Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography Through Fieldwork Devices edited by Adolfo Estalella and Tomas Sanchez Criado (published by Berghahn Books in 2018) is a precursor to what we witness today, with the heightened focus of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. While younger academics are being encouraged to think in these terms, and older academics have cemented their space in academia with their focus on singular topics, more and more scholars today are embracing working with each other across disciplines. This could be attributed to sincerely seeing trends and harvesting the strengths in each other’s scholarly acumen, or a more practical reason of one scholar having more access to funds at their institution than the other. But this book explores what happens in the field during ethnography: is that a space that can foment unintended collaborative and experimental research practices?
‘Fieldwork devices’ has been extended in this volume to include what emerges from creative interventions, such as “co-produced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms” (p. 2). The chapters describe field engagement in terms of shared modes of doing together, which can go as far as being termed as collaboration that may not have been concerted attempts, but as nudges to find new techniques. The authors strive to find the appropriate vocabularies to narrate this, which is where the “experimental impulse takes central stage within ethnography” (p. 11).
This volume is illuminating in terms of possibilities, given that research grant applications increasingly ask for adaptability or Plan B in methodologies, owing to unforeseeable circumstances, stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic which greatly impacted ethnographic on-site research.
Alas, the ethnographies are largely from across Europe, and one from Russia, which makes the understanding of the different negotiations across various fields limited. Nevertheless, the variety and scope of research within this book are fascinating: from “tracing the material and conceptual processes in the ongoing generation of new articulations of air pollution” (Chapter 1), to the language of musical rhythm to juxtapose the ebbs and flows of being on tour with a musical band (Chapter 3), and an ethnography of transcription of interviews of scientists involved in a nuclear project and a context of state secrets and concerns of personal privacy (Chapter 6).
The volume argues for the messiness inherent in ethnographic fieldwork and what is defined as parasitical contexts, especially when it offers the opportunity for the observed to become epistemic partners. Each of the authors describes in detail the relationships developed on the field, and the resultant collaborative epistemologies, thus bringing to the fore the need to normalise this practice, rather than the asymmetric balance between the informant Other and the informed anthropologist.
In several chapters, the researchers describe how they get involved with the grassroots organisations they are studying, wherein they extend their own hands—quite literally—in building structures. This surely makes the ethnographic epistemology more rooted than if it were only grounded in observation. But shouldn’t this be the norm? I wonder about this aloud from the position of asking a core question: the role of academics in society. Are we meant to simply report what we see and write them rather ‘objectively’—notwithstanding how problematic that is—or engage and even make use of our knowledge and privileges in stepping in? Such porosity allows for research to be more impactful and possibly more intimate and immediate, than the mere impact factor of the journal where the research might be published.
The editors of the book thus lay out the premise of how researchers themselves view such “transgressing of conventions” as a “failure” of their work. For example, borrowing from George Marcus’ “ethnographic interaction as complicity” (1997), Tomasz Radowski writes in his chapter on art experiments in rural Poland: “However much collaboration carries within itself that accusation of mixing up proximity and professional distance, complicity permits those tensions to remain rather than to be transcended” (p. 170).
Similarly, describing his intent for mini-ethnographies of “collaborations between artists and academics, which explored the relations between critical art, urban renewal and the Olympics” (p. 179) in London, Isaac Marrero-Guillamón finds himself as a participant in the production of what he was studying. “I failed to keep up with essentials such as fieldnotes, and I wrote for the projects I wanted to study more often than about them” (p. 183; italics in the original). Maria Schiller needed the label of “research traineeship” for her to gain access to the bureaucratic spaces. This urges one to wonder if vulnerability should be something that only early career researchers need to experience, while those who have been fossilised in the discipline could exude blind confidence when venturing into new spaces.
In essence, each of the chapters offers an emic perspective on the subject they are researching, while reflecting deeply on the processes that enabled this. A few examples: Schiller’s journal extract is an honest reflection of the definition of the relationship between a researcher and an interlocutor, especially when sharing notes about one’s personal life; she details her wonderment about the exhaustion of being an ‘alien’ observer even as she is researching ‘sideways’ (Ulf Hannerz, 1992). Anna Lisa Ramella found that there was no fixed structure or schedule for a music band on tour, and upon finding the evolving nature of experimentation with that, her “fieldwork experiences conveyed similar struggles and ambiguities to touring itself” (p. 73), until she arrived at the conditions to reach a sense of “rhyming together” (p. 75).
A departure from the rhyming with a tour band is Andrea Gaspar’s framework of “idiotic” encounter, one that was loaded with friction; when the realities within the organisation where she was an ethnographer differentiated significantly from what the organisation portrayed of itself. With being asked to think more conceptually and thus in the abstract, Gaspar shows us the “intellectualization” turn (Naylor and Ball, 2005) that took place in the design studio where she was a researcher. While her concern was with the “real” effect of objects outside the studio, she spells out—almost like a thriller—how the studio was tasked to create a “tablecloth-for-a-concert-with-glasses”, for a stylish but lonely man who has lost his job and his girlfriend (p. 105). An entire email exchange debates the concept and existential use of a tablecloth and a table, and “a tablecloth that changes the use of a table” (p. 106). The exchange feels giddy; much more so when we are brought to the anti-climax of this idea winning a prize of EUR 5,000, but without having to create it. Gasper details the idiocy arising from the confrontation between embodied disciplinary epistemic differences and offers us a lesson on creativity’s impossibility without difference.
Karen Waltrop opens her chapter with a Danish journalist’s query about the idea of ‘social control’ among Muslim women living in Copenhagen. This becomes significant to what Waltrop asserts—after interfacing with her interlocutors through a photo-diary-turned-exhibition, and participant observation—as the need for anthropologists to “subject our moral positions and assumptions to the same kinds of analysis we use on others”. She views digital technology devices of cameras, smartphones and Facebook in terms of what they make possible, and what they constrain.
Yet another fascinating chapter on constraints is the ethnography of the process of obtaining consent for the publication of transcribed texts of in-depth interviews with scientists and engineers who lived and worked in Obninsk in Russia, one of the science cities constructed as part of the Soviet nuclear programme (p. 132). The transcriptions were towards an open online archive. The interviews were conducted by 12 individuals who came from various disciplines; each brought in their disciplinary perspectives over the standards of transcriptions of the interviews, which they debated on (p. 133). Each of the three authors of the chapter details their encounters with the retired scientists: the chapter thus brings to fore the temporality of projects and its impact on the issues of approval of transcripts of interviews, wherein “new and uncertain communicative space [were created], where all the participants constantly need to improvise and compromise” (p. 150).
The ever-articulate Sarah Pink, in the afterword to the book, calls for the ethnographic processes of experimentation and collaboration as a new configuration of place beyond locality; “as an ongoingly emergent and changing configuration of things and processes” (p. 202). Lauding the enthusiasm of the authors for their attempts at reconceptualizing “what is possible and what is acceptable in ethnographic practice”, Pink argues for a form of “blended practice” across and with other disciplines that could “reshape each other” (p. 202). This would mean going beyond the elbowing for the single-author essays and collaborations not as an afterthought; an anthropology that is “undisciplined” and steeped in experimenting that causes a jolt. While recognising the need for conventional long-term fieldwork, Pink sees this volume as adding to the corpus of the “new critical revisionist wave” that is underway in anthropological ethnography today (p. 209).
The era of ethnographic collaborations and experimentations is already manifold in the post-pandemic era of ethnography of the digital. If collaboration is key for epistemic purposes, there is a need to also make such epistemologies widely available; not merely in the process of how they can be accessed but also in their materiality. This volume is an interesting read on the processes of ethnographic experimentation and experimentation, even if unintended within one’s own epistemic paradigm.
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Priyanka Borpujari is a PhD researcher at Dublin City University. Her research looks at the use of social media by older women and she is exploring collaborative methodologies.