Collaborative ethnographic methods: dismantling the ‘anthropological broom closet’?

ABSTRACT

Scholars and activists are increasingly carrying out collaborative research to respond to the asymmetrical privileges built into Western science by partnering with local communities and explicitly orienting their research towards their political aims. In this article, we examine this important shift, tracing the ways it intersects with other important trends in the field, especially the politics of knowledge and decolonization. We discuss the tendencies of collaborative research in Latin America to examine the context and political agendas of those involved and to show what is produced. We suggest that collaboration, like other seemingly progressive discourses like decolonization, can be the site of governance as well as liberation, as it is increasingly the norm for government agencies, research institutions, and non-governmental organizations to promote participatory methods to further their own agendas. Considering the dilemmas in our different research projects on indigenous politics in Bolivia, we urge careful analysis of the multiple and changing standpoints of our collaborators in order not to re-construct essentialized notions of indigeneity. Ultimately, we see the need to acknowledge the tight spaces of negotiation that we all find ourselves drawn into when we undertake collaborative endeavors.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• collaborative research
• decolonization
• politics of knowledge
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

This article was the result of collaborative thinking with many colleagues. We especially thank Responsible Editor Joanne Rappaport for her comments on an early version of this paper. We also thank the Faculty Critical Anthropology Workshop at UC San Diego and the anonymous reviewers for helping us expand the literatures with which we are in conversation. As usual, differently situated thinkers make things better.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This scholarship coalesced into Faye Harrison’s now famous 1991 edited volume, Decolonizing Anthropology.

2. Scholars motivated by this critique work to engage indigenous worldviews, often rethinking the binaries between nature and culture that underlie capitalism and development. This is in line with the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in which scholars have argued that researchers must recognize that indigenous people inhabit worlds marked by radically different ontologies or ways of understanding the universe (see Blaser 2013; De la Cadena 2015). While de la Cadena emphasizes co-laboring as a form of collaborative research across ontological difference, not all approaches to ontology are collaborative. Many, in fact, are more like conventional ethnographic research.

3. See Allen and Jobson (2016), for a critique of how the Decolonization Generation we describe above was ignored or sidelined by many in anthropology.

4. For a similar analysis of pedagogy in a very different context, see Rancière (1991).

5. The Otros Saberes initiative was originally founded in 2005 at an Executive Council meeting leading up to the LASA Conference. For more on its relationship to the LASA organization and the rationale behind the initiative, see: https://lasa.international.pitt.edu/forum/files/vol45-issue4/OtrosSaberes.pdf.

6. For more, see the LACES ‘Special Issue on Indigeneity and Neoliberalism in Chile,’ vol. 13 no. 3.: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rlac20/13/3?nav=tocList.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Kennemore

Amy Kennemore is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at UC San Diego. Her main areas of research are legal pluralism, engaged collaborative research, decolonization, and critical race theory. She has conducted nearly five years of ethnographic research in Bolivia to explore rights as a tool for critique and political action.

Nancy Postero

Nancy Postero is Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego. She studies the intersection of politics, race, and economy in Latin America, especially Bolivia. She is the author of Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Post-multicultural Bolivia (Stanford 2007) and The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia (UC Press 2017).