mountain Patterns exhibition in the Burke Museum, as previously mentioned. The second book, Perspectives on the Yi of Southwest China, published by the University of California Press and edited by Stevan Harrell (2001), was compiled from papers given at the First International Yi Conference, which Ma wrote about in chapter 15 of this book. The third book, which resulted from the fieldwork discussed in chapters 7 through 13 of this book, is Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China (2001), also published by University of Washington Press. These are achievements not many others can equal.

In all, Fieldwork Connections gives us good stories of ethnographic processes of collaboration, and the marvelous accomplishment that perhaps could be achieved only through the particular chemistry among



Harrell, Bamo, and Ma under the specific context of scholarly exchange at the turn of the century. However, the book’s underlying theme of conscientious reciprocity, showing how successful collaboration can evolve from fieldwork networks, seems general enough for all ethnographic fieldworkers to learn from.

• • • • •ho ts’ui-ping is an associate research fellow at the institute of ethnology, academia sinica, in taiwan. she holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of virginia. her research and publications have largely been devoted to the Jingpo in Yunnan, people’s republic of china, covering such subjects as personhood, materiality, social change, and historical anthropology.

references

Vermander, Benoit. 2005. Cong Yangquan Xiaocun dao Diqiucun: Liangshan Yizu de Shenghuo yu Chuanshuo [From Yangquan Village to a Global Village: Life and Legend of Liang-shan Yi Nationality]. Trans. Cai Meifang. Taipei: Taipei Ricci Institute.

Keyan G. Tomaselli, ed. Writing in the San/d: Autoethnography among Indigenous Southern Africans. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007. 190 pp.

Paper, $29.95.

megan biesele, Kalahari Peoples Fund

robert k. hitchcock, Michigan State University

The Writing in the San/d anthology is an intriguing experiment in col-laborative methods and so is quite apt for inclusion in this first volume of Collaborative Anthropologies. It is important both as a device to raise consciousness about the human side of anthropological research and as a challenge to some of the more traditional modes of ethnograph-ic writing. Editor Keyan Tomaselli has been for some years gathering his students in Culture, Communication, and Media Studies (CCMS) at the University of Kwazulu Natal (Durban, South Africa) and taking them, along with members of his own family, to research sites in South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia to interact with San people.

The interactions of this loosely defined research group with San communities and individuals have been more or less informal, but at the same time they have been concerned quite fixedly with the media-tion, representation, and phenomenology of Ethnographic Encounter, writ large. Thus the activity of this group of researchers sits squarely



within postmodern anthropology. Many readers of this new journal will know that Kalahari research has been one of the major loci where the postmodern and earlier approaches to ethnography have gone head to head. The “Great Kalahari Debate” is still going on, and Tomaselli’s group of collaborators is carrying some of the current salient strands of argument.

The offerings in the book stem from trips to two San areas in South Africa and one each in Namibia and Botswana. They range across jour-neys of personal discovery, methodological experiments and refine-ments, and the conundrums of cross-cultural representation. The writ-ers vary from a student of sheltered background making her first trip out of town, through more experienced students, to Tomaselli himself, who has traveled the Kalahari roads for decades and has thought deep-ly about representations of, by, and with San people in media ranging from film to oral poetry. Fresh insights abound in the collection, touch-ing on the role of anthropologists, development workers, and other outsiders as they may affect myth reinforcement about the San; explor-ing the role of market relations in the commodification of culture; and asking hard questions about ways in which grassroots critique may reach and influence the larger structures in which San communities, often feeling voiceless and powerless, are embedded today.

This said, we want to make a few suggestions for the anthology au-thors to consider. We assume the main purpose of Writing in the San/d is to improve communication among several stakeholders in the San’s future, including, beyond the San themselves, relevant nongovernmen-tal organizations (NGOs) and government entities, academics, and a public wishing to get beyond romantic stereotypes. If so, it would seem that attention to the cultures of communication of the various parties to the desired amelioration would be the best avenue to progress. Yet it must be said that many of the articles in the anthology neglect scholarly conventions—even on the level of spelling and grammar—in a way that is bound to make scholars feel disregarded. Each author also seems to find it necessary to criticize the “hundreds of ” previous researchers and NGO workers with indiscriminate assurance, many times in ignorance of the facts of various situations. Worst, the lively San themselves, and their often heroic efforts to make their communities sustainable, are too often given short shrift in this book and emerge as passive recipi-ents of both aid and oppression.



We do not for a moment think that it was the intention of this group of authors to thwart the purpose of furthering communication. Perhaps it was their very focus on their own encounter experiences that caused them to do so in many ways with this book. For one thing, the ethno-graphic term clan is quite loosely used, which does not seem a good decision for a book whose title claims to valorize autoethnography. For another, the awkward “San/d” in the title is only awkwardly explicated, as is the concept of “autoethnography” itself. San names and Western names alike have been repeatedly misspelled, complex histories have been reduced to misleading bons mots, and unclear—and clearly unedited —writing mars the texture of what would otherwise be a meaningful communication for all concerned.

As a further example of what we mean, we cite the six-page preface called “Our Host Communities,” in which the settings and recent his-tories of the four research sites—in the Northern Cape and Kat River Valley in South Africa, at Ngwatle in Botswana, and in Nyae Nyae, Namibia—are outlined. The descriptions of the locales fail to pro-vide significant information—for example, in the cases of Ngwatle, Botswana, and Nyae Nyae, Namibia, many of the residents are pro-vided with food, cash, and other goods by the Botswana and Namibian governments respectively. NGOs as well as researchers, development workers, film makers, and tourists provide assistance of various kinds as well. It is argued that the main means of livelihood in Nyae Nyae to-day is farming (xi). In fact, this is true for only a portion of the popu-lation; most households survive through diversified means, including support from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, the government of Namibia, private companies (including at least one mining company), tourists, some foraging, and transfers from relatives and friends. Simply be-cause one is engaged in autoethnography and employing collaborative methodologies does not exempt one from the need to check facts and present accurate information.

The nine articles in the book make a number of important points, including (1) the insufficiency of tourism alone as a means of alleviat-ing poverty (24–26), (2) the importance of looking at the interactions among researchers as well as the relationships between the observ-ers and the observed, (3) the need to determine whether our writing is intelligible to our informants, sources, and hosts, (4) the fact that members of communities often provide a diversity of opinions and per-



spectives on issues, not all of which are consistent with one another or with the views of outsiders, (5) the significance of perception, memory, and experience in doing ethnography, and (6) the necessity of examin-ing carefully one’s own assumptions when engaged in any sort of cul-tural representation. It could also usefully have made the point—but didn’t—that no one has the right to make cavalier assumptions or to critique the often well-meaning efforts of governments and NGOs with-out placing them in context and providing clear evidence. It is interest-ing to note, as Sonja Narunsky-Laden and Nate Kohn point out in their chapter, that most of the chapters are authored by women “who seem able to slide almost effortlessly into modes of experiential writing that are at once personalized and analytic, while demonstrating storytelling skills” (13). The same, in fact, could be said of the people and organi-zations who are so much a part of this book but whose voices are often heard only indirectly. Discussions around campfires are one way to ob-tain information and insights; so, too, are quantitative studies that can be used in the development of policies and programs that could, with careful implementation and full participation of all concerned, result in the enhancement of the well-being of both indigenous and nonindig-enous peoples.

We hope the authors of Writing in the San/d will take our suggestions to heart when considering their future collaborations. What they are trying to do is praiseworthy, but we feel it does not help their case to cast aspersions on other workers past and present who have also been assiduous in trying to get at the truth, to be of material help, or to assist in getting San voices heard.

• • • • •megan biesele helped found the Kalahari peoples Fund, an anthropological advocacy organization, in 1973 and currently serves as its director. From the 1970s to the present, she has done oral literature fieldwork with Ju/’hoan san communities in botswana and namibia while working in human rights and educational development in both countries. she has taught anthropology at universities in texas and south africa. currently she is preparing her collected texts in the Ju/’hoan language for use by scholars and for return to Ju/’hoan community education projects and digital archives.

robert k. hitchcock has worked in the Kalahari among san and other groups for more than three decades. he is a member of the board of directors of the Kalahari peoples Fund, which provides funding, advice, and assistance to the peoples of southern africa. he has done collaborative development and human rights work in botswana, lesotho, namibia, swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and half a dozen



other african countries. currently he is the chair of the Department of anthropology at Michigan state University and a board member of the international Work group for indigenous affairs.

Megan Biesele and Robert K. Hitchcock have just completed a new book, The Ju/’hoan San of Namibia since Independence: Development, Democracy, and Indigenous Voices in Namibia, to be published by Berghahn Books (Oxford).

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar, eds. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. New York: Berg, 2006.

320 pp. Paper, $34.95.

claudia briones, University of Buenos Aires and National Council for

Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET, Argentina)

As the result of a Wenner-Gren International Symposium held in Porde-none, Italy, March 7–13, 2003, this book is a significant step in the con-formation of the World Anthropologies Network (WAN), defined as “an experiment in global cooperation” in Lins Ribeiro and Escobar’s words (ix). The main goal of both endeavors is not only to examine and promote changes in the relationships among anthropologists in differ-ent locations but to analyze the dynamics and effects of what Tomas Gerholm (1995) has called the “world system of anthropology.” Rober-to Cardoso de Oliveira’s “peripheral anthropologies,” Esteban Krotz’s “anthropologies of the South” (conceived as a sort of “anthropologies without history” in Eric Wolf ’s terms), Anibal Quijano’s “coloniality of power,” Walter Mignolo’s “geopolitics of knowledge” and “diversali-ty,” Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “provincializing Europe project” are all taken as valuable antecedents to developing epistemological, theoretical, and political awareness of the conditions affecting our discipline’s process-es of knowledge production and communalization (Brow 1990).

The common purpose of analyzing the “world system of anthropol-ogy” is to reflect and comment critically on the genesis and impacts of power relationships and asymmetries within the anthropological com-munity at large. The aim of such recognition is not to voice resentments but to rethink contexts for open, reciprocally enriching exchanges and dialogues. One founding premise is that the consolidation of an “in-ternational anthropology” and the immersion of different academies in transnational processes cannot be seen as the result of simple processes of imposition, borrowing, adaptation, or contestation; they depend



instead on many factors, argue editors Lins Ribeiro and Escobar, “from nation building and national structures of alterity to institution build-ing and opportunities for exchanges” (9).

Amidst such a backdrop, each of the book’s chapters explore and highlight different incarnations and consequences of the unequal struc-turing of the system in terms of theory consumption, definition of re-search agendas, institution building, financial support, access to re-sources, language, interpersonal relationships, brain drain, or, as Paul Nchoji Nkwi conveys,“catch-22” predicaments for “Third World” col-leagues trapped in the cross fire of being suspected of partaking in the colonial heritage of universal academic standards while trying to inter-vene in the pressing public agenda of their nation-states. As a result, the editors identify, and find productive to keep in tension, two perspec-tives that traverse the volume. One approaches anthropology as a uni-fied field, a sort of unity, admitting diversity, but doubting that we can do without some universals or unified language—that is, if we want to “make communication, and hence collective action, possible,” as Susana Narotzky states (146). The other anchors itself in the idea of di-versality as a point of departure that opens up “new dialogic possibili-ties” and “other avenues of engagement” by taking into account “mul-tiple histories, trajectories, languages, conceptual frameworks, political commitments, experiences of transnationalism, and networking” (24).

For those of us anthropologists who read in English and have access to international books, it is both a luxury and a powerful tool in and of itself to have in a single piece critical explorations of the discipline’s developments in Japan (by Shinji Yamashita), Siberia (Nikolai Vakhtin), China (Josephine Smart), Mexico (Esteban Krotz), France (Eduardo Archetti), Spain (Susana Narotzky), Cameroon and Africa at large (Paul Nchoji Nkwi), United Kingdom (Eeva Berglund), Peru (Marisol de la Cadena), Australia (Sandy Toussaint), India (Shiv Visvanathan), and Brazil (Otávio Velho) along with a contextualizing introduction by the two editors and a final, insightful discussion by Johannes Fabien. And it is so for at least three main reasons.

First, it is as much useful as unusual to have a book that updates the readership on such a wide spectrum of case studies that illustrate the ways in which anthropological academies have been affected by the “empire-building” and “nation-building” processes of their respec-tive home countries. This variety is strengthened by the fact that the



sample includes academies that belong to the global south and also to the hegemonic core. Like Lins Ribeiro and Escobar, I agree with the importance of provincializing the United States (even if not just for Latin Americans) by envisioning “research projects focused on North American subjects” (12). Thus, the only expectation I find unaccom-plished is that precisely the United States becomes the missing “case study” here.

Second, the chapters’ grounded discussions put forward not simply the relationships between centers and peripheries from the authors’ situated locations; more importantly, they put forward the formation of peripheries within the centers and of centers within the peripher-ies for case studies transformed into loci of enunciation and commit-ment. In this regard, the decision to feature resident but non-national anthropologists as well as independent native scholars examining the trajectory of core academies enriches the collection. In the future, how-ever, for the “world anthropologies project” to be a truly dialogic en-terprise, having native anthropologists working within “main league” institutions can be an interesting and vital move to enrich these ongo-ing debates.

Last but not least is the consistency with which the participants share a concern with assessing how to democratize relationships among col-leagues—especially once we acknowledge that only a small number of the anthropologists of the world are fluent in English and have access to international books, and that many of those strategically located in both regards neither manage sociologically and academically margin-al languages nor consider it valuable to engage in dialogue with “mi-nor” academies. It may seem a flaw for those of us who live and work in the global South not to read or know “the classics” and keep updated. Conversely the lack of proficiency in local classics and readings that we consider “basic” more often than not goes unnoticed or is just seen as a negligible fault by those whose institutional affiliations allow them to recreate the global cannon in anthropology inadvertently. If outcomes of this sort can be seen as the result of the tension between what Lins Ribeiro and Escobar call “provincial cosmopolitanism” and “metropol-itan provincialism” (13), the book demonstrates that there is no smooth path leading to the pluralization of a discipline in need of revising re-lationships (not only “among” academies but also “within” them) and of reflecting critically upon the pecking order of knowledge (not simply



among colleagues but mainly between practitioners and interlocutors). Both challenges meet obstacles of their own, even if nested.

In the first instance, Otavio Velho points to the possibility that a na-ive definition of peripheral anthropologies as a necessary source of al-ternative ideas can foster neo-orientalist perspectives, and may even end up fostering the asymmetric, neocolonial, burdensome mandate of performing as the reservoir of resources to an alleged crisis of imagina-tion in the centers. In the second instance, Marisol de la Cadena con-vincingly argues that José María Arguedas could envision and engage in a multiple ontologism for and from Perú, because of the more explicit intercultural subjectivities, which are fostered in countries that have not spread an all-embracing modernity—and modernist epistemolo-gies and politics—evenly. Yet Arguedas’s intuition was not understood by his contemporary peers, and his “attempts to redirect mestizaje into interculturalidad” somehow were more a part of his literary world than of his ethnological pieces (203).

The incompleteness of modernist projects can be seen as a promis-ing starting point, even more so once we take in Eeva Berglund’s argu-ment that there are also multiple modernities within the West. In sum, the porosities and leakages of modernist projects of life and knowledge open up conditions for cognitive pluralism everywhere at this point of the world system. Yet, Marisol de la Cadena also states that “the dy-namics and hierarchies of hegemonic knowledge, continue to pervade the production of interculturalidad” (219).

To structure his final comments, Johannes Fabian reformulates the topic of the book as a series of questions about anthropology at large: Who? When? Where? What? How? So? Lins Ribeiro and Escobar add the “What for?” to the list. Arguedas’s example compels me to intro-duce another question much more concerned with Fabian’s statement that “we have been living with fundamental contradictions between dis-course and research practices” (282). Why? The “why” I propose here does not address “us” just as bearers of an authorized even if deceiv-ing universal knowledge—a topic that the book thoroughly discusses and develops. It addresses “us” in our heterogeneities—as Archetti’s contribution so suggestively does for the French academy, and other chapters do as well—to highlight other dimensions of anthropological diversity and diversality.

By heterogeneities, I do not simply refer to differences in political



persuasions or in the visibility and prestige that colleagues acquire ac-cording to their focus on international or national research agendas. I am mainly concerned with bringing into focus the effects of our being actors and agents of complex, broader scenarios; and of our becoming implicated by asymmetries where the academic/nonacademic divide is just one of the cleavages in force. In these arenas, the nested rela-tionships and interpellations that shape our subjectivities (subjection, “we” call it) render illusory the very “we, anthropologists” that each of us uses to bring home safely our narratives of the self, or to install our profession strategically vis-à-vis varied audiences (subjectification, “we” used to say).

My suggestion of decentering the “we, anthropologists” even fur-ther, thus is less a call to give it up than a maneuver to expand the scope of the “why” question in such a way that it might even allow us to (re)articulate our multiple belongings with more awareness: Why is it that, as one of our sociological common understandings asserts, not always and not any subordination (economic, political, or epistemic) can transform itself into an antagonism, productively and explicitly in-grained into academic discourse and practice?

For such a transformation to operate, the open-ended character of modernist projects seems to work just as a necessary condition. But to produce grounded knowledge, we need to move further, using “he-gemony” as a heuristic and not as a (self )explanatory concept. So, the pressing research agenda still is, for all of us, what factors can work as sufficient conditions.

Once we take into account the complexity of the scenarios and sit-uations in and against which “we” become and think of ourselves as actors or agents, I cannot be confident that we anthropologists of the South are automatically better equipped than those of the North to democratize the anthropological episteme. Perhaps we simply are in a better position to unlearn our privileges because we can transfer to northern colleagues a set of claims that our interlocutors often posit to us. But these are not sufficient conditions either, it seems.

In any event, even if the mere enunciation of tensions and antago-nisms does not guarantee in itself the occurrence of expected or de-manded transformations, bringing diagnoses and discussions of this sort into the open is a necessary as much as productive step toward the envisioning of a more emancipatory politics (academic included). In



this regard, the authors have put the ball in motion with sophisticat-ed anthropological skill. Now we all can enjoy the liberating intradis-ciplinary and transnational game of bringing some of “our” skeletons out of the closet.

• • • • •claudia briones is a professor of anthropology at the University of buenos aires and a researcher for the national council for scientific and technological research (conicet) in argentina. her primary research areas are indigenous movements, rights, and policy; differentiated citizenships and national formations of alterity in argentina; kinship, knowledge, and politics of the Mapuche people. her most recent publications include Contemporary Perspectives on the Native Peoples of Pampa, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego: Living on the Edge (coedited with J. lanata, 2002), Metacultura del estado-nación y estado de la metacultura (2005), and Cartografías Argentinas: Políticas indigenistas y formaciones provinciales de alteridad (editor, 2005).

references

Brow, James. 1990. “Notes on Community, Hegemony, and the Uses of the Past.” Anthro-pological Quarterly 63 (1): 1–6.

Gerholm, Thomas. 1995. “Sweden: Central Ethnology, Peripheral Anthropology.” In Fieldwork and Footnotes: Studies in the History of European Anthropology, ed. H. F. Vermeu-len and A. A. Roldán, 159–70. London: Routledge.


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