Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Charles R. Menzies Collaborative research practices have reached a point in anthropology where they are no longer questioned out of the box as problematic. For many new anthropologists collaboration, in some form or another, is understood as a critical component of doing anthropology right. Yet there remains questions about method and approach as well as underlying issues of power and colonialism mixing with naïve good intentions. The papers in this issue push us to consider novel ways of collaboration, to ask when collaboration is not the right direction, to wonder over our intentions, and to consider the implications of refusal for collaborative projects. Our opening essay is an exemplar of where collaborative practices are headed: not simply collaboration in research, but also in writing. There are antecedents to this kind of approach. Allison and Ossman (2014) told the story of their collaboration through narrative and art wherein Allison's exploration of her maternity was the motivation for Ossman's artwork and together they authored a narrative of their experience. The collaboration between Nuxnuxskaca cts'e7i7elt, Sáwllkwa, Euale, and McIlwraith is of a different order. Here we find academics (Euale and MacIlwraith) collaborating with an Indigenous elder (Nuxnuxskaca cts'e7i7elt) and the sentient embodiment of water (Sáwllkwa), who motivates the other three to act on its behalf. This is an approach that takes seriously the call to engage, test, and play with our notions of collaboration. Kotaska's paper draws on her experiences working for First Nations and as an academic engaged in collaborative research. Kotaska challenges us to carefully consider when collaboration is not the right approach. Many First Nations in British Columbia now have their own research offices and engage hired consultants to do their core research. What is the role of the academic researcher in this mix? What are the costs to a community to have collaborative projects underway? With collaborative [End Page vii] approaches more and more the mainstream of university- led research, the time is right to question collaboration as being always the first methodological choice in research. Martindale and Armstrong examine the abstract and theoretical conditions for effective collaboration between Indigenous partners and archaeologists. They both have a long and successful history of collaborative archaeology, which gives a particular salience to their concerns with problematic aspects of contemporary archaeological production. They examine central assumptions that undergird legal decisions, both for and against aboriginal rights and title, and contemporary archaeological thinking that reveals a shared cultural history and ethnocentric bias. Without moving past the inherent ethnocentrism of archaeological thinking, collaborative projects will, they suggest, remain naïve good intentions. Fessenden's paper completes the set by reflecting upon her experience facing a refusal to collaborate. What happens when a project sets off as collaborative but then faces a situation in which the terms of collaboration essentially render the project impossible to complete? This can be a soul crushing experience for any researcher, but even more so when the criterion for success is collaborative from start to finish. Fessenden uses her experience of refusal to explore its place in ethnographic practice and how it might better inform ideas and practices of collaboration. Each of these papers takes ideas of collaboration beyond a simple assumption that collaboration is an a priori positive practice. From expanding the conceptual frame of whom and what one collaborates with through the problematic assumption that collaboration is always required, to questioning the theoretical and cultural barriers to collaboration within mainstream disciplinary thinking, to the idea of refusal as illuminating; each of these papers invites us to reimagine our collaborative research practices and to appreciate the variation in possibilities that confront us as researchers. Reference Allison, J. E., & Ossman, S. 2014. "Making Matrice: Intersubjectivity in Ethnography and Art." Collaborative Anthropologies 7 (1): 1–25. doi:10.1353/cla.2014.0004. Google Scholar Copyright © 2020 University of Nebraska Press