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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 1,
February 2005 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research. All rights reserved
0011-3204/2005/4601-0004$10.00
CollaborativeEthnography andPublic Anthropology
by Luke Eric Lassiter
Collaborative ethnographythe collaboration of researchers
andsubjects in the production of ethnographic textsoffers us
apowerful way to engage the public with anthropology. As one ofmany
academic/applied approaches, contemporary collaborativeethnography
stems from a well-established historical tradition
ofcollaboratively produced texts that are often overlooked.
Femi-nist and postmodernist efforts to recenter ethnography along
dia-logical lines further contextualize this historically situated
col-laborative practice. The goals of collaborative ethnography
(bothhistorical and contemporary) are now powerfully converging
withthose of a public anthropology that pulls together academic
andapplied anthropology in an effort to serve humankind more
di-rectly and more immediately.
l u k e e r i c l a s s i t e r is Associate Professor of
Anthropologyat Ball State University, currently on leave and
teaching at theUniversity of North Carolina, Greensboro (his
mailing address:2633 Walker Ave., Greensboro, NC 27403, U.S.A.
[[email protected]]). Born in 1968, he was educated at
RadfordUniversity (B.S., 1990) and the University of North Carolina
atChapel Hill (Ph.D., 1995). He has conducted fieldwork in the
Ki-owa community of southwestern Oklahoma and the AfricanAmerican
community of Muncie, Indiana, and has published ThePower of Kiowa
Song: A Collaborative Ethnography (Tucson:University of Arizona
Press, 1998); with Ralph Kotay and ClydeEllis, The Jesus Road:
Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns(Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002); with Hurley Good-all, Elizabeth Campbell,
Michelle Natasya Johnson, and others,The Other Side of Middletown:
Exploring Muncies AfricanAmerican Community (Walnut Creek: AltaMira
Press, 2004); andThe Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography
(Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, in press). The present
paper was sub-mitted 19 vi 03 and accepted 10 vi 04.
While sustaining our fundamentals, probing thedeep mysteries of
the human species and the humansoul, we must press outward,
mobilizing our workand ourselves to make a difference beyond the
disci-pline and the academy.
james l . peacock
In his often cited essay The Future of Anthropology,James L.
Peacock (1997:9) set forth three possibilities foranthropology in
the coming century: extinction,hanging on as [a] living dead, or a
flourishing redi-rection of our field into a prominent position in
society.Focusing on this latter scenario, he argued that we
mustdirect our efforts toward a renewed emphasis on anthro-pologys
relevance to wider publics.
Peacocks essay marked a revitalization of earlier dis-ciplinary
conversations about how to make a differencebeyond the discipline
and the academy. As anthropol-ogists had in the 1960s and 1970s, we
once again debatedhow to bridge theory and practice and craft a
more ac-tivist and engaged anthropology. Indeed, Peacocks
threescenarios for anthropologys future echoed the threestrategies
proposed by Dell Hymes in Reinventing An-thropology (1969:3948)
almost three decades earlier: toretrench (i.e., to reduce
anthropology to the study of pre-history, the primitive), to let go
(i.e., to be absorbedby other disciplines), or to relax (i.e., to
reconsider an-thropologys organization and to reconfigure its
trajec-tories). The issue is not between general anthropologyand
fragmentation, wrote Hymes (p. 47), but betweena bureaucratic
general anthropology, whose latent func-tion is the protection of
academic comfort and privilege,and a personal general anthropology,
whose function isthe advancement of knowledge and the welfare
ofmankind.
Many anthropologists, past and present, have an-swered the
challenge to redirect and reinvent anthro-pology along such lines
as those articulated by Hymes,Peacock, and others (see, e.g.,
Sanday 1976). Some, how-ever, have met these arguments with
ambivalence. Inparticular, many applied anthropologists have
wonderedif such invention and reinvention is even necessary
giventhe continuing vigor of its applied dimension. MerrillSinger
(2000), for example, contends that the latest ac-ademic effort to
invent a public anthropology is more areiteration of hierarchical
divisions between academicand applied anthropologists than a more
broadly con-ceived proactive anthropology. The avenue for
ap-proaching these goals, writes Singer (p. 7), is
throughstrengthening, valuing and more fully integrating
ap-plied/practicing anthropology, rather than inventing newlabels
that usurp the role of public work long played byan already
existing sector of our discipline.
Singer is right. A perusal of past and recent issues ofHuman
Organization or Practicing Anthropology willquickly put to rest any
doubt that anthropologists areactively engaged in the public domain
both as practi-tioners and as theoreticians. But Peacock, Hymes,
andthe many others who have written about redirecting
andreinventing anthropology are also right. Paradoxically,
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the redirection of anthropology is still important for thevery
reasons put forth by Singer: anthropologistspar-ticularly academic
anthropologistscontinue to strugglewith reconciling anthropologys
applied, public, and ac-tivist roots with the disciplines elite
positioning in theacademy. Such a castelike assumption, writes
Hymes(2002:xxiii), ill befits a field that claims to oppose
in-equality. We teach against prejudice on the basis of
race,language, and culture. Despite our praise of fieldwork,have we
preserved an unspoken prejudice in favor of our-selves as
literati?
To be sure, the crux of the problem is primarily aca-demic
(Basch et al. 1999:320). After all, we train bothfuture academic
anthropologists and future applied an-thropologists in the halls of
academe (cf. Basch et al.1999). Yet the larger problem remains the
integration oftheory and practice, research and training, the
joining ofacademic and applied anthropologists, uninhibited by
he-gemony, in a common project, and the engagement
ofanthropologists with wider publics within and outsideof academia
(cf. Hill 2000). As Peggy Sanday (1998) sug-gests, merging
anthropology with public currents ismore than a focus for research;
it is a paradigm for learn-ing, teaching, research, action, and
practice within thefield of anthropology.
Robert Borofsky (2002) suggests that this larger projectaffirms
our responsibility, as scholars and citizens, tomeaningfully
contribute to communities beyond theacademyboth local and
globalthat make the study ofanthropology possible. Anthropologists
such as PhilipBourgois (1995), Paul Farmer (1999), Laura Nader
(2001),and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2000), as well as a host ofothers
(see, e.g., MacClancy 2002), have provided com-pelling cases for
what this public anthropology shouldlook like. From human rights to
violence, from the traf-ficking of body parts to the illegal drug
trade, from prob-lem solving to policy making, from the global to
the localand back again, the issues informing this evolving
projectto merge anthropology with public currents have
provendiverse and multifaceted.
An important component of this (re)emergent publicanthropology
is a heightened (re)focus on collaborationwith the publics with
which we work (cf. Moses 2004).Collaboration has of course long
been an important partof the applied and public work of
anthropologists (see,e.g., Stull and Schensul 1987), and activist
and appliedresearch strategies such as participatory action
researchhave long recognized a responsibility to publics outsidethe
academy (see, e.g., Kemmis and McTaggart 2000). Allthe same,
however, collaborative research with researchsubjects is only
recently entering onto anthropologyscenter stage as a necessary
condition of both applied andacademic work. We no longer just
choose to engage incollaborative research with our subjects;
collaboration isincreasingly conditioning not only our advocacy but
ourso-called pure research as well. In the wake of the
recentTierney affair, for example, the American Anthropolog-ical
Associations (2002) El Dorado Task Force singledout collaboration
as follows:
The El Dorado Task Force insists that the anthropol-ogy of
indigenous peoples and related communitiesmust move toward
collaborative models, in whichanthropological research is not
merely combinedwith advocacy, but inherently advocative in that
re-search is, from its outset, aimed at material, sym-bolic, and
political benefits for the research popula-tion, as its members
have helped to define these. . . .Collaborative research involves
the side-by-sidework of all parties in a mutually beneficial
researchprogram. All parties are equal partners in the enter-prise,
participating in the development of the re-search design and in
other major aspects of the pro-gram as well, working together
toward a commongoal. Collaborative research involves more
thangiving back in the form of advocacy and attentionto social
needs. Only in the collaborative model isthere a full give and
take, where at every step of theresearch knowledge and expertise is
shared. In col-laborative research, the local community will
defineits needs, and will seek experts both within andwithout to
develop research programs and actionplans. In the process of
undertaking research onsuch community-defined needs, outside
researchersmay very well encounter knowledge that is of inter-est
to anthropological theory. However, attention tosuch interests, or
publication about them, must it-self be developed within the
collaborative frame-work, and may have to be set aside if they are
not ofequal concern to all the collaborators. In collabora-tive
research, local experts work side by side withoutside researchers,
with a fully dialogic exchange ofknowledge (that would not, of
course, preclude con-ventional forms of training).
While some anthropologists were quick to dismiss thetask forces
recommendations (see, e.g., Gross and Platt-ner 2002), its call to
pull advocacy and research into thesame stream nonetheless marked a
widening agreementamong anthropologists that collaborative research
is avaluable approach to human understanding.
This essay focuses on one component of the largereffort in
collaborative researchcollaborative ethnog-raphy, defined here as
the collaboration of researchersand subjects in the production of
ethnographic texts,both fieldwork and writing.1 In previous essays
I havesought to illustrate that while ethnographic fieldwork is,by
definition, collaborative, collaborative ethnographyextends
fieldwork collaboration more systematicallyinto the writing of the
actual ethnography (see Lassiter1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
2004a, b; Lassiter et al.2002, 2004). In this essay, however, I
wish to establisha simple, more epistemological point: that
collaborativeethnography, as one of many academic/applied
ap-proaches, offers us a powerful way to engage the public
1. I develop these themes in much greater detail in a
forthcomingbook (Lassiter 2005), parts of which appear here with
the permissionof the University of Chicago Press. I thank the
anonymous review-ers who patiently provided insightful comments and
suggestionsfor improving this essay.
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lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 85
with anthropology one field project, one ethnographictext at a
time. In what follows I suggest, first, that con-temporary
collaborative ethnographic efforts stem froma well-established
historical tradition of collaborativelyproduced texts that, as
founded in part on activist tra-jectories, are often overlooked in
our current discussionsof collaborative research; second, that
feminist and post-modernist efforts to recenter ethnography along
dialog-ical lines further contextualize this historically
situatedcollaborative practice; and, third, that the goals of
col-laborative ethnography (both historical and contempo-rary) are
now powerfully converging with those of a pub-lic anthropology that
pulls together academic andapplied anthropology in a common effort
to serve hu-mankind more directly and more immediately.
Precedents for a Collaborative Ethnography
The co-production of ethnographic texts has a long his-tory in
anthropology. Historians of anthropology haveelaborated a number of
important collaborations be-tween ethnographers and their
interlocutors in the fieldsdevelopmental yearscollaborations that
built upon andextended the collaborative requisite of fieldwork
into thecollaborative writing of ethnographic texts. The well-known
collaborations between Franz Boas and GeorgeHunt immediately come
to mind (see, e.g., Boas andHunt 1895; cf. Berman 1996). So do the
collaborationsbetween the French anthropologist/missionary
MauriceLeenhardt and the natives of New Caledonia (see
Clifford1982), Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas (see
Red-field and Villa Rojas 1934), Sol Tax and Santiago Yach(see Tax
1979), H. Russell Bernard and Jesus Salinas Ped-raza (see Bernard
and Pedraza 1989), and a host of othercollaborative projects
carried out throughout the twen-tieth century (see Sanjek 1993).
What I have in mindhere, however, is to elaborate a stream of
collaborativelyinspired works that preceded and followed these
better-known projects and have gone mostly unnoticed by
con-temporary ethnographers: those of the earliest Ameri-canist
tradition, in which American anthropologists andtheir Native
American collaborators together coresearch-ed and, in some cases,
coconceived and cowrote theirtexts. While I agree with George E.
Marcus and MichaelM. J. Fischer (1986:viii) that American
anthropologysstill resonating experimental moment, which centers
di-alogue and collaboration in both ethnographic fieldworkand
writing, reflects a historical development in whichanthropology in
the United States seems to be synthe-sizing the three national
traditions of British, French,and American anthropology, I also
agree with Regna Dar-nell (2001) that among the strongest
precedents for col-laborative practice emerged within the
Americanisttradition.
The development of American anthropology was in-timately tied to
the study of American Indians (see, e.g.,Mead and Bunzel 1960).
Americanist ethnography con-sequently developed in close
collaboration with Amer-ican Indian people (cf. Bruner 1986).
Indeed, one cannot
consider the development of collaboration as a centralcomponent
of Americanist ethnography without ac-knowledging how American
Indian collaborators helpedshapeat times as active participantsthe
earliest eth-nographic descriptions of Native America
(Liberty1978a). It is noteworthy, then, that what is often
con-sidered as the first true ethnography of American In-dians
(Tooker 1978:19)Lewis Henry Morgans Leagueof the Ho-de-no-sau-nee,
or Iroquois (1851)makes ex-plicit reference to the collaboration
that engendered itswriting. Its dedication reads: To Ha-sa-no-an-da
(Ely S.Parker), A Seneca Indian, This Work, The Materials ofWhich
Are the Fruit of our Joint Researches, Is Inscribed:In
Acknowledgment of the Obligations, and in Testi-mony of the
Friendship of the Author. Morgan (1851:xi) echoes this dedication
in the books preface, writingthat Parkers intelligence, and
accurate knowledge ofthe institutions of his forefathers, have made
his friendlyservices a peculiar privilege.
As Morgan so clearly acknowledged, the League wouldhave taken a
very different form without Ely Parkersactive participation. A
lawyer by training, Morgan orig-inally became interested in the
Iroquois because of hisinvolvement in the Grand Order of the
Iroquois, a secretfraternal order organized by him and friends in
Aurora,New York, and patterned after Iroquois cultural and
po-litical institutions. In an effort to found the order
onrationalism and authenticity (in contrast to earlier
mensorganizations, such as the American Tammany societies,which
were based more on fictional representations ofIndians), Morgan
turned to scientific investigation of Na-tive American peoples.
Collaboration with Indians wascrucial for authenticating this new
scientific investiga-tion and, in turn, the Order (see Deloria
1998: 7194).When Morgan met Ely Parker in a bookstore in the
early1840s, he immediately took the opportunity to involveParker in
his scientific work, and Parker enthusiasticallyagreed (Tooker
1978).
Parker initially facilitated Morgans access to Iroquoisleaders,
serving as an interpreter, but over time he cameto provide
firsthand knowledge and help organize inter-views on the Tonawanda
Reservation (see Fenton 1962).As Elisabeth Tooker (1978:23)
writes:
All the evidence indicates this was a collaboration.. . . that
Parker was not only Morgans interpreterbut also provided him with
information as he knewit and, when he did not know it, inquired of
knowl-edgeable people at Tonawanda, a task made rela-tively easy
for him by his personal and family con-nections. . . . The
collaboration proved advantageousto both; Morgan not only called on
Parker for infor-mation and other aid, asking him to attend
meetingsof the Order, but also Parker called on Morgan forhelp,
such as asking him to come to Washington inthe spring of 1846 to
testify on Iroquois politicalorganization.
While Parker eventually went on to join the UnionArmy, serve as
General Ulysses S. Grants military sec-
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86 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005
retary, and become Grants Commissioner of Indian Af-fairs
(Tooker 1978), his collaboration with Morgan servedas a significant
impetus for Morgans subsequent writ-ings on American Indians in
general (see, e.g., Morgan1871) and on the Iroquois in particular
(see, e.g., Morgan1858), in which he continued to encourage a
kinderfeeling towards the Indian, founded upon a truer knowl-edge
of his civil and domestic institutions, and of hiscapabilities for
future elevation (Morgan 1851:ix).
Morgan went on to focus on broader theories of kinshipand
evolution which, of course, had an enormous impacton the
development of American anthropology (cf.Tooker 1992), but his
first ethnography should not beunderestimated. Not only was it
characterized as thebest general book on the Iroquois long after
its firstpublication (see Fenton 1962:v) but it helped shape theway
Americanist ethnographersin direct contact andcollaboration with
Indiansapproached the salvaging ofIndian cultures as a scientific
undertaking (cf. Hallowell2002 [1960]:3843). Major John Wesley
Powell, the foun-der of the Bureau of American Ethnology, later
wrote thatMorgans League was the first scientific account of
anIndian tribe ever given to the world (1880:115), and
hisappreciation of it was more than just a passing thing.Morgan
deeply influenced Powells thinking; indeed, hiswritings (esp.
Morgan 1877) helped to establish the Bu-reau of American Ethnology
(BAE) within an evolution-ary framework (see Baker 1998:3845;
Hinsley 1981:11343). His collaborative approach with Parker
inLeague, however, influenced the way Americanist eth-nographers
went about describing (and salvaging) NativeAmerica. With the
bureaus establishment, Americanethnography as a scientific genre
was systematized, andso was collaboration with Native American
informants.Consequently, the direct involvement of these
nativecollaboratorsmany of whom also became BAE
ethnol-ogistspowerfully authorized the work undertaken bythe bureau
in many of the same ways that authenticatedthe League and Morgans
Grand Order of the Iroquois.
But the story is more complicated than this (see Dar-nell 1974,
1998; Hinsley 1981; Deloria 1998:9094). Al-though Morgans and
eventually the bureaus brand ofsalvage ethnography placed American
Indians firmly inthe past (by describing what were perceived to be
un-changing beliefs and practices that American civilizationwould
eventually subsume), involving Native Americanpeoples in the
construction of ethnography also meant,contradictorily, often
engaging with Indian politicalstruggles in the present. As Philip
J. Deloria (1998:84)writes about Morgans collaboration with Ely and
otherParker family members:
The relationships that developed between New Con-federacy
[a.k.a. Grand Order of the Iroquois] mem-bers and the Parkers and
other Seneca people tookthe group far from the distant abstractions
of fiction-alized Indianness and into the free-for-all of
Indian-American political conflict. Ely Parker had traveledto
Albany to continue a long struggle being wagedby the Tonawanda
Seneca, who, under the terms of
an imposed treaty, were scheduled to abandon theirreservation by
1846. The New Confederacys subse-quent involvement with the Senecas
foreshadowedwhat has since become something of an anthropo-logical
tradition: political activism on behalf of thenative peoples who
serve as the objects of study.
Such activist tendencies, spawned by direct collabora-tion with
native interlocutors, did indeed foreshadow ananthropological
tradition, one that extended right intothe Bureau of American
Ethnology.
While Powell originally established the bureau to in-form and
influence Indian policy and arguably it neverreally did so, in
practice the activism of its individualethnologists often
contradicted what came to be its of-ficial apolitical party line
(Hinsley 1981). James Mooney,for instance, caused Powell constant
headaches (Hin-sley 1976:23). In his Ghost Dance Religion (1896)
hehelped to fuel growing public outrage over the WoundedKnee
Massacre of 1890, going so far as to suggest, to thechagrin of his
superiors, that the religious beliefs andpractices for which
Indians had been murdered were inthe same league as Christian
beliefs and practices (Hin-sley 1976:2325). Mooney did not stop
there, however.Throughout his career as a BAE ethnologist he
defendedthe rights of Indian people, often at great cost to his
owncareer (cf. Gleach 2002). When he helped the Kiowas,Comanches,
and Kiowa Apaches officially organize theirpeyote religion as the
Native American Church, for ex-ample, he was barred from working on
the Kiowa-Co-manche-Apache reservation ever again (see Moses
1984:20621). This political activism on behalf of the nativepeoples
who serve as the objects of study (Deloria 1998:84) was a direct
product of Mooneys ethnographic workon the Kiowas, Calendar History
of the Kiowa Indians(1898).
One can hardly believe that Mooney would have goneto such
lengths, putting his own career in jeopardy, with-out a deep
personal commitment developed while sys-tematically encountering,
living among, and engagingwith Indian people. The same could be
said for manyother BAE ethnologists, such as Frank Hamilton
Cush-ing, J. Owen Dorsey, Alice Fletcher, Francis La Flesche,and
James R. Walker (Lindberg 2002). Long before Bron-islaw Malinowski
insisted that anthropologists moveoff the verandah and into the
everyday lives of thenatives (see Stocking 1983), many BAE
ethnologists hadmoved into Native communities and were
participatingin peoples everyday lives, doing fieldwork in
collabo-ration with Indian informants, and, in some cases,
fol-lowing in the tradition of Morgan, acting on behalf oftheir
subjects. Although political activism was off thebeaten path of
mainstream BAE practice (cf. Darnell1998), its presence calls
attention to a deeper and morecomplex ethnographic collaboration
between ethnogra-phers and native informants that, though vital,
was oftenveiled in many early BAE texts.
The texts produced by the Bureau of American Eth-nology between
1879 (when it was founded as a branchof the Smithsonian
Institution) and 1964 (when it was
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lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 87
terminated) (Judd 1967) represent perhaps the largest sin-gle
corpus of literature ever produced on Native NorthAmericans (see
Smithsonian Institution 1971). For themost part, these works
employed the authoritative, nor-mative style that was the writing
tradition of the day,and their aim was the objective documentation
of NativeAmerican beliefs and practices.
Though limited in some ways, the work is immenselyexpansive and
impressiveoverwhelming, actuallyand unmatched in its depth and
coverage. The unwav-ering commitment of BAE ethnologists to their
craft(and, in many cases, to their Indian subjects) is imme-diately
apparent. So, too, is the role of Indian collabo-rators in
constructing these texts: the close work of BAEethnologists and
American Indians is evidenced by manyethnologists references to
native collaborators. It is oftenunclear, however, to what extent
these Native Americaninformants provided direct assistance or,
indeed, con-tributed their own writings.
Some ethnologists, however, delivered more clearlycollaborative
ethnographies. Chief among them wasFranz Boas, of course, who
worked with Hunt and othercollaborators in several other non-BAE
texts as well. Alsoprominent were the efforts of the BAE
ethnologist AliceCunningham Fletcher, who, like Boas, explicitly
ac-knowledged the role of her assistants (see, e.g., Fletcher1904).
Fletcher is perhaps best known for her collabo-rative efforts with
Francis La Flesche, with whom shewrote The Omaha Tribe (Fletcher
and La Flesche 1911).Both Fletcher and La Flesche were BAE
ethnologistswhen their manuscript appeared, but their
relationshiphad originally begun with La Flesche serving
asFletchers field assistant and interpreter. As their worktogether
intensified, so did their relationship: La Fleschebegan referring
to Fletcher as mother, and by the early1890s she had adopted him as
her legal son (see Liberty1976, 1978b; cf. Lurie 1966, Mark 1988).
The professionalcollaboration that would eventually produce The
OmahaTribe began when, as Ridington and Hastings (1997:1718)
write,
it became obvious, first to him and then to her, that[La
Flesche] was a partner rather than simply a son,an interpreter, or
an informant. The matter came toa head with her plans to publish a
substantial paperentitled A Study of Omaha Indian Music.
Francis,himself an accomplished Omaha singer and thesource of much
of her information, managed to con-vince his adopted mother that
his part in the workshould be recognized in print. . . . By the
time oftheir most comprehensive publication, The OmahaTribe, in
1911, Francis had achieved the status ofcoauthor.
Significantly, La Flesches negotiation of his role in theproject
was as much a matter of the native interlocutorsdemanding agency as
about the anthropologists givingover control. La Flesches
insistence on being acknowl-edged was in fact to foreshadow native
consultants in-sistence that anthropologists and others include
their
names, voices, and contributions in texts about them, ademand
that gathered power throughout the twentiethcentury.
Although La Flesche and Fletchers coauthored man-uscript was an
exceptional case (Liberty 1976), it markedthe growing involvement
of Native American ethnolo-gists in the Bureau of American
Ethnology and othermuseum-based institutions. To be sure, several
Ameri-can Indian ethnologists had been collaborating with thebureau
and other institutions for many years prior to theappearance of
Fletcher and La Flesches book and thesubsequent appearance of La
Flesches own reports (see,e.g., La Flesche 1921). John N. B.
Hewitt, for example, amixed-blood Tuscarora Indian who worked with
theBAE ethnologist Erminnie Smith, took over Smithswork after her
death in 1886 (Darnell 1998:7071). LikeLa Flesche, Hewitt
contributed several of his own reports(see, e.g., Hewitt 1903,
1928).
To put it simply, the collaborations between NativeAmerican
ethnologists and other ethnologists, in partic-ular, and with
institutions like the Bureau of AmericanEthnology, in general, are
significant to appreciating therole of collaboration in the early
development of Amer-icanist ethnography, but they do not tell the
whole story.Indeed, focusing solely on ethnologist-assistant
relation-ships or white-Indian coauthored texts underestimatesthe
actual role of collaboration in these early institu-tions. As
Darnell (1998:8085) points out, collaborationin the bureau was a
complicated, multifaceted affair.Many other peoplesuch as
missionaries, former furtraders, and diplomatsalso had intimate
knowledge ofIndian languages and cultures, and they also
collaboratedwith the bureau to produce its reports, bulletins,
andother manuscripts. One need only recall the
well-knowncollaborations between Franz Boas and James Teit,
aScotsman who had an extensive knowledge of severalNorthwest tribes
(see, e.g., Teit 1930). Native Americanethnologists like Hewitt and
La Flesche, it turns out,were just some of the many kinds of
semiprofessionalswho had close associations with American Indian
peo-ples, knew native languages, and contributed theirunique skills
and knowledge to the bureaus goal of col-lecting Native American
beliefs and practices before theypresumably disappeared
forever.
This is not to diminish the role of Native Americansin the
bureau or other museum-based institutionsonlyto suggest that, while
clearly seeking to elaborate morefully a native point of view
through the use of knowl-edgeable collaborators, the bureau was not
interested inusing these collaborations for critiquing Western
societyand culture (although many individual ethnologists,
likeMooney, certainly did), much less negotiating ethnog-raphys
ultimate goals. This would come later as an-thropologists became
much more intimately and criti-cally aware of the colonially
derived separation betweenthose doing the representing (the Self)
and those provid-ing the firsthand data for these representations
(theOther)a separation that became all the more pro-nounced as
anthropology became a professional disci-pline more firmly situated
in the academy (cf. Fabian
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88 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005
1983). Whereas this critique became prominent alongwith a more
explicitly expressed critical anthropology inthe 1970s and 1980s,
it had its beginnings much sooner:with the emergence of American
Indian life historiesunder the influence of Paul Radin.
Beginning with his 1913 Journal of American Folkloreessay
Personal Reminiscences of a Winnebago Indian,continuing with the
publication in 1920 of Autobiog-raphy of a Winnebago Indian, and
culminating with theappearance of Crashing Thunder in 1926 (1913,
1920,1926), Radins earliest experiments with Winnebago bi-ography
marked the beginning of truly rigorous workin the field of
biography by professional anthropologists(Langness 1965:7). Indeed,
to this day Radins work withwhat came to be generally known as life
history is stillwidely regarded as among the most significant
efforts tomerge individual experience with ethnographic
descrip-tions of culture (Darnell 2001:13770).
Radins fieldwork among the Winnebago was carriedout
intermittently between 1908 and 1913 (see Du Bois1960), and in 1911
and 1912 he did ethnography underthe auspices of the Bureau of
American Ethnology. In thebureaus twenty-seventh annual report
(published in1923) he supplemented his exhaustive description of
theWinnebago tribe with numerous first-person narratives(see Radin
1923). Two of the collaborators who providedtheir first-person
accounts were Radins principal in-formants (Radin 1926:xxi), Jasper
Blowsnake and hisyounger brother Sam Blowsnake, both of whom he
reliedon considerably to construct his subsequent
Winnebago(auto)biographies (Krupat 1983). Radin used Jasper
Blow-snakes autobiography in Personal Reminiscences of aWinnebago
Indian, in which, being a student of Boas,he followed the standard
Boasian procedure for repre-senting native texts: Jasper Blowsnakes
description ofhis life, written in his native language, was
presentedalong with the English translation. In Autobiography ofa
Winnebago Indian, based on Sam Blowsnakes auto-biography, Radin
deviated from his previous approach:he did not include a native
text in Winnebago (but didinclude 351 notes in this short, 91-page
account). InCrashing Thunder, Radin went even farther,
expandingAutobiography of a Winnebago Indian to make the textmore
artfully literary and readable (Krupat 1983).
While Radins approach to life history was straight-forwardto
describe a life in relation to the social groupin which he [the
subject] had grown up (1920:2)hisappreciation for and
representation of life history as textwas not as simple. He no
doubt recognized the problemsand limitations of the conventional
approach to nativetexts (Vidich 1966)that language and story were
not inthemselves facts but a textualization of facts which,of
course, could yield multiple and divergent interpre-tations (Krupat
1983:xixv). In Personal Reminiscencesof a Winnebago Indian, for
example, he (1913:294)briefly warned of the problems inherent in
constructingand translating a life history, and in his Method
andTheory of Ethnology (1933:1112) he elaborated on
theseproblems:
In science we stand beside or, if you will, above thefacts. We
are not a part of them. But we are a part ofthe cultural facts we
are describing in a very realway. The moment we stand beside or
above them,we do them injury; we transvaluate and make themfacts of
another order. In short, they are reduced tofacts of the physical
world. The disadvantages atten-dant upon being an integral part of
the phenomenonwe are describing must seem a fatal defect to
thescientific mind. Unquestionably it is. But it is inher-ent in
cultural phenomena and nothing can verywell be done about it. This
defect is not being cor-rected by treating them as physical facts.
Objectiv-ity, in the sense in which it exists in the natural
andphysical sciences, is impossible for culture history,except,
perhaps, in the domain of material culture.For culture, the ideal
of permanency and durabilitytoward which a description of the
physical world in-evitably strives is unattainable. The more
culturehistorians and ethnologists attempt it, the more sus-pect
their descriptions become. There are too manyimponderabilia, and
these are too intimately con-nected with its very life blood.
This position was critical to Radins approach to repre-senting
individual experience through biography (cf. Dia-mond 1981).
Although anthropologists such as Boas andMalinowski had relied
heavily on individual collabora-tors to elaborate the facts of
culture, Radin argued thatthese individual collaborators and their
experiences werelargely absent from ethnographic accounts because
ofethnologists overzealous attempts to quantify and typifyculture.
Individual experience was too messy for them,argued Radin,
(1933:42), too subjective, and as a conse-quence the method of
describing a culture without anyreference to the individual except
in so far as he is anexpression of rigidly defined cultural forms
manifestlyproduces a distorted picture.
Just as Radins Crashing Thunder had marked a sig-nificant
turning point in the use of life history, his ar-gument for more
firmly situating individual experienceat the center of ethnographic
inquiry marked an ex-tremely significant turning point in
Americanist eth-nography itself. What it required was a more
sustainedfocus on collaboration with native interlocutors,
non-anthropologists with differing worldviews and perspec-tives who
had their own unique experiences to presentin an ethnography that
was to be clearly separated fromthe personality of the ethnologist
(see Radin 1933:87129). Arguably, the Americanist focus on
presentingnative texts in their original form did just this.
Broadlydefined, many of these texts consisted, for example, ofthe
myths, stories, and legends relayed by native inform-ants; more
narrowly defined, many of them were writtenby native assistants in
their native language and trans-lated, transcribed, and/or edited
by the ethnologist. FranzBoas, of course, became the most widely
recognized pro-ponent of this latter approach, with the Boas-Hunt
col-laborations representing its quintessential illustration.As
Briggs and Bauman (1999) point out, in collaborations
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lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 89
such as this one the subjects of inquiry were largely cho-sen by
the ethnologist. Although Radin (1933:114) ad-mitted complicity,
his focus on the life experience of hiscollaborators helped to
usher in an innovative way ofconceptualizing the structure of
ethnography as basedmore on the informants choices of story,
narrative de-vice, style, and flow (see Darnell 2001:13770).
Within American Indian studies, Radins focus on in-dividual
experience in culture set the stage for subse-quent life histories
that shifted away from the psychol-ogy of the individualas
articulated by Edward Sapir(1934)and toward the relativistic
representation of ex-perience. Radins approach also set the stage
for moreintensive long-term collaborations between ethnogra-phers
and native consultants that are perhaps unmatchedin any other
subfield of ethnographic inquiry (see Darnell2001:10570).
While the collaborative model for constructing life his-tories
had a profound effect on the production of(auto)biography, it also
fostered a more general collabo-rative approach to Native American
ethnography. AsDarnell (2001:208) writes, The dialogic potentials
of lifehistory discourse are considerable, although the genresof
ethnographic production that develop them havemoved, in practice,
beyond life history in the narrowsense. Contemporary Americanists
reflect teachingsfrom multiple Native specialists, emphasizing
sharingand transmitting of knowledge rather than narrative
au-thority jealously guarded by the anthropologist. Amer-ican
Indian studies are therefore replete with collabor-atively
conceived and dialogically informed ethno-graphic projects (not
always coauthored) such as the useof Yuchi focus groups to
construct community-basedtexts (Jackson 2003), the bringing
together of museumresources to document a local chapter of the
NativeAmerican Church at the request of Osage peyotists(Swan 2002),
the use of a community-based editorialboard to construct a locally
centered text on the Bay AreaAmerican Indian community (Lobo et al.
2002), the useof collaborative methodologies and textual strategies
byan anthropologist and his Kiowa relatives (Palmer 2003),and even
the collaboration of a university press with theSalish Kootenai
tribal government to produce a tribaloral history (Gary Dunham,
personal communication,January 3, 2002).
Increasingly, of course, all ethnographers are findingthemselves
addressing issues of collaboration. Indeed, eth-nographers in and
outside of the Americanist tradition(e.g., the British and French)
have also long dealt withthese issues (see Sanjek 1993). Yet
something uniquelyAmerican is at work in the history of
collaboration in theAmericanist tradition. Americans as a whole, of
course,have long struggled with reconciling the differences
be-tween the ideal of equality, on the one hand, and the veryreal
consequences of living in an inequitable society strat-ified along
the lines of race, class, and gender, on the other(see Smedley
1993). Similarly, Americanist ethnographyhas more or less since its
inception faced this paradox,especially as its subjects,
assistants, informants, collabo-rators, and consultants have sought
equal time and rep-
resentation in the larger ethnographic project as under-taken,
primarily, by middle-to-upper-class white Euro-American
anthropologists (cf. Said 1979).
As American anthropologists in general turned awayfrom American
subjects and toward the British andFrench schools of anthropology
for methodological andtheoretical inspiration, such direct
involvement of na-tive collaborators became easier to sidestep.
Moreover,the divisions between researchers and their subjects
be-came all the more pronounced as anthropology becamea
professional academic discipline in its own right, de-veloping and
then emphasizing credentials that clearlyseparated the academic
professional from the so-calledamateur anthropologist (which
included, of course, thenon-university-trained American Indian). As
the disci-pline solidified and professionalized, the writing of
ob-jective ethnography fell to scientifically trained
anduniversity-sited academics who tended to base their
in-tellectual authority on the single-authored text.
Indeed,collaborations between the likes of La Flesche andFletcher
would prove much more difficult to achieve inan academic setting,
where to this day the single-au-thored text is valued over the
multiple-authored text,interdisciplinary work among professionals
over collab-orative work between professionals and
nonprofession-als, and academic credentials over experiential
ones.With the academic professionalization of anthropologyfirmly in
place, collaboration with ethnographic con-sultants was seemingly
put on hold, only to resurface infields such as feminist and
postmodernist anthropology.
Feminist Anthropology
At least since the 1970s, womens studies scholars havecontended
that feminism linked with conventional so-cial science research
methods can yield more humaneand dialogic accounts that more
fullyand more colla-borativelyrepresent the diversity of experience
(see,e.g., Bowles and Duelli Klein 1983; cf. Westcott 1979).The
feminist scholar Renate Duelli Klein (1983:9495),for example,
argued that
whenever possible, feminist methodology should al-low for such
intersubjectivity; this will permit theresearcher constantly to
compare her work with herown experience as a woman and a scientist
and toshare it with the researched, who then will add theiropinions
to the research, which in turn might againchange it.
A methodology that allows for women studyingwomen in an
interactive processwithout the artifi-cial object/subject split
between researcher and re-searched (which is by definition inherent
in any ap-proach to knowledge that praises its neutralityand
objectivity) will end the exploitation ofwomen as research
objects.
Many feminists agreed. Our work, wrote Barbara DuBois
(1983:110), needs to generate words, concepts, that
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90 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005
refer to, that spring from, that are firmly and richlygrounded
in the actual experiencing of women. And thisdemands methods of
inquiry that open up our seeing andour thinking, our conceptual
frameworks, to new per-ceptions that actually derive from womens
experience.
Some feminist ethnographers have argued, however,that a feminist
methodology might be more problematicthan advantageous to the
agendas of a larger, critical fem-inist theory. In Can There Be a
Feminist Ethnography?Judith Stacey (1988:22) argued that although
the eth-nographic method . . . appears ideally suited to
feministresearch [in that it] . . . draws on those resources of
em-pathy, connection, and concern that many feminists con-sider to
be womens special strengths, she ultimatelyquestioned whether the
appearance of greater respectfor and equality with research
subjects in the ethno-graphic approach masks a deeper, more
dangerous formof exploitation. She pointed to the contradictions
be-tween critical feminism, on the one hand, and collabo-rative
ethnographic approaches, on the otherespeciallywhen the researchers
feminism conflicted with theagendas of her subjects. She reported,
for example, thatone of her informants, a fundamentalist Christian,
hadasked her to not reveal the secret lesbian relationshipabout
which she had spoken to her. This intimate knowl-edge not only
highlighted the potential for exploitation(if, for instance, Stacey
had chosen to write about thisethnographic fact anyway) but also
drew attention tothe differences between Staceys goals as a
critical fem-inist and that of her interlocutor, who presumably
ac-cepted the larger societys disparaging view of homosex-uals.
Principles of respect for research subjects and fora collaborative,
egalitarian research relationship, wroteStacey (1988:24), would
suggest compliance, but thisforces me to collude with the
homophobic silencing oflesbian experience, as well as to
consciously distort whatI consider a crucial component of the
ethnographictruth in my study. Whatever we decide, my ethnogra-phy
will betray a feminist principle. These moral di-lemmas
notwithstanding, in the end Stacey was gener-ally hopeful about the
attainment of a feministethnography. Following James Cliffords
assertion thatethnographic truths are . . . inherently partial
(Clifford1986:7), she concluded (p. 26) that while there cannotbe a
fully feminist ethnography, there can be (indeedthere are)
ethnographies that are partially feminist, ac-counts of culture
enhanced by the application of feministperspectives. . . . I
believe the potential benefits of par-tially feminist ethnography
seem worth the seriousmoral costs involved.
Ensuing feminist, reciprocal ethnographieslikethose written by
Elaine Lawless (1993), in which theresearchers feminism and the
experience of the re-searched are negotiated and presented within
the pagesof the same text (even when they differ)would in
partresolve the disparities noted by Stacey and consequentlyinch a
partially feminist ethnography a bit closer to afully feminist
ethnography. But the potentials for afeminist ethnography revisited
a larger problem in the dis-cipline: contemporary feminist
approaches that shared
ethnographys goals with subjects placed a feminist eth-nography
in an inferior position relative to emergentmore professional
ethnographic experiments (cf. Strath-ern 1987). Simply put, it
wasnt objective enough. Al-though an emergent postmodernist
anthropology wasalso experimenting with ethnographic forms,
strugglingwith issues of power and authority, and challenging
no-tions of objectivity (as in Clifford and Marcus 1986),
theadvances in feminist ethnography along these lines werelargely
dismissed and ignored by itsmostly malepro-ponents (Behar 1995).
Lila Abu-Lughod has suggested, inher own Can There Be a Feminist
Ethnography?(1990a), that feminist ethnographers stood to lose
toomuch in an emerging critical anthropology dominatedby a
hyper-professionalism that is more exclusive thanthat of ordinary
anthropology (p. 19) and one that con-tinued to reify a now
obscured presumption of objectivedistance maintained by the
traditional rhetoric of socialscience (p. 18). If a feminist
ethnography challengedconventional ethnography by emphasizing
everyday ex-perience and everyday language (which engendered a
pre-sumably more simplified and less rigorous analysisvia its
identification and collaboration with unprofes-sional
collaborators), then a more professional, the-oretical, and
rigorous ethnography challenged con-ventional ethnography by
foregrounding a rarefied,jargonistic discourse (which presumed to
engender amore complex analysis undertaken without the con-straints
of reciprocal responses from consultants). Eventhough, in
actuality, the rigor of feminist ethnographyrevolves around the
very complex negotiation of visionsbetween ethnographers and
interlocutors, collaborativeand reciprocal approaches were once
again, within thelarger field (social science in general,
anthropology inparticular), caught not only within the still
resonatingdivisions between professional and unprofessional workbut
also within the still very powerful if now obscureddivisions
between objective and subjective, betweentheoretical and
descriptive, and between mascu-line and feminine. As a consequence,
Abu-Lughod(1990a:19) argued, contemporary feminist anthropolo-gists
may not have pushed as hard as they might onepistemological issues
nor experimented much withform . . . perhaps because, within an
anthropologicalmilieu in which the cross-cultural findings of a
feministanthropology (that is, of gender) were still relatively
new,they preferred to establish their credibility, gain
accep-tance, and further their intellectual and political aims.
Whether there can be a truly feminist ethnography ornot,
Abu-Lughod and other feminist scholars in and out-side of
anthropology (see, e.g., Bell 1993, Reinharz 1992,Stack 1993,
Visweswaran 1988, Wolf 1992) suggest thata feminist ethnography can
nevertheless offer anthro-pology a powerful reconceptualization of
the goals of eth-nography itself. In short, feminist ethnography is
nowbroadly defined as an experimental ethnography thatquestions the
positionality and authority of the ethno-graphic process (from
fieldwork to text), foregrounds andsimultaneously seeks to dissolve
the power relationshipbetween ethnographer and subject, and,
perhaps most
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lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 91
important, contextualizes ethnographic writing within abroader
consciousness of the historical trajectories offeminist texts
(rather than in terms of the response tothe classic modernist
male-centered ethnographictexts from which postmodernism arguably
springs) (Vi-sweswaran 1992, 1997). Feminist ethnography embracesa
more conscious politics of representation, but in con-trast to many
dialogic approaches it also seeks to exposethe unequal distribution
of power that has subordinatedwomen in most if not all cultures and
[to] discover waysof dismantling hierarchies of domination (Wolf
1992:119).
Feminist ethnography also offers anthropology an eth-nography
written by ethnographers who, as womenwhose knowledge is situated
vis-a`-vis their male coun-terparts (cf. Haraway 1988), are already
Other (see Mas-cia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen 1989). A feminist
ethnog-raphy, which unapologetically upholds a
nonpositivistperspective, rebuilding the social sciences and
producingnew concepts concerning women (Reinharz 1992:46),is a
research process whereby others study othersand, as in studies by
native anthropologists of their owncommunities (see Abu-Lughod
1990b; cf. Limon 1990),openly struggle in both fieldwork and
ethnographic textswith issues of sameness (where both researcher
and re-searched are women who share similar experiences withsystems
of domination) and difference (where class andrace, for example,
play a prominent role in interpreta-tions of the complexities of
gender) (cf. Moore 1988). Byworking with the assumptions of
difference in same-ness, writes Abu-Lughod (1990a:2526, 27), of a
selfthat participates in multiple identifications, and an otherthat
is also partially the self, we might be moving beyondthe impasse of
the fixed self/other or subject/object di-vide that so disturbs the
new ethnographers. . . . [Thus]the creation of a self through
opposition to an other isblocked [in feminist ethnography], and
therefore both themultiplicity of the self, and the multiple,
overlapping,and interacting qualities of other cannot be
ignored.2
2. Several women ethnographers had sought to do just this
before.Perhaps the best-known example is Marjorie Shostaks Nisa:
TheLife and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981), in which Shostak
framesher ethnography in terms of this interaction between sameness
anddifference (pp. 56, 7): My initial field trip took place at a
timewhen traditional values concerning marriage and sexuality
werebeing questioned in my own culture. The Womens Movement hadjust
begun to gain momentum, urging re-examination of the rolesWestern
women had traditionally assumed. I hoped the field tripmight help
me to clarify some of the issues the Movement hadraised. !Kung
women might be able to offer some answers; afterall, they provided
most of their families food, yet cared for theirchildren and were
lifelong wives as well. . . . I presented myself tothem pretty much
as I saw myself at the time: a girl-woman, re-cently married,
struggling with the issues of love, marriage, sex-uality, work, and
identitybasically, with what womanhood meantto me. I asked the
!Kung women what being a woman meant tothem and what events had
been important in their lives. But theexperience of Shostak and
that of !Kung women also diverged invery significant ways. For
example, their culture, unlike ours, wasnot being continuously
disrupted by social and political factionstelling them first that
women were one way, then another. In theend, her ethnography was
meant to illustrate the diversity ofwomens experience (through an
intimate portrayal of Nisas life),
Simply put, feminist ethnography is writing carried outby a
woman author who is always aware that she is awoman writing (Behar
2003:40).
Conceptualized in this way, feminist ethnography hasfor the most
part been associated with women ethnog-raphers and the reciprocal
and collaborative relationshipswith women interlocutors that have
engendered its ap-proach. Indeed, as feminist ethnography developed
in re-sponse to patriarchal research and writing methods thateither
ignored women or dismissed feminist theory andmethods altogether as
irrelevant to larger discussionsabout ethnography, a feminist
approach has more oftenthan not implied that only ethnography in
the handsof feminists . . . renders it feminist (Reinharz
1992:48).But, given its gendered marginalization (Abu-Lughod1990a,
b) and given that many feminist ethnographersquestion whether
feminist theory and anthropology canestablish more common ground
(Gordon 1993, Strathern1987), feminist ethnography actually has
more similar-ities than differences with the dialogic and
collaborativeethnographic experiments of the past several
decades(and, indeed, with Americanist life-history accounts)(Caplan
1998, Visweswaran 1992). In particular, feministethnographys
central focus on voice, power, and repre-sentation is converging
with the central focus of eth-nography in postmodernist
anthropology (cf. di Leonardo1991).
Postmodernist Anthropology
A more general critique of anthropologys claims to anability to
handle the complexities of a postcolonial andpostindustrial world
authoritatively and objectivelyconverged in the 1980s with the
emergence of a post-modernist anthropology. While the modern
developmentof anthropology in the first three-quarters of the
twen-tieth century had advanced the Western-centered projectof the
Enlightenment, emphasizing science and reason,authority and
objectivity, positivism and realism, post-modernist anthropology
resituated the goals of anthro-pology within a more complicated
multicultural world(outside the divide between the West and the
Rest), in-stead emphasizing power and voice, subjectivity and
di-alogue, complexity and critique (cf. Clifford 1986, 1988;Marcus
1992, 1999; Tyler 1987). In ethnography, specif-ically, the
emergence of postmodernism marked a con-fluence of previous
ethnographic approachessuch asthat embraced by cognitive, symbolic,
and humanisticanthropologythat had for some time variously
strug-gled and experimented with the limitations of the
eth-nographic craft in representing the lived complexities
ofculture and experience from the native point of view(Marcus and
Fischer 1986).
and, to a lesser extent, to present experiential alternatives
towomens statuses and roles in the Western world (see Marcus
andFischer 1986:5859 and Pratt 1986:4246 for a more critical
dis-cussion). More recent examples that adopt this approach
(perhapsmore fully than Shostak) include Abu-Lughod (1993), Behar
(1993),and Brown (1991).
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92 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005
Marcus and Fischer (1986:1744) argue that interpre-tive
anthropology, in particular, provided the context foraddressing
this so-called crisis of representation. Withthe recognition of a
more complex field (in which un-touched cultures no longer existed,
anthropologist andtheir interlocutors were more and more
politically, so-cially, economically, and intellectually
interconnectedin a global political economy, and new and shifting
fieldsites demanded new research strategies),
interpretiveethnographers revitalized experimentation with
ethno-graphic forms that might bring anthropology forcefullyinto
line with its twentieth-century promises of authen-tically
representing cultural differences and respond toworld and
intellectual conditions quite different fromthose in which
[ethnography] became a particular kindof genre (pp. 4243).
While there were and continue to be many types ofethnographic
experiments (variously conveying othercultural experience and/or
taking into account worldhistorical political economy [Marcus and
Fischer 1986:45110]), many interpretive anthropologists have
fo-cused on dialogue as a key metaphor (rather than thetextual
metaphor established by Clifford Geertz [1973])for
reconceptualizing the ethnographic process. Dia-logue has become
the imagery for expressing the wayanthropologists (and by
extension, their readers) mustengage in an active communicative
process with anotherculture, wrote Marcus and Fischer (1986:30)
about thisshift in focus. It is a two-way and
two-dimensionalexchange, interpretive processes being necessary
both forcommunication internally within a cultural system
andexternally between systems of meaning.
While many interpretive anthropologists engaged thedialogic
metaphor more or less symbolically, some eth-nographers took the
metaphor more literally, looking tothe dialogic processes of
fieldwork itself to construct eth-nographies that were more
representative of the collab-orative production of knowledge
between anthropolo-gist(s) and informant(s)that is, to present
multiplevoices within a text, and to encourage readings from
di-verse perspectives (Marcus and Fischer 1986:68). KevinDwyers
Moroccan Dialogues (1987) is perhaps the best-known example. Dwyers
approach is similar to narrativeethnography in its focus on shared
experience (see Ted-lock 1991), but he narrows the field of vision
even more,focusing on and problematizing the dialogic emergenceof
culture throughout. His purpose in doing so is to chal-lenge the
authority of the single-voiced monograph and,perhaps more
important, to show how the complexitiesof Others are often lost in
the textual world of paragraphsand sentences. The anthropologist
who encounters peo-ple from other societies is not merely observing
them orattempting to record their behavior, wrote Dwyer
(1987:xviii); both he and the people he confronts, and thesocietal
interests that each represents, are engaging eachother creatively,
producing the new phenomenon of Selfand Other becoming
interdependent, of Self and Othersometimes challenging, sometimes
accommodating oneanother. Recognizing, of course, that presenting
Mo-roccan dialogues in text and in English is itself an act of
distanced interpretation, a fiction, Dwyer challenged thereader
to question the content of the ethnographic textand, more
important, its goals and purposes (p. xix):
If a faithful record, a full communication, of the ex-perience
is impossible, this is no excuse to reducethe effort to preserve in
the text, and to convey toothers, what one believes to be crucial
in that expe-rience. The effectiveness of this book should
bejudged, then, not in the light of a necessarily mis-taken
criterion of fidelity to experience, but in termsof the
significance of taking certain aspects, ratherthan others, as
essential, and the books success indisplaying them: here, the
structured inequality andinterdependence of Self and Other, the
inevitablelink between the individuals action and his or herown
societys interests, and the vulnerability and in-tegrity of the
Self and the Other.
Dwyers version of dialogic ethnography called for closescrutiny
of the nature of cross-cultural understandingand appreciation of
the very real challenges faced by eth-nographers when they seek to
forge experience as text.Simply put, Dwyer concentrated on
process.
Other classic dialogic works that variously took upthese kinds
of issues include Vincent Crapanzanos Tu-hami (1980), Jean Briggss
Never in Anger (1970), andJeanne Favret-Saadas Deadly Worlds (1980)
(cf. Marcusand Fischer 1986:6971). While many of these
ethnog-raphies focused on the collaborative production ofknowledge
and directly challenged the goals of ethnog-raphy by resituating
its power and authority in the di-alogic process, writing dialogic
ethnography did not nec-essarily mean engagement in collaborative
practice withinterlocutors to produce collaboratively conceived
texts(cf. Tyler 1987). Many interpretive anthropologists em-braced
the metaphor of dialogue in their fieldwork andwriting, but only a
few ethnographers took the metaphorto this next logical step. Of
course, several ethnographershad continued in the collaborative
tradition of Hunt andBoas or Fletcher and La Flesche, coauthoring
ethno-graphic texts with key informants/consultants (see, e.g.,Bahr
et al. 1974, Majnep and Bulmer 1977), but otherswere going a
critical step farther by seeking to includereactions from their
consultants in their ethnographictexts.3 Examples includein
addition to those of theAmericanist and feminist tradition already
mentionedDouglas E. Foley and companys From Peones to Polit-icos
(1988), an ethnography of ethnic relations betweenAnglos and
Mexicanos in a South Texas town, whichincludes native responses to
the text; John C. Messen-gers Inis Beag Revisited (1983), an
ethnography focusingon a shipwreck off the coast of an island west
of Ireland,
3. I consider this step critical because, as Radin (1927, 1933)
pointedout, engaging in coauthored projects does not necessarily
meanengagement with diverging worldviews, especially when
coauthorsmove to write conventional, authoritative, academically
positionedtexts. By including consultant commentary these
ethnographersproblematized audience in a different way by directly
challenging(at the very least implicitly) the authority of the
ethnographer tospeak solely for the Other (see Clifford 1983).
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lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 93
a folk song that Messenger composed about the ship-wreck, and
the islanders mixed reactions to both thesong and his controversial
ethnographic texts; and JamesL. Peacocks Purifying the Faith
(1978), an accountpartrealist description, part symbolic analysis,
part narrativeethnographyof the history, beliefs, and practices of
amovement to reform Islam in Indonesia that includescommentary from
one of Peacocks collaborators (pre-sented as a preface) (cf.
Lassiter 2001).
Although ethnographies that considered responsesfrom the natives
(even negative ones, as is the casewith Messengers work) were
exceptions to the rule andinvolved different views of
collaboration, they foreshad-owed a focus on a trope of
collaboration that wouldemerge full-blown in critical ethnography.
This ethnog-raphy was marked by a number of important texts,
in-cluding James Clifford and George E. Marcuss WritingCulture
(1986), George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fi-schers Anthropology
as Cultural Critique (1986), JamesCliffords The Predicament of
Culture (1988), and RenatoRosaldos Culture and Truth (1989)all of
which arguedfor a more ethical, humanistic, interpretive,
intersubjec-tive, dialogic, and experimental ethnography.
Althoughmany social scientists have taken these writers to task,the
influence of their texts on the practice of ethnogra-phy today is
unmistakable: few ethnographers embarkon their projects without
bearing these issues in mind(cf. Marcus 1994). Ethnography today
involves a criticaland reflexive process whereby ethnographers and
theirinterlocutors regularly assess not only how their
collab-orative work engenders the dialogic emergence of culture(and
the verity of their shared understandings) but alsothe goals and
the audiences of the ethnographic productsthese collaborative
relationships produce. Indeed, eth-nography no longer operates
under the ideal of discov-ering new worlds like explorers of the
fifteenth century.Rather we step into a stream of already existing
repre-sentations produced by journalists, prior
anthropologists,historians, creative writers, and of course the
subjects ofstudy themselves (Fischer and Marcus 1999:xx). Withthe
gap between ethnographer and consultant ever nar-rowing,
collaboration between ethnographers and inter-locutorsboth of whom
exist within and partake of alarger economy of representations in
varied and compli-cated waystakes on a whole new meaning.
Consider, for example, Paul Rabinows reflections onthe
collaborations that produced the writing of MakingPCR (1996)an
ethnography of the polymerase chainreaction (PCR) as it developed
in the biotechnology com-pany Cetus Corporation. In his essay
American Mod-erns: On Sciences and Scientists (1999), Rabinow
traceshis collaboration with Tom White, a former vice presi-dent of
Cetus. White engaged Rabinow in the project,giving him open access
to scientists at all levels in theinstitution. He wanted an
anthropologist to elaborate thecomplexities of the industry at a
time when popular mis-understandings about biotechnology abounded,
but morethan this White hoped that the collaboration couldmake him
more productive. He never blurred the dis-tinction between the
technical and the therapeutic,
never asked me to play a facilitator or therapeutic role.He
remained attentive to possible operationalizable as-pects arising
from my analysis. One thing he wanted toknow was how to create an
environment for future dis-coveries (p. 328). While Whites goals
helped to pro-duce the foundation for collaboration, Rabinows
goalsdiverged from them in that he wanted to explore
therelationships between the culture of science and the cul-ture of
the humanities (which includes the sociologicalstudy of science).
In short, Rabinows and Whites goalsmay not have been identical, but
Rabinows ethnographydid indeed help to advance Whites agenda to
makesomething different happen that he couldnt entirelycontrol
(Rabinow 1999:332)a collaborative venturethat he hoped would
produce the same kinds of inno-vative results (in this case a text)
for which Cetus wasalready well-known.
George E. Marcus (1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001) hasargued that
such experimentsconscious of both thelarger interconnected streams
of representations and thechanging contexts of fieldwork todaymay
finally bepushing anthropology toward realizing the potentials
ofthe 1980s critique of anthropology. While anthropologistshad
always sought to establish rapport with their inform-ants as a
prerequisite for collecting their ethnographicdata within the
traditional mise-en-sce`ne of field-workthat is the
intensively-focused-upon single siteof ethnographic observation and
participation (Marcus1995:96)and had, consequently, sought to build
theirshared understandings collaboratively (Marcus 1997),
thespecific attention given to dialogue and collaboration inthe
1980s critique had great potential to unveil and makeexplicit the
challenges of collaboration often glossed overby the trope of
rapport. As Marcus (2001:521) writes,
The relational context envisioned by the 1980s cri-tique of
anthropology for the explorations of levelsand kinds of reflexivity
in fieldwork was the idea ofcollaboration and the de facto but
unrecognizedcoauthorship of ethnography. This reenvisioning ofthe
traditional mise-en-sce`ne of fieldwork as beingcollaborative was
potentially the most provocativeand transformative reinterpretation
of conventionalethnographic authority to which the use of the
con-cept of rapport was wedded. . . . Rapport signaled
in-strumentally building a relationship with a partici-pant or
informant with the predesigned purposes ofthe anthropologists
inquiry in mind and withoutthe possibility that those very purposes
could bechanged by the evolution of the fieldwork relation-ship
itself, governed by building rapport. In contrast,collaboration
entails joint production, but with over-lapping mutual as well as
differing purposes, negoti-ation, contestation, and uncertain
outcomes.
In the same way as the dialogic metaphor came to replacethe
textual metaphor in interpretive anthropology, thecollaborative
metaphor came to replace the dialogic met-aphor in critical
anthropology. Given this, though, thetrope of collaboration that
emerged in the 1980s critique
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94 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005
failed to displace the older tropes that even now con-tinue to
define the regulative ideals of fieldwork in theprofessional
culture of anthropologists, continues Mar-cus (2001:521). The idea
of rapport was too established,too enmeshed within positivist
rhetorical style, and thustoo legitimating to be replaced. And so,
its use has per-sisted even after the 1980s critique.
Essentially serving as another word for rapport,then,
collaboration indeed became cliche in the 1980sand 1990s (and
remains so today), while actual experi-ments in collaboration like
those mentioned above wereforgotten (2001:522). Marcus argues,
however, that thecontemporary challenges of fieldwork like that
describedby Rabinow (1996, 1999) present a new set of emergingnorms
and expectations for fieldwork for which collab-oration is a key
trope and transformative practice for thewhole ethnographic
enterprise. In an ever-evolving,shifting, and multisited field in
which dichotomies suchas West/East and local/global have lost their
methodo-logical utility, ethnographers are now, perhaps more
thanever, having to reflect on the challenges that collabora-tion
presents to both ethnographic fieldwork and rep-resentation (see
Marcus 1998, 1999). In sum, critical eth-nography can potentially
move collaboration from thetaken-for-granted background of
ethnography to itsforeground.
With this in mind, Marcus (1997) argues that collab-oration
explicitly uncovers the differing purposes, goals,and agendas in
ethnography and makes the relationshipsinherent in fieldwork even
more central to the writingof critical ethnography. But
collaboration also advancesthe goal of a critical ethnography to
articulate the activ-ism and citizenship of the anthropologist as a
more com-plete participant in the larger anthropological project
ofsocial justice and equitywhich, although in many waysuniquely
American (see Marcus 2001:520), now strugglesto be engaged as a
public, as well as an ethical, act. Hav-ing to shift personal
positions in relation to ones sub-jects, writes Marcus (1999:1718),
and other active dis-courses in fields that overlap with ones own
generatesa sense of doing more than just traditional
ethnography,and it provides a sense of being an activist in even
themost apolitical fieldworker. Indeed, as Marcus (1999:27)
continues,
there are very clearly other constituencies for ethno-graphic
work that break the frame of the isolatedscholarly enterprise:
again, circumstantial activismand the citizen anthropologist become
an integralpart of ethnography. Work slips in and out of
para-public settings; it is answerable to ones subjects inmore
substantial ways than in the past; it becomesthoroughly immersed in
other kinds of writing ma-chines in the space of its operations.
Knowledge canbe produced in this way also, but what sort
ofknowledge and for whom? Being open to this radicaltransformation
of the research process is what is atstake in acting on a crisis of
representation.
In pulling ethnography, collaboration, citizenship, and
activism into one stream, Marcus suggests, being opento this
radical transformation has enormous potentialto relocate
ethnography within public currents that en-gage ethnographers and
consultants in representationalprojects that realize a more
explicit collaborative prac-tice.
Envisioning critical ethnography as a reflective pro-cess of
choosing between conceptual alternatives andmaking value-laden
judgments of meaning and methodto challenge research, policy, and
other forms of humanactivity (Thomas 1993:4) closely coincides with
thetime-honored focus on collaboration within applied an-thropology
(see, e.g., Austin, 2003, LeCompte et al. 1999,Stull and Schensul
1987) and feminist anthropology,which made this connection over a
decade ago. Femi-nist research is more closely aligned with applied
an-thropology, wrote Frances E. Mascia-Lees, PatriciaSharpe, and
Colleen Ballerino Cohen (1989:2324). Whiletheir purpose was to
distinguish between feminist re-search and an emergent experimental
ethnography, todaythe differences between feminist ethnography and
thecritical ethnography that emerged from the still reso-nating
experimental moment are less clear. Taken to-gether, the
differences between its goals and those of anapplied anthropology
are also less clear, but this shouldnot be surprising. The goals of
anthropology seem to beshifting as the disciplines practitioners,
academic andapplied, establish themselves in streams of practice
morerelevant, more public, and more accessible to a diversityof
constituencies (cf. Basch et al. 1999, Hill and Baba2000).
Collaborative ethnography, in my view, is situatedsquarely at the
center of this newly emergent and pub-licly engaged trajectory.
Intersections: Contemporary Strategies forCollaborative
Ethnographic Practice
From such complex roots one would expect complex andmultifaceted
approaches to collaboration, and these ap-proaches are indeed
diverse. While, as Marcus points out,the notion of collaboration
has long been cliched in eth-nographic practice, ethnographers have
begun to outlinemore specific collaborative strategies for
embracing thepublics with which they work. In general, these
strate-gies fall into six (not mutually exclusive) categories:
(1)principal consultants as readers and editors, (2) focusgroups,
(3) editorial boards, (4) collaborative ethnogra-pher/consultant
teams, (5) community forums, and (6)coproduced and cowritten
texts.
Many ethnographers have used principal consultantsas readers and
collaborative editors for a very long timepresenting their
ethnographic texts, as Richard Horwitz(1996:137) describes it, to
the informant for review, in-viting corrections . . . [and]
edit[ing] the final draft to-getherbut few have actually detailed
the more com-plex methodological processes involved in this type
ofcollaborative ethnography, especially the negotiation
ofdifferences in interpretation (see Lassiter 2000, 2001).
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lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 95
Horwitz reports that his own editing sessions haveranged from
the most congenial to the most acrimoniousencounters of my adult
life.
Using concrete examples from his own research, Hor-witz points
out that collaborative reading and editingwith key ethnographic
consultants is a two-way processin which differences in visions,
agendas, and expecta-tions emerge that are not always easily
resolved. Manycollaborative ethnographers (see, e.g., Evers and
Toelken2001, Hinson 1999, Lawless 1992) have argued that
col-laborative reading and editing with consultants shouldbe
understood as a conversation situated within a veryparticular
relationship and undertaken in a very partic-ular time and placea
dialogue about rather than a finalstatement on any particular
ethnographic topic (see Las-siter 2004b).
A second collaborative strategy is the use of focusgroups (see
e.g., Bernard 1995:22429). For example,when I was writing The Power
of Kiowa Song (Lassiter1998), in addition to having individual
Kiowa consul-tants read the entire text I met with small groups
ofKiowa people to review individual chapters that includedissues in
which they were interested. Many of my con-sultants of course
lacked the time, the energy, or thedesire to invest in my project
on the same level as theprincipal consultants, and focus groups
allowed them tobe involved in responding to and commenting on
thetext.
Similar to the use of focus groups is the use of formaleditorial
boards appointed by the community. This strat-egy is common in
American Indian studies, for instance,where tribal councils (or
appointed committees from thetribal council) may serve as editorial
boards of sorts. Theuse of these boards may seem only bureaucratic,
theironly purpose being to rubber-stamp the final text (seeMihesuah
1993), but in some cases it has provided theopportunity for the
kind of collaborative reading and ed-iting that moves ethnographic
texts in the direction ofcollaborative ethnography. For example,
for the book Ur-ban Voices (Lobo et al. 2002), an editorial
committeematerialized from a series of conversations about
col-lecting the oral histories of the Bay Area American
Indiancommunity. This editorial committee, made up of
theanthropologist Susan Lobo and members of the local In-dian
community, directed a larger project to collect andrecord the
communitys oral history as text. Evolvingover several years, the
committee involved hundreds inthe textual and editorial process.
The product was trulya book of the community, the editorial board
writes(Lobo et al. 2002:xix), a reflection and documentationof the
history of some of the people and significantplaces, events and
activities that make up and shape thecommunity.
The use of ethnographer-consultant teams is, ofcourse, best for
collaborative ethnographic projects thatinvolve large numbers of
both. For example, in a recentcollaborative study of the African
American communityof Muncie, Indianathe site of the famous
Middle-town studies (see Lynd and Lynd 1929)entitled TheOther Side
of Middletown (Lassiter et al. 2004), Hurley
Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, Michelle Natasya Johnson,and I
organized teams of community advisers and stu-dent ethnographers to
work on individual chapters to-gether. As a result of ongoing
conversation, the studentsand their advisers chose the topics of
study and definedthe chapters trajectories. As the students
finished chap-ter drafts, they took these back to their community
ad-visers for comment and discussion. We embarked on thisproject
with the understanding that the students com-munity advisers were
not representative of the com-munity. All of us (professors,
students, and consultants)were clear that each chapter team was
only engaging ina discussion about Muncies African American
com-munity, a discussion framed by the contours of theirparticular
subject areas, their particular relationships,and their particular
interests in the project. Each chaptertherefore had clear
boundaries (like any conversation)but also clear potentials for
in-depth dialogue about whatit meant to live in and identify with
Muncies AfricanAmerican community (see Lassiter 2004a).
The students also discussed the evolving text in sev-eral larger
community forums in which members of thebroader Muncie African
American community publiclycommented on the developing
student-adviser chapters.Such an approach, generally speaking, has
been used formany years by applied anthropologists involved in
com-munity-based participatory action research (see e.g.,Flocks and
Monaghan 2003). Of course, community feed-back is anything but
homogeneous (cf. Lackey 2003).When, for example, the National
Museum of the Amer-ican Indian (NMAI) began work on a new Kiowa
exhibitfor its upcoming Our Peoples Exhibition in Washing-ton,
D.C., I assisted in organizing several communityforums in the Kiowa
community to identify a commu-nity-based plan for the exhibit. The
NMAI was buildingsimilar collaborative museum-community
relationshipsall over the country and asking each participating
com-munity to determine how its story would be told. Asmight be
expected, Kiowa people differed strongly as towhich stories should
be told and how, and community-based discussion continued for
several months as NMAIstaff made return trips to gauge, through
community fo-rums, this developing conversation and to present
theevolving exhibit design to the Kiowa community atlarge. While
consensus was anything but smooth, thesecommunity forums kept the
exhibit plan in the open,encouraging participation in its concept
and design (Ki-owa people wrote some of the exhibit panels, for
ex-ample). These forums also encouraged Kiowa people toraise
questions about how the NMAI would representKiowas to the world.
Considering the number of Nativecommunities in which NMAI staff
proceeded in thesame way and the scale of the eventual exhibit,
this mayhave been among the largest collaborative-based projectsin
the history of museums.
The final strategy for collaboration is probably themost direct
in addition to being the first employed: thecreation of cowritten
texts. Collaboratively written textscan take a variety of forms.
Ethnographers and their in-terlocutors bring diverse skills and
experience to any
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96 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005
given ethnographic project. While all collaborative eth-nography
is arguably coauthored, not all collaborativeethnography can be
cowritten (Hinson 1999). Many co-written texts follow the pattern
of Severt Young Bear andR. D. Theiszs Standing in the Light: A
Lakota Way ofSeeing (1994), which engages the consultant as
narratorand the ethnographer as compiler and translator:
Theiszrecorded Young Bears narratives and organized the ma-terial
on paper, maintaining Young Bears style and de-livery as best he
could, and the two edited the text to-gether as it developed. I
have proceeded similarly in someof my own collaborative texts (see,
e.g., Horse and Las-siter 1997), as have many other ethnographers
(see, e.g.,Blackman 1992, Cruikshank et al. 1990, McBeth 1996).In
other coauthored collaborative texts, consultants havehad an even
more direct role in the writing of the text,contributing their own
writings. In The Other Side ofMiddletown, some consultants
responded to the stu-dents chapter drafts by presenting texts of
their own,which the students then integrated into their
chapters(see, e.g., Lassiter et al. 2004:18687). Les Field
describesa slightly different process in his writing of The
Grimaceof Macho Raton: Artisans, Identity, and Nation in
Late-Twentieth-Century Western Nicaragua (1999), for whichhis
collaborators provided essays about their experienceas artisans,
which Field then integrated into his ethnog-raphy. But he diverges
somewhat from other ethnogra-phers approach to coauthorship: while
he does not in-volve his consultants in reading and editing the
finalmanuscript, he nonetheless cautions the reader to rec-ognize
how his own experiment in coauthorship isnothing if not fraught
with contradictions and dangers(Field 1999:20). He elaborates (pp.
2021):
I have not individually listed these Nicaraguans ascoauthors of
the book, because that would misrepre-sent how the book was
written. I organized, edited,conceptualized, and wrote the vast
majority of thisbook, and I claim its overall authorship. On
theother hand, I have tried to navigate a blurry middleground
between treating the essays written by myfriends as rich
ethnographic material, with which Ican support my own points, and
handling them as Iwould a text written by another academic.
Field points out that in comparison with the situationwith other
collaborative projects (see, e.g., Jaffe 1996), inhis project the
power differential between ethnographerand consultant is extremely
lopsided (p. 21). He is anAmerican intellectual, with the power to
present thelast word about Nicaraguan cultural history throughthis
book, which limits the collaborative glow withwhich I want to endow
it.
One can only admire Field for being so honest aboutthe nature of
his collaboration, but he raises an impor-tant point: when
ethnographers engage in collaborativetext production with their
consultants, the power thatthey can wield over the process must not
be underesti-mated. Therefore, rather than merely giving lip
serviceto collaboration, ethnographers are increasingly
describ-
ing the exact nature of their collaborative approach
tocoauthorship when appropriate (cf. Briggs and Bauman1999:52022).
While some collaborative projects can pro-ceed through relatively
equitable relationships, a goodmany cannot. Indeed, collaborative
coauthorship, like allstrategies in collaborative reading and
editing, is not anend that can always be fully achieved.
Most collaborative ethnographers are today variouslyemploying a
combination of these strategies (see Brettell1996). Every
collaborative project is, of course, unique.Each calls for specific
strategies appropriate to its indi-vidualized relationships and
particular contexts. Co-writing of texts with consultants is not
always possible,but to my mind collaborative reading and editing
(es-pecially that which pushes toward cointerpretation) iswhat
ultimately makes an ethnography collaborative.When taken seriously
and applied systematically ratherthan bureaucratically, any one or
a combination of thesestrategies leads us from the mere
representation of dia-logue to its actual engagement, from
one-dimensional tomultidimensional collaboration, and from a
cliched col-laborative ethnography to a more deliberate and
explicitcollaborative ethnography that more immediately en-gages
the publics with which we work.
Conclusion
Engaging the publics with which we work in our eth-nographic
research and writing necessarily casts ethnog-raphy as a public
act. It also, as Marcus (1999) pointsout, casts it as an act of
citizenship and activism thathas long figured prominently in
various ethnographic ap-proaches (Americanist, feminist, and
postmodernistamong them). The integration of collaboration into
theethnographic research process engendered broader com-mitments to
the people with whom we work when LewisHenry Morgan engaged Ely
Parkers Iroquois communityin both research and political activism,
when JamesMooney chose to act on behalf of Kiowa peyotists as
aconsequence of his Kiowa research, and when Paul Radininsisted on
the Blowsnakes right to tell their story theirway. The same is true
of more recent feminist and post-modernist conversations about the
role of dialogue andcollaboration in contemporary ethnographywhen
fem-inist scholars like Judith Stacey or Lila Abu-Lughodstruggle to
realize a feminist ethnography as one thatmore fully embraces other
visions of gender identity,even when those visions differ from the
ethnographers,and when postmodernist ethnographers such as Paul
Ra-binow embrace collaborative research projects that re-alize
their consultants visions for developing innovativeunderstandings
of themselves, their organizations, ortheir communities. But it is
only recently that collabo-rative ethnographywhich encourages
collaboration inboth research and writinghas begun to move more
sys-tematically from the fields margins to its center.
Collaborative ethnographic practice is now convergingwith an
engaged, public anthropology, and an importantcomponent of this
emergent public anthropology is writ-
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lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 97
ing for publics beyond the boundaries of
anthropologicaldiscourse. This may be among our biggest challenges
ifwe want to speak more powerfully to public issues andconcerns
(cf. Jaarsma 2002). A collaborative ethnographicpractice encourages
us to address the publics with whichwe work. This collaborative,
public act is, of course, often,though not always, locally based,
but it is not thereforeimmaterial to a larger public anthropology
discussion. Ata time when anthropologists have in their sights a
rede-finition of anthropological activism within much
moremultifaceted, multisited, and shifting field contexts (Mar-cus
1995), we should not forgo the opportunity that mostof us have for
building a public anthropology from theground up and from the
center out. Collaborative ethnog-raphy is a grassroots public
anthropology that must gohand and hand with the larger project
outlined by Borofsky(1999), Peacock (1997), Sanday (1998), and
others. Withoutthis grassroots collaborative action, this larger
public an-thropology is bound to fail. Indeed, the time is ripe for
usto develop the potential for writing texts that speak evenmore
directly to our consultants concernsconcerns thatare no doubt
global in their interconnectedness to a widerpolitical economy but,
like those of an activist or appliedanthropology (Wulff and Fiske
1987) and those of partic-ipatory action research (Kemmis and
McTaggart 2000),community-based. Collaborative ethnographic
practicehas the potential to pull academic and applied
anthro-pology, feminist and postmodernist approaches,
andAmericanist and other anthropological traditions into thesame
stream, fashioning an engaged anthropology that, asPeacock
(1997:14) suggests, prob[es] the deep mysteriesof the human species
and the human soul and encouragesus to press outward, mobilizing
our work and ourselvesto make a difference beyond the discipline
and theacademy.
Comments
samuel r . cookDepartment of Interdisciplinary Studies,
VirginiaPolytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, VA 24061,
U.S.A.([email protected]) 10 ix 04
Too often in anthropology we profess to learn from themistakes
of our pastour professions colonial legacy, ourhierarchically
situated interpretations of human evolu-tion and experience, and so
forthbut inadequately ac-knowledge the contributions of our
predecessors. Foun-dational anthropologists such as Lewis Henry
Morgan,James Mooney, and even Franz Boas in some cases becomethe
whipping boys of the discipline, whose theoreticaltrajectory is
regarded as a lesson in how not to conductethnography. Lassiter
reminds us that our history is ourstrengththat our roots are
utilitarian and publiclyrelevant.
If Morgans theory of unilineal cultural evolution
ringsethnocentric