Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices (EASA Series (34))

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as “fieldwork devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of “experimental collaborations” to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality. Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Foreword Collaboration Mode 3 A Found Condition of Anthropological Field Research Today ... and What Might Be Made of It Introduction Experimental Collaborations 1 Experimenting with Data ‘Collaboration’ as Method and Practice in an Interdisciplinary Public Health Project 2 The ‘Research Traineeship’ The Ups and Downs of Para-siting Ethnography 3 Finding One’s Rhythm A ‘Tour de Force’ of Fieldwork on the Road with a Band 4 Idiotic Encounters Experimenting with Collaborations between Ethnography and Design 5 Fieldwork as Interface Digital Technologies, Moral Worlds and Zones of Encounter 6 Thrown into Collaboration An Ethnography of Transcript Authorization 7 A Cultural Cyclotron Ethnography, Art Experiments and a Challenge of Moving towards the Collaborative in Rural Poland 8 Making Fieldwork Public Repurposing Ethnography as a Hosting Platform in Hackney Wick, London Afterword Refiguring Collaboration and Experimentation Index Grounded in a series of diverse ethnographic projects in Africa, America and Europe, Experimental Collaborations attempts to expand our ethnographic repertoire of fieldwork devices. Anthropology has historically consolidated its ethnographic mode of knowledge production around participant observation: a social and epistemic situation of fieldwork involvement maintaining a certain detachment and distance. Grounded in a series of diverse ethnographic projects in Africa, America, and Europe, experimental collaboration expands our ethnographic repertoire of fieldwork devices beyond participant observation: fieldwork is carried out in collaboration with our counterparts in the field, creating an ethnographic mode whose epistemic practice is experimental and whose social engagement in the field is collaborative