Collaborative Anthropologies

Russell, Whitney

2021 Collaborative Anthropologies

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<p>Abstract:</p><p>This article reflects on one ethnographic method deployed during field-work in India in 2018. Drawing from decolonial, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of ethnography, I suggest that the type of “collaboration” that is often prescribed as the best way to navigate inequalities between the researcher and the researched may become more feasible if both parties practice embodying an unfamiliar relationship. In India dance is the primary expressive form in the community where I conduct research. By asking a group of women to teach it to me, I found we could momentarily subvert the expert-student relationship that is inherent in any research endeavor undertaken with people, but especially with a community where so many oppressions intersect to devalue and exclude knowledge in the community, while simultaneously supporting the knowledge I produce as expertise. When we danced we practiced, through embodied experience, what it is like for the outside researcher entrenched in the privileges of institutional knowledge to have her knowledge rendered inconsequential, perhaps laying the ground for research that could, in the future, be collaborative.</p>

Moog, Steve

2021 Collaborative Anthropologies

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<p>Abstract:</p><p>In DIY punk scenes around the world there are varying interpretations of what ‘doing-it-yourself ’ means. For the punks at Rumah Pirata, a punk collective near Bandung, Indonesia, DIY is a form of practiced anarchism. They frame their definition of DIY around interactions based on mutual aid, non-hierarchical organizational practices, and deep-seated anti-capitalist sentiments. To them, doing-it-yourself means doing-it-with-friends and doing-it-without-profiting. In many ways, the power dynamics embedded in standard ethnographic research run counter to Rumah Pirata’s collectivist ethics. In this article I discuss a collaborative visual ethnography project done in conjunction with the Rumah Pirata collective, designed to incorporate DIY anarchist principles into ethnographic methods. Through participatory ethnographic photography and the collective construction of a photo-book/zine, I demonstrate that collaborative visual methods offer a way to curtail the power dynamics inherent in ethnography, thereby facilitating enhanced understandings of the interworking of a punk anarchist collective.</p>

Shannon, Jennifer

2021 Collaborative Anthropologies

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<p>Abstract:</p><p>The repatriation of sacred objects from the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History to the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation in North Dakota established the foundation for a long-term research partnership that resulted in an oral history project and documentary about the life and times of a missionary to the reservation in the past, and it provided a means for elders to historicize the present and communicate to the next generation their concerns about contemporary times. Through a collaborative filmmaking process that highlighted visual sovereignty and engaged in Indigenous storywork, the resulting video represented the past in the community members’ own terms, sparked dialogue in community vetting sessions about the oil boom, and became a teaching resource for the tribal college.</p>

Schwandt, Zoe

2021 Collaborative Anthropologies

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