Collaborative Moments. Expanding the Anthropological Field through Cross-Disciplinary Practice

ABSTRACT

This article explores some implications of cross-disciplinarity, as experienced in practice. Anthropologists are used to fuse different styles of reasoning by integrating the points of view and unspoken certainties of their partners in the field into their analysis. Fieldwork can be seen as an experiment in real time, where insights gained intersubjectively gradually shape up as knowledge through analysis. This line of thought is brought to bear on a discussion of collaboration between anthropologists, archaeologists, and biologists in North West Greenland. Through actual experiences from the field, this article shows how knowledge generated on the edge of one’s familiar disciplinary territory may both expand and intensify the anthropological field. Collaborative moments are seen to make new anthropological insights emerge through the co-presence of several analytical perspectives in the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboration
• cross-disciplinarity
• knowledge-making
• fieldwork
• the High Arctic
• landscape

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the Carlsberg Foundation and the Velux Foundations for supporting the cross-disciplinary North Water project (www.NOW.ku.dk) allowing archaeologists, biologists, and anthropologists to work together in the High Arctic landscape. Thanks are owned to my team-colleagues Bjarne Grønnow, Anders Mosbech, Janne Flora, and Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen for their reading and commenting upon an earlier draft. The two anonymous reviewers are likewise thanked for their generous and critical observations that improved the article considerably.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.