Ethnographic Collaboration Research Articles

Unstitching the Past: An Experimental and Microwear Investigation of Dorset (Paleo-Inuit) Needles from the Foxe Basin Region

For Paleo-Inuit cultures, needles are arguably one of the most important artefact types, as they were used to create warm, waterproof clothing that is essential for survival in Arctic environments. This, in combination with the prevalence of needles within archaeological collections, has prompted many researchers to the topic of Paleo-Inuit needles. However, the majority of their studies have approached the material using traditional, typological methodology. A pilot study conducted by Siebrecht et al. (2021) demonstrated that, while needles from several Dorset Paleo-Inuit culture (c. 800 – 1300 AD) sites in the Foxe Basin region were previously considered as typologically identical, microwear analysis highlighted variation in how they would have been made and used over time and across sites. The pilot study also noted variation, across sites, in certain typological attributes, such as needle eye shape, distal end shape, and cross-section shape. The present study aims to expand on these discoveries by considering possible reasons for variability in the attribute of needle cross-section shape. Methodologically, we use microwear analysis, experimental archaeology, and ethnographic collaboration. With this approach, we were able to explore Dorset needle making and sewing practices in more detail than has been possible in prvevious, purely typology-focused studies. Our results showed no observable pattern between cross-section shape and the material being sewn but may reveal links between needle size and the material being sewn, a correlation in different polish types and the duration of needle use, as well as insights into the possible sewing techniques used by Dorset groups. Our study thus offers a fresh perspective on this topic and points to new directions for this area of Arctic archaeological research.

Walking with bread in Cairo: Ethnographic collaboration between a researcher and a research assistant

This paper presents a mode of collaboration between a researcher and research assistant for ethnographic data collection. We describe our experience as a researcher, who previously conducted fieldwork in Egypt but is now largely situated in the United States due to having young children, and a Cairo-based research assistant, who conducted participant observation of everyday practices of buying and eating subsidized bread for the researcher’s book project on bread, wheat, and security in Egypt. We position our narratives of this process side-by-side, interspersed by joint reflections, addressing questions regarding power asymmetries, the distribution of benefits, and what makes research collaborations work well. We argue that partnering in observation brings the benefit of more than one way of seeing and thinking through data. Moreover, we propose that this form of collaboration can be an effective strategy for researchers for whom continuous presence in their fieldsite is not possible.

Creating a Shared "Activity Timespace" in Ethnographic Collaboration: Aligning Knowledge, Synchronizing Rhythms, Re/Constructing Roles

Creating a Shared "Activity Timespace" in Ethnographic Collaboration: Aligning Knowledge, Synchronizing Rhythms, Re/Constructing Roles

The ecology of global, collaborative ethnography: metho-pedagogical moves in research on climate change with youth in pandemic times

ABSTRACT This article explores the nature of ethnographic collaboration during the harrowing and unpredictable times of a global pandemic. Documenting Year Two of a five-year, multi-sited ethnographic study, which necessitated virtual fieldwork in global drama classrooms (in Canada, India, Colombia, Taiwan, England, Greece), we offer a theoretical picture and practical illustrations of the ‘metho-pedagogical’ adaptations and observations made by the Toronto site team. For our study of youth and the climate emergency, we use an arts-led and youth-driven research process to provoke ‘listening bodies’ and the co-emergence of youth, artists, researchers, and research projects towards a more relational climate consciousness, a future created in the now. The prominence of ‘presence’ in our project took on an urgent and surprisingly intimate quality owing to the global pandemic in which we all suddenly found ourselves.

Data, Methods and Writing

Methods have been recognised in STS as mattering for a long time. STS ethnographies establish a boundary object with which STS scholars weave a pattern: From such ethnographic accounts we learn that knowledge is produced locally. Ethnography has over the recent decades been highlighted as a key method in STS. And that STS ethnography is specifically shaped by being often configured to consider its forms of collaboration or intervention in the field. This special issue focuses on how methods matter, specifically on how STS ethnographic collaboration and its data are translated into ethnographic writing, or performative of other reality effects. Exploring STS’s own methods-in-action brings to attention the messy landscape of method practice. Our objective in this exploration is to develop a genre of writing about method that fosters response-ability and enables the audience of research output to position themselves between the research materials and practices that were invested into the study. This special issue hopes to contribute to STS engagement with its methods by way of methodography. Methodography serves as a genre of analytic writing, that articulates specificity and scrutinises the situated practices of producing STS knowledge.

Say Why You Say It

This paper explores “how ethnographic collaboration configures its data” via examination of three relations: between ethnography as method and writing, between leaky empirical and conceptual sets, and between ethnographic and rhetorical effects. I suggest that writing entails keeping the research imagination alive to two simultaneous processes of scaling—of the empirical within the text, and of diverse sets of literature in mutual relation—always with a specific focus and orientation. What emerges is an image of both ‘ethnographer’ and ‘data’ as hybrid and transformable companions.
 I illustrate with reference to two quite different texts about emerging Mekong realities. Both are elicited as experimental additions to worlds. In that capacity, they are capable of generating reality effects but those effects cannot be preordained. I conclude that ethnographic collaborations find no other grounds than dic cur hic—why, here, now—or as Isabelle Stengers has formulated it “say why you say it.”

Embodiment in Ethnographic Collaborations

This article – grounded in ethnographic fieldwork within the organization of chronic patients with multiple sclerosis in Russia – empiricizes and problematizes the work it takes to craft ethnographic collaborations with care. We attend to the notion of collaboration ‘from a body’, or, rather, from bodies-in-movement. By scrutinizing three turning points of our ethnographic fieldwork along with our relations with partners in the field, we specify how movement matters in ethnographic collaborations. Attention to the embodiment work allows us to specify the energy and resources such collaborations ask for and that are otherwise silenced or neglected. We distinguish three instances of embodiment work in such collaborations – composition, moving with and being moved by, as well as pausing. By attending to how ‘we know’ through crafting and maintaining ethnographic collaborations, this article contributes to a broader question of how to care for differences in ethnographic collaborations.

Un proyecto audiovisual de etnografía colaborativa en construcción: la serie documental La comunicación indígena

En esta contribución se describe el proceso de colaboración etnográfica seguido en la serie documental La comunicación indígena. Un derecho en construcción. Realizada bajo la dirección técnica del Centro de Medios Audiovisuales (CEMAV) de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) en el marco del proyecto de investigación “Medios Indígenas”. Esta serie contó con la participación de académicos, antropólogos, periodistas y comunicadores indígenas y no indígenas de más de una docena de colectivos y medios de comunicación procedentes de América Latina y del Estado español. Partiendo del reconocimiento a los actores indígenas reiteradamente invisibilizados en los procesos de investigación tradicionales, reflexionamos sobre el lugar de enunciación de los participantes en este proyecto, la audiencia a la que nos dirigimos, y el proceso de selección de imágenes y narraciones, entre otros elementos de un ejercicio experimental de etnografía colaborativa en el ámbito de la comunicación indígena en América Latina.

Underground Inscriptions

This essay examines the politics of home in underground Bucharest, and the ways relationships of care among homeless drug users emerge amid everyday violence and exclusion, illuminating the unconventional practices of belonging that take shape in transient communal spaces such as underground electric, transportation, and waste-management systems. The traces of systemic exclusion in these experiences converge in makeshift forms of kinship and care, provoking questions of solidarity, fragility, and the political potential of recognizing such forms through ethnographic collaboration.

Pretty Shield's Thumbprint: Body Politics in Paratextual Territory

Pretty Shield's ThumbprintBody Politics in Paratextual Territory Amy Gore (bio) Over several cold March days in Montana, three friends gathered around a wood stove in an unused building on the Crow reservation. They met for more than pleasant reminiscing: from the start all three considered their conversation as an important means of cultural preservation for the Crow Nation. Frank B. Linderman, who had spent the last forty-six years of his life living in Montana and building relationships with Native peoples, took careful notes while he watched the hands of a Crow elder, Pretty Shield, as she shared her life's story through sign language.1 Linderman conversed fluently with Pretty Shield in Plains Indian sign language, yet to ward off any misinterpretation, Pretty Shield also spoke simultaneously in the Crow language while another Crow woman, Goes Together, translated into English for Linderman's added benefit. Although Linderman had spent a lifetime in Montana and had just published the memoir of another important Crow leader, Plenty Coups, he records this as the first extended conversation he had ever had with Native women. In the resulting text, Red Mother (1932), later renamed as Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, he writes of his desire to document "a woman's story" (16), a perspective that he regarded as underrepresented and undervalued in Native American autobiography.2 To correct the trend, Linderman directly and repeatedly requests a Native woman's perspective in his interview questions. As a result the book draws continual attention to the race and gender of Pretty Shield, not only throughout the text but also throughout the book's many paratextual elements, such as its cover images, illustrations, dedication, foreword, and title page. [End Page 167] As an ethnographic collaboration, Pretty-shield presents a two-body problem: as the non-Native recorder of a Native informant, to what extent did Linderman control, limit, or misrepresent Pretty Shield's life narrative? On the one hand, critics such as Stephanie Sellers question Linderman's qualifications, as a privileged white man immersed in Western culture, to chronicle the life of a Crow woman (79). Sellers devotes a chapter of her book to addressing her numerous critiques of the text, including instances of Linderman's ethnocentrism, his qualifications to write Pretty Shield's story as a cultural outsider, the absence of the Crow creation story, and Linderman's missed opportunities to "ask the right questions" about Crow culture (78–82). On the other hand, Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Sands compliment Linderman for embedding explanatory notes within the text rather than marginalizing them in an appendix, for maintaining Pretty Shield's achronological narrative of her life, and for recording her story with "sensitivity and insight" (45–46). As such debates demonstrate, the body politics of racial and gender identity and the role they play in Native autobiography lead one into a contentious intellectual hot spot in Native studies. Yet a recent shift in the field proposes a reexamination of Native American autobiography that restores attention to the Native subject as well as the non-Native ethnographer. As Michelle Raheja and Stephanie Fitzgerald argue, previous focus on the ethnographer's mediation "often obscured the Indian voice of the text and shifted the focus of the scholarship away from indigenous lived experience to that of the non-Indian editor" (1). Similarly, David Carlson protests readings of Native American autobiography for how "authentic" they may or may not be. He calls such approaches, following Robert Warrior, a "critical dead-end" and instead suggests readings of "how individual autobiographical acts can reveal a process of self-definition whose engine was engagement with legal models of Indianness in a highly charged communicative context" (14). Such a reframing, he suggests, considers Native autobiographies as "something more complex than capitulation to colonial power; they produced a vibrant tradition of Native American literary and political discourse that should be better appreciated today" (14). In all, their [End Page 168] scholarship advocates for a revisiting of as-told-to narratives and, rather than debate "whose text" we are reading, how "authentic" it may be, or in what ways the recorder falls short, that we more productively reconsider the complex instances of...

Introduction: Labours of Collaboration

The four pieces in this section are innovative collaborations at various levels, ranging from anthropologists collaborating with communities to collaborative presentations as a way to subvert hierarchies and Euro-centric modes of being with/in academia. These papers engage with the relationship between collaboration and commoning, some explicitly and others implicitly, as ways to shape knowledge production and practice for a much more egalitarian ethnographic engagement within and beyond the academy. In this Special Section of Volume 2 of Commoning Ethnography, we share four papers that engage with the changing nature of ethnographic collaboration on multiple levels.

Linking worlds: a theoretical reflection on some preconditions for ethnographic collaborations in personalized medicine

Precision, or personalized, medicine (PM) is a ground-breaking approach to medical care which aims to predict, prevent and treat diseases by studying, on an individual scale, the pathogenic potential of the association between genetic and environmental factors. As one of the most important outcomes of biotechnological research, PM is generated in the lab. Nonetheless, the impacts of PM will be observed outside of the lab, namely, on the modification of population’s patterns of use and access to healthcare. Taking PM as object of study, anthropologists are challenged to make a double reflection. The first consists in understanding which peculiarities an ethnography should have to grasp engineers’ and other experts’ underlying modes of knowing and doing inside de lab. The second, more analytical, consists in identifying the indicators revealed by that ethnography which may promote an interpretation of how these modes simultaneously mirror and resonate a given cultural will located both upstream and downstream the lab — from and to outside of it. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the hypothesis stressing that an ethnographic collaboration might configure an effective way of doing this.

The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice. Andrew Irving. Chicago: Hau Books, 2017. 264 pp.

The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice. Andrew Irving. Chicago: Hau Books, 2017. 264 pp.

Ethnographic Collaborations in Latin America: The Effects of Globalization. June C.Nash and Hans C.Buechler, eds. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

Ethnographic Collaborations in Latin America: The Effects of Globalization. June C.Nash and Hans C.Buechler, eds. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers: Relational Science, Ethnographic Collaboration, and Tribal Community by Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez

Women Ethnographers and Native Women Storytellers: Relational Science, Ethnographic Collaboration, and Tribal Community by Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez

Midwife Radio: The Entangled Trajectories of Global Health Programming, Broadcast Media, and the Indonesian State

Shortly after the fall of Indonesia’s New Order government, the country’s public radio network began limited broadcasts of a program intended to augment the midwifery skills of the biomedically trained “skilled birthing attendants,” called bidan. This radio series was focused on educating rural health care providers in an efficient, modern way, reflecting the country’s history of Jakarta-centered nation-building through didactic mass media. After what appeared to be relatively promising trials, the national Ministry of Health let the program languish and never brought it to full implementation. This article investigates the bidan radio series as a case study not only in public health education, but as a representation of the country’s shifting narratives of nationalist modernity, and the role of mass media in reproducing them. We argue that the program depended on the medium itself as the locus of its message, and therewith national radio’s historic discourse of unifying progress. Based on an ethnographic collaboration between medical and media anthropologists, this ethnohistoric research interrogates childbirth as a disputed field of cultural knowledge production, and an exemplar of broadcast media and biomedical nationalism’s entangled trajectories.

Innovating from the Inside: Teacher Influence and the ‘Promisingness’ of Digital Learning Environments

In line with global trends, Australian educational policy emphatically recognises the need for contemporary learners to be digitally literate, with provision of ‘one-to-one’ devices to individual learners in schools a major implementation strategy. However, without teacher commitment, the benefits of such investment in one-to-one programs are undermined and the devices themselves are under-utilised. Too often, the focus on hardware is not accompanied by insight into the organisational learning and change required in pedagogical practices. In the knowledge that curriculum and pedagogical renewal rests squarely with teachers and leaders rather than with technological hardware and software per se, this article draws on outcomes/findings from a school/university ethnographic collaboration which closely explored the introduction of a school-funded, one-to-one netbook program in a school excluded from a state-wide initiative. It seeks to make visible the often overlooked work of teachers as members of learning organisations through a narrative of change. The narrative focuses on teacher agency and capacity to mobilise a school community to commit to a vision of; no-blame risk taking; collective professional learning; the power of purpose and passion; leadership in the face of government practice which disempowered teachers and disadvantaged students; and the development of an innovation ‘from the inside’.

Collaborative Ethnography and Public Engagement: Crafting a New Peer Review

Every spring for the last three years the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at Wake Forest University (WFU) has sponsored Boy Scout Day as one of several family oriented Saturday activity sessions. Most of the "Family Days" are exhibit related, providing active extensions to museum designed and community advised thematic presentations. Boy Scout Day is a different phenomenon, designed in part to add "authenticity" to the decades old practice of young boys dressing up as Indians in order to earn proficiency badges. With up to 200 Scouts and their leaders in attendance, the activity has had mixed reception among the principals involved. Boy Scouts love throwing atlatls, learning to flint knap and hearing Native American stories. Anthropology faculty members are skeptical, wondering about the implications of the continued Scout-Indian relationship. Local Native American groups have had an increasing presence, first as vendors, and then as advisors and participants. But has this taken us past a 1950s-era popular notion of what Native Americans are all about, and beyond this, the relationship between anthropology, museums and the indigenous? The following pages explore the ways in which a model of ethnographic collaboration can inform and expand the growing call for public engagement as a motivation for academic/community relationships.

Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America by Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy (review)

Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America by Bamo Ayi, Stevan Harrell, and Ma Lunzy (review)

Reclaiming the Wasteland: Samson and Delilah and the Historical Perception and Construction of Indigenous Knowledges in Australian Cinema

Reclaiming the Wasteland: Samson and Delilah and the Historical Perception and Construction of Indigenous Knowledges in Australian Cinema