Collaborative Anthropology Today

A Collection of Exceptions

Dominic Boyer, George E. Marcus, Dominic Boyer, George E. Marcus

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781501753350
  9781501753343
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501753367
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Social Sciences

As multisited research has become mainstream in anthropology, collaboration has gained new relevance and traction as a critical infrastructure of both fieldwork and theory, enabling more ambitious research designs, forms of communication, and analysis. Collaborative Anthropology Today is the outcome of a 2017 workshop held at the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine. This book is the latest in a trilogy that includes Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be and Theory Can Be More Than It Used to Be. Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus assemble several notable ventures in collaborative anthropology and put them in dialogue with one another as a way of exploring the recent surge of interest in creating new kinds of ethnographic and theoretical partnerships, especially in the domains of art, media, and information. Contributors highlight projects in which collaboration has generated new possibilities of expression and conceptualizations of anthropological research, as well as prototypes that may be of use to others contemplating their own experimental collaborative ventures.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. How Do We Collaborate? An Updated Manifesto
• 2. Imagination, Improvisation, and Letting Go
• 3. Ethnographic Reentanglements in the Collaborative Ecologies of Film and Contact Improvisation
• 4. Variations in the Ways That Collaborations Surround and Effect Ethnographic Research Projects: Addendum to Chapters 1–3
• 5. Function and Form: The Ethnographic Terminalia Collective between Art and Anthropology
• 6. Limn: Experimenting with Collaboration
• 7. What’s So Funny ’bout PECE, TAF, and Data Sharing?
• 8. A Collaborative Ethnography of Transnational Capitalism
• 9. Hypernormalization, Collaborative Analytics, and the Making of “American Stiob”
• 10. An Account of the Cultures of Energy Podcast as Collaboration—Offered in Podcast Form, Of Course
• 11. Crafting Lissa, an Ethno-Graphic Story: A Collaboration in Four Parts
• Afterword: A Conversation on the History of Anthropological Collaboration with Rebecca Lemov
• Contributors
• Index