Collaboration

Gay Y Blasco, P. and De La Cruz Hernández, L. (2012), "Friendship, Anthropology." Anthropology and Humanism, 37: 1-14.

Pharao Hansen, M. (2016), “Writing Irataba: On Representing Native Americans on Wikipedia.” American Anthropologist, 118: 541-553.

Jackson, J.L., JR. (2004), “An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object." American Anthropologist, 106: 32-42.

Glass, A. (2018), “Drawing on Museums: Early Visual Fieldnotes by Franz Boas and the Indigenous Recuperation of the Archive.” American Anthropologist, 120: 72-88.

Speed, S., Blackwell, M., Aída Hernández Castillo, R., Sieder, R., Sierra, M.T., Ramirez, R., Macleod, M. and Herrera, J. (2009), “Remapping Gender, Justice, and Rights in the Indigenous Americas: Toward a Comparative Analysis and Collaborative Methodology.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 14: 300-331.

Guzmán, J.R. (2022), “Raitera, Ally, Accomplice: Giving Rides as Engaged Ethnography.” Anthropology and Humanism, 47: 312-328.

Virtanen, P.K. and Honkasalo, M. (2020), “New Practices of Cultural Truth Making: Evidence Work in Negotiations with State Authorities.” Anthropol Conscious, 31: 63-90.

Good, Anthony. “Cultural Evidence in Courts of Law.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): S47–60.

Llorens Rocamora, Benjamin & Paloma Yáñez Serrano. April 2017. 'City Play: Collaborative Filmmaking with Children'. Allegra Lab.

Joost Fontein. “‘She appeared to be in some kind of trance:’ Anthropology and the question of unknowability in a criminal trial,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2014 4:1, 75-103.

  • Co-written by informant and anthropologist (challenges fixed roles, analysis is not one-sided)
  • Ethnographic knowledge is collaboratively made, and should be co-owned
  • The 'reflexive turn' of anthropology does not offset the objectification of informants
  • "Informants are what happened to ethnographers before they started writing."
  • Translation: How did translation impact the mutual understandings behind this piece?
  • Anthropological jargon as a barrier preventing Liria from fully understanding the project
  • "We meet in the spaces between worlds"
  • Similar experiences and emotions (discontent) despite different social/economic backgrounds and material inequalities
  • Abiding by and breaking different cultural rules / codes of conduct
  • Difficulties for Liria in leaving husband/community, being financially stable (2008 crisis), child visitation rights, disability pension
  • Seeing how two women navigate their own worlds. What happens when they cross over?
  • Paloma: non-Gitana anthropologist at St. Andrews (feminism, gender violence)
  • Liria: Spanish Gitana (Romani) street-seller
  • Born in the same year, in the same city
  • Overlap between ethnography and biography
  • Anthropology as more than just writing, but as "a powerful presence in our lives"
  • Shared knowledge, understanding, commitment

See also: anthropologist's individual reflection, 5 years later. Gay Y Blasco, P. (2017), "Doubts, Compromises, and Ideals: Attempting a Reciprocal Life Story." https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12174

  • Written by assistant professor of anthropology at Brown and University of Copenhagen
  • Wikipedia as an "experiment in anarchic knowledge production" and the possibility to storage all of human knowledge, a "long dream of modernity"
  • Describes how Wikipedians (mostly white Americans) negotiate Indigenous representation as objects of encyclopedic knowledge
  • Calls for anthropologists to become Wiki editors
  • 'Wikialities': Wikipedia realities (ability to rewrite reality)
  • Re-writing of Wiki article about Irataba (Mohave leader, late 1800s): exoticizing narrative of 'Manifest Destiny' --> anthropological account of political importance to his own people
  • Citing anthropologists/historians as legitimation of knowledge
  • Process through which living person is reduced to written memory
  • Hauntings of the "sins of our anthropological forebears"
  • Who stewards anthropological/legal/historical knowledge?
  • How do we correct past mistakes in recorded knowledge?
  • Systematic misrepresentation of knowledge unless active participation by people who have lived/studied the topic
  • Mainstream consumer audience tends to reproduce the majority perspective, be uncritical of sources, privilege biased perspectives
  • Production of 'facts' verified by 'reliable sources' (What are the 'wrong sources?')
  • Systemic bias: crowdsourced, but self-selected editors must have computer access, internet literacy, time, interest, confidence (excludes most of world)
  • Wikipedia conceals its knowledge production behind knowledge distribution ('re-representation')
  • "The basic task...requires an anthropologist to act as a steward who can locate anthropological knowledge of the past and translate it into an 'encyclopedic' text"
  • Written by anthropology professor at UPenn
  • How digital video technology makes space to rethink the anthropologist-informant relation
  • Organized around self-reflexivity
  • Filmmaking as gift-giving between native ethnographic filmmakers and their subjects
  • Work with/for Nellie (local tenant activist) in Harlem, NY: role in ethnographic film, produce info video for her organization -- quid pro quo (32, 39)
  • Discourse about visual anthropology in conversation with native anthropology. How do these spheres of knowledge production complicate each other?
  • Anthropology: detailed knowledge and translation of knowledge into a "more general theory of translocal factuality and objectivity" (33)
  • Who provides the raw information? Who does the analysis? Does this analysis always have to be 'objective?'
  • Nonnative anthropologist's claim to 'detached impartiality' (34) -- claim to truth
  • Native anthropologist is presumed to "embody a racial politic" -- "sellout or savior" (34)
  • What happens when the 'native' turns the camera around and films the ethnographer? (blurring borders between roels, 36)
  • Cites Lorde, Harrison, Benjamin, Brackette Williams, Du Bois
  • Faye Ginsburg's "parallax effect" re: multiple subjectivities (36-37)
  • See previous conversation about positionality and situated knowledges, also see identity (37)
  • The "vulnerable anthropologist" (38)
  • "A rigorous reflexivity says that the answers don't come automatically with the admission of one's social location vis-à-vis race, class, gender, and so on, but that such an admission is only a more sophisticated way to begin asking the same important questions about the kinds of knowledge-producing interactions possible" (37)

  • Written by associate professor of anthropology at NYU (affiliated with AMNH), also an artist
  • Boas made fieldnotes directly onto a series of research drawings of Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) objects (Northwest Coast 1886-1897)
  • How do the drawings impact current efforts to document ethnographic materials with the Kwakwaka’wakw?
  • How can past and present ethnographic work support legal activism and Indigenous sovereignty claims?
  • Materials' capacity to embody cultural knowledge, if the affected communities have access to them
  • Traverse divides between "the past and present of anthropology as a discipline of collaborative praxis, between ethnographic and Indigenous ways of knowing and being, between analog and digital media of representation, between colonial structures of archival containment and activist attempts at open access"
  • Object's role in lived experience (songs, dances, ceremonies)
  • Visual fieldnotes as a conversation, dialogic, intertextual -- yet Boas failed to attribute ownership/creation to Indigenous artists
  • Public accessibility of collections and cultural production/revitalization
  • Glass is currently working on a project to repatriate objects with their families, support Indigenous artists today, locally contextualize objects, re-embed in social structures
  • Archival recuperation as dialogic engagement with anthropology's colonial legacy, rather than absolving the discipline of it
  • After 2006-2007 conversations with academics, lawyers, activists, and legal scholars about interdisciplinary comparison and collaboration
  • Proposes a collaborative methodology for Native American Studies in the US & Canada and Indigenous Studies in Latin America
  • Consider effective approach for research with/about Indigenous people under neoliberal conditions
  • Understanding local differences and common themes in lived experience
  • "Collaborative and politically engaged research... recognizes research 'subjects' as knowledge producers in their own right"
  • Role of collaborative research in decolonizing anthropology
  • Refrain from unreflexively prioritizing legal/anthropological analysis over other critical reflection
  • Overcome false idea that 'theory' is solely academic and 'experience' is solely possessed by Indigenous people
  • Reconfiguring relation between state and people
  • Cultural identities and the law as sites of resistance (recognition, refusal)
  • Indigenous justice institutions/practices as spaces of 'interlegality'
  • Contributions by this methodology to transnational solidarity networks
  • Limit further violence to "nonacademic Indigenous people [that occurs] by privileging forms of knowledge about their experience that are not theirs"
  • Ride-giving as a "a collaborative means of resistance and an intervention in the politics of mobility," political and intimate
  • "generative in imagining modes of praxis for ethnographers acting as accomplices in shared struggles for justice"
  • Written by linguistic and medical anthropology professor at SUNY Geneseo
  • Call to reject apolitical research agendas, move beyond amity/allyship to enact complicity (take action beyond self-centering support)
  • Author provided rides home for Moisés and Adán from immigrant rights group meetings, part of informal ride network
  • 'Passenger-seat ethnography' (cites Neale-Hurston)
  • Campaign for driver's licenses for undocumented people
  • Risk and vulnerability to deportation
  • Leverage drivers' whiteness in potential encounters with law enforcement
  • Rides framed as collaboration might be more generative than as "freely given gifts" (indebtedness)
  • Mutual sharing of stories
  • More than just helpful, enables self-representation and eluding surveillance
  • Fieldwork as "an extended and continuous meeting"
  • Written by anthropology professor and professor of Finnish Studies at University of Helsinki
  • Examines negotiations with state authorities regarding "supernatural" phenomena in "culturally contrasting contexts"
  • Euro-American, binary, bounded, measurable concepts are used to "create the grounds of validity"
  • Aims to treat "ungraspable," "other-than-human presences as social practices in and of themselves"
  • Two cases in differing social, political, cultural contexts (Amazonian Indigenous and Northern European experiences)
  • Concepts like "supernatural" and "evidence" originate in Euro-American empirical science (categorizes phenomena as normal/abnormal, true/false)
  • Accounts of "ungraspable presences" were rarely narrated publicly in Europe -- believability, implied objectivity or lack thereof
  • Believability in a courtroom as evidence, or by a healthcare professional (presumed sign of unsound mind?)
  • Authors as active actors looking for explanations
  • Huni Kuin artwork as self-representation of spiritual learning
  • Evidence: "a process is dependent on the communities and contexts in which it is produced"
  • "Translational evidence?" (90)
  • Implications for anthropology as evidence for Indigenous sovereignty claims (see Povinelli)
  • Written by anthropology professor at University of Johannesburg (South Africa), "expert witness" in trial (removed stance?)
  • Recent UK criminal trial for a young Zimbabwean woman (Rachel) who attacked her mother with a knife when she was possessed by an evil spirit
  • Difficulties in producing anthropological evidence for the criminal court beyond conventional "cultural defense" -- constraints and unintended efficacy
  • Family on opposite sides of courtroom
  • Judge told jury: "A witness, except for expert witnesses, cannot be asked their opinion about things"
  • Anthropology as evidence vs. psychiatry/medicine
  • What happens when different ways of knowing, of making sense and ordering the world, confront each other within the UK courtroom?
  • "Ethnographic sorcery" (Harry West)
  • Political implications of anthropological representations
  • Possibility of not guilty by reason of insanity
  • Alarmist sensationalization and exoticization of similar cases in UK media ("muti murders," 82)
  • For most of the trial, Rachel and her mother's beliefs in witchcraft and possession were set aside as "irrelevant" by the court (83)
  • Author aimed to reduce distance between family's understanding of events and what the court finds "reasonable"
  • Not essentializing cultural difference, but recognizing the limits of knowledge and uncertainty (88)
  • "Noninsane automatism" (89), guilty of "malicious wounding" (95)
  • Written by historian/filmmaker and anthropologist/filmmaker, involved in Big Tree Collective
  • Includes link to full film (32 min)
  • Recorded in 2014 during Sisi's election campaign
  • Gives 'subjects' (children) the power to film/analyze
  • Written by anthropology professor at University of Edinburgh (anthro of law, kinship, Hinduism)
  • See also: Engelke, Matthew. “The Objects of Evidence.” (published in same journal and book) http://www.jstor.org/stable/20203794
  • Emphasizes importance of sketches/films/ audio/photos alongside fieldnotes
  • Sensory ethnography
  • Using visual ethnography to reveal the children's imagination -- the children must be active participants in image production
  • Such collaboration leaves the outcome of the project "suspended," based on interaction
  • Children participated in a "Mini Medina," where they made their own, no-adult city (buildings, constitution, jobs)
  • Places anthropologist's footage alongsider children's footage
  • "Performativity and world discovery"
  • Creation of social/civic life not in mimicry to existing adult life, but in an attempt to explain the world to themselves
  • Element of play
  • Problems that arise when culture is treated as "objective evidence" by courts of law
  • "Expert witnesses": uneasiness with label "culture expert" for anthropologists, experts feel pressure to profess certainty
  • Case: asylum appeals under 1951 Refugee Convention, English law
  • Hegemony between judicial and scientific/technical professions, ''soft'' vs. ''hard'' sciences
  • "Reasonable man": a standard
  • Shift from disciplinary to mechanical approach of objectivity (S49)
  • Anthropological evidence sometimes excluded as "unscientific" (S50)
  • "Formal legal proceedings in Western common law downplay specific contexts as much as possible in the interests of attaching events to general principles of law" (S50-51)
  • Useful history/gloss of anthropology of law keywords (legal pluralism, culture)
  • Rights versus / to / as culture
  • "Cultural defense": cultural pluralism?
  • Difficulty in getting courts to see culture as dynamic rather than monolithic
  • Concern for the law's "reifying approach to 'culture'" (S57) -- law's attempt to make culture more 'concrete?'

Co-ownership and
co-authorship

Visual anthropology

Ethics & methods

Applied/engaged/
public anthropology

Anthropology
as evidence

Legal analyses of anthropological subjects