Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology Author(s): Luke Eric Lassiter Reviewed work(s): Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 46, No. 1 (February 2005), pp. 83-106 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/425658 . Accessed: 01/08/2012 20:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org Current Anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005 ᭧ 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4601-0004$10.00 While sustaining our fundamentals, probing the deep mysteries of the human species and the human Collaborative soul, we must press outward, mobilizing our work and ourselves to make a difference beyond the disci- pline and the academy. Ethnography and —james l. peacock Public Anthropology In his often cited essay “The Future of Anthropology,” James L. Peacock (1997:9) set forth three possibilities for anthropology in the coming century: “extinction,” “hanging on as [a] living dead,” or a “flourishing redi- by Luke Eric Lassiter rection of our field into a prominent position in society.” Focusing on this latter scenario, he argued that we must direct our efforts toward a renewed emphasis on anthro- pology’s relevance to wider publics. Peacock’s essay marked a revitalization of earlier dis- Collaborative ethnography—the collaboration of researchers and subjects in the production of ethnographic texts—offers us a ciplinary conversations about how to “make a difference powerful way to engage the public with anthropology. As one of beyond the discipline and the academy.” As anthropol- many academic/applied approaches, contemporary collaborative ogists had in the 1960s and 1970s, we once again debated ethnography stems from a well-established historical tradition of how to bridge theory and practice and craft a more ac- collaboratively produced texts that are often overlooked. Femi- nist and postmodernist efforts to recenter ethnography along dia- tivist and engaged anthropology. Indeed, Peacock’s three logical lines further contextualize this historically situated col- scenarios for anthropology’s future echoed the three laborative practice. The goals of collaborative ethnography (both strategies proposed by Dell Hymes in Reinventing An- historical and contemporary) are now powerfully converging with thropology (1969:39–48) almost three decades earlier: to those of a public anthropology that pulls together academic and retrench (i.e., to reduce anthropology to the study of pre- applied anthropology in an effort to serve humankind more di- rectly and more immediately. history, the “primitive”), to let go (i.e., to be absorbed by other disciplines), or to relax (i.e., to reconsider an- luke eric lassiter is Associate Professor of Anthropology thropology’s organization and to reconfigure its trajec- at Ball State University, currently on leave and teaching at the tories). “The issue is not between general anthropology University of North Carolina, Greensboro (his mailing address: 2633 Walker Ave., Greensboro, NC 27403, U.S.A. [elas- and fragmentation,” wrote Hymes (p. 47), “but between [email protected]]). Born in 1968, he was educated at Radford a bureaucratic general anthropology, whose latent func- University (B.S., 1990) and the University of North Carolina at tion is the protection of academic comfort and privilege, Chapel Hill (Ph.D., 1995). He has conducted fieldwork in the Ki- and a personal general anthropology, whose function is owa community of southwestern Oklahoma and the African the advancement of knowledge and the welfare of American community of Muncie, Indiana, and has published The Power of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography (Tucson: mankind.” University of Arizona Press, 1998); with Ralph Kotay and Clyde Many anthropologists, past and present, have an- Ellis, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns swered the challenge to redirect and reinvent anthro- (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); with Hurley Good- pology along such lines as those articulated by Hymes, all, Elizabeth Campbell, Michelle Natasya Johnson, and others, The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie’s African Peacock, and others (see, e.g., Sanday 1976). Some, how- American Community (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004); and ever, have met these arguments with ambivalence. In The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Chicago: Uni- particular, many applied anthropologists have wondered versity of Chicago Press, in press). The present paper was sub- if such invention and reinvention is even necessary given mitted 19 vi 03 and accepted 10 vi 04. the continuing vigor of its applied dimension. Merrill Singer (2000), for example, contends that the latest ac- ademic effort to invent a public anthropology is more a reiteration of hierarchical divisions between academic and applied anthropologists than a more broadly con- ceived proactive anthropology. “The avenue for ap- proaching these goals,” writes Singer (p. 7), “is through strengthening, valuing and more fully integrating ap- plied/practicing anthropology, rather than inventing new labels that usurp the role of public work long played by an already existing sector of our discipline.” Singer is right. A perusal of past and recent issues of Human Organization or Practicing Anthropology will quickly put to rest any doubt that anthropologists are actively engaged in the public domain both as practi- tioners and as theoreticians. But Peacock, Hymes, and the many others who have written about redirecting and reinventing anthropology are also right. Paradoxically, 83 84 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005 the redirection of anthropology is still important for the The El Dorado Task Force insists that the anthropol- very reasons put forth by Singer: anthropologists—par- ogy of indigenous peoples and related communities ticularly academic anthropologists—continue to struggle must move toward “collaborative” models, in which with reconciling anthropology’s applied, public, and ac- anthropological research is not merely combined tivist roots with the discipline’s elite positioning in the with advocacy, but inherently advocative in that re- academy. “Such a castelike assumption,” writes Hymes search is, from its outset, aimed at material, sym- (2002:xxiii), “ill befits a field that claims to oppose in- bolic, and political benefits for the research popula- equality. We teach against prejudice on the basis of race, tion, as its members have helped to define these. language, and culture. Despite our praise of fieldwork, Collaborative research involves the side-by-side have we preserved an unspoken prejudice in favor of our- work of all parties in a mutually beneficial research selves as literati?” program. All parties are equal partners in the enter- To be sure, the crux of the problem is primarily aca- prise, participating in the development of the re- demic (Basch et al. 1999:3–20). After all, we train both search design and in other major aspects of the pro- future academic anthropologists and future applied an- gram as well, working together toward a common thropologists in the halls of academe (cf. Basch et al. goal. Collaborative research involves more than 1999). Yet the larger problem remains the integration of “giving back” in the form of advocacy and attention theory and practice, research and training, the joining of to social needs. Only in the collaborative model is academic and applied anthropologists, uninhibited by he- there a full give and take, where at every step of the gemony, in a common project, and the engagement of research knowledge and expertise is shared. In col- anthropologists with wider publics within and outside laborative research, the local community will define of academia (cf. Hill 2000). As Peggy Sanday (1998) sug- its needs, and will seek experts both within and gests, merging anthropology with public currents “is without to develop research programs and action more than a focus for research; it is a paradigm for learn- plans. In the process of undertaking research on ing, teaching, research, action, and practice within the such community-defined needs, outside researchers field of anthropology.” may very well encounter knowledge that is of inter- Robert Borofsky (2002) suggests that this larger project est to anthropological theory. However, attention to “affirms our responsibility, as scholars and citizens, to such interests, or publication about them, must it- self be developed within the collaborative frame- meaningfully contribute to communities beyond the work, and may have to be set aside if they are not of academy—both local and global—that make the study of equal concern to all the collaborators. In collabora- anthropology possible.” Anthropologists such as Philip tive research, local experts work