Savannah Shange

collaboration, n.
Pronunciation: /kəˌlabəˈreɪʃən/
Etymology: noun of action, < Latin collabōrāre to collaborate v.: probably immediately < French. 

1. United labor, co-operation; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work.
2. spec. Traitorous cooperation with the enemy 
—Oxford English Dictionary

Anthropology is always collaborative. We make our knowledge in cooperation with others: with interlocutors in the field, upon whom we are utterly dependent; with co-researchers and colleagues with whom we design projects and share expertise; with our disciplinary strictures and demands; and with the neoliberal institutions that train, employ, and fund us. Anthropology is also collaborative in the second sense—traitorous, or at least complicitous, with longer histories of disciplinary knowledge production that leave anthropology as, if not the handmaiden of colonialism, at least its kin (Asad 1973; Harrison 1991; Allen and Jobson 2016). The Oxford English Dictionary’s two definitions of collaboration coexist in anthropological practice, even as we have increasingly embraced the first as a means to challenge the second. 

In the last twenty years, we’ve turned toward engaged, activist, and public anthropology, seeking to make anthropological knowledge production more participatory and political (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Lassiter 2005; Hale 2006; Checker 2010). Such possibilities have precedents in feminist and women of color ethnography, which have long cultivated reciprocal, dialogic, and horizontal relationships between researcher and researched—even as the challenges of such collaboration are well documented (Stacey 1988; Behar 1996; Craven and Davis 2013). Across the discipline, anthropologists have turned new attention to persistent problems of epistemology and representation: what counts as an object of knowledge; how we can rework binaries of anthropologist/informant, expert/object, and knower/known; and whether ethnographic ways of knowing are necessarily also ways of objectifying and controlling (Povinelli 2006; Robbins 2013; Simpson 2014; Hankins 2015). Collaboration as a method and a problem sheds light on the ethics of anthropological knowledge production—its potentials and its pitfalls, the hopes it reflects and the disappointments it yields. 

At a time when collaborative ideals and practices have become standard across a variety of domains—from crowd-sourcing and data sharing to scientific laboratories and social movements (see Holmes and Marcus 2008)—this Correspondences session pays critical attention to the dilemmas of collaboration. Contributors consider: What are the political desires that incite and sustain collaboration? How does collaboration challenge but also reproduce more hierarchical, less liberatory ethnographic knowledge practices? What forms of accountability does collaboration demand? What are collaboration’s contradictions—its ethical limits and its hopeful horizons? Whose collaboration, and for what?