Collaborators Collaborating

Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations

Monica Konrad, Monica Konrad

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857454812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

As bio-capital in the form of medical knowledge, skills and investments moves with greater frequency from its origin in First World industrialized settings to resource-poor communities with weak or little infrastructure, countries with emerging economies are starting to expand new indigenous science bases of their own. The case studies here, from the UK, West Africa, Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Latin America and elsewhere, explore the forms of collaborative knowledge relations in play and the effects of ethics review and legal systems on local communities, and also demonstrate how anthropologically-informed insights may hope to influence key policy debates. Questions of governance in science and technology, as well as ethical issues related to bio-innovation, are increasingly being featured as topics of complex resourcing and international debate, and this volume is a much-needed resource for interdisciplinary practitioners and specialists in medical anthropology, social theory, corporate ethics, science and technology studies.

I

INTERSECTIONS AND ALIGNMENTS

Chapter 1

A Feel for Detail: New Directions in Collaborative Anthropology

Monica Konrad

The value of detail has long been central to the ethnographer’s sensibilities. As the art of suggestive possibility, detailing will give us the story to assuage a thousand disbelievers; the elements of consistency (or otherwise) to canonize the aesthetics of myth making; or even, as with Umberto Eco’s playful ‘Report on Field Research’ outlining La Pensée Sauvage in a Po Valley society, the occasion for simultaneous readings and misreadings (Eco 1994).¹ Whether or not we want to tell all as it really happened, or indeed whether we are able to do so, most academic ethnographers today would concur that the find of a particular detail, no matter its relative proportions to the rest, will say something about the animator(s) of its selection. There may be many possible ways to go within the life of detailing, and plentiful chances to follow through to attributions. From its original acquisition, or perhaps we shall say subconscious surfacing, to the work of analytic processing – the placement and juxtapositional effects of association, omission and evasion within oral, textual, visual, kinaesthetic and other communicational frames – a detail, it can be argued, may only be brought to life because it has been made to stand out.² Details, in other words, need intellectual creators. And details that are shared as their descriptiveness comes into being, we might also say, need a conceptual language made out of the terms of their creators’ own creative relationality. And so we come to the confluence of details that have become this particular book.

First, though, a word about those surfaces just mentioned. Standing out, as it happens, was a major preoccupation of the first generation of professional ethnologists, mostly men of course, who were quite obsessed with detailing, as indeed they were with a certain self-mythicizing. At the turn of the last century, at just the time when accounts about non-European native life by the nascent ‘fieldworker’ had to be seen as different in kind from those produced by the likes of missionaries, government officials and casual travellers, what mattered was scrupulous attentiveness to observation. To capture as W.H.R. Rivers once put it ‘every detail of a culture. . . . every feature of life and custom in concrete detail’ – this was the aim of the new anthropological professionalism and its modernist corollary, the ethnographic innovation of fieldwork. Rivers, who had moved into social anthropology from a training in neurology, psychiatry and his own medical encounters with others’ shell shock, had been keen – following Alfred Haddon’s example – that professional placement in the field be known as the labour of ‘intensive work’ (Rivers 1913: 7). This idea of intensification was linked at the time to the new notion of ethnographic empathy and it pertained not only to the descriptive ideals of a totalizing cultural performance – as that was then imagined – but set in train what since has become a discipline-specific and enduring normative standard. Today, within the terms of our early twenty-first century professionalism, the notion of the good anthropologist as the good ‘detailer’ is as pervasive as ever.

Collaborators Collaborating is a collection of critical essays by social anthropologists and intellectual corollaries that brings together fresh insights about contemporary forms of knowledge intensification and intellectual creatorship in sites allied to ‘research’. Where the push to amass data and information has become the near-ubiquitous proclivity of culture almost everywhere, what kind of details can stand out in today’s knowledge economy? That is of course one generalized question, but in any event not to restrict the terms, what kind of details do we now think we want, and how is the work of detailing to be recognized as such? There are a number of reasons propelling renewed attention here towards critical theoretical debate within anthropological circles, as well as more widely across the humanities and social sciences, not least of which is the intensification of research as adjunct to collaborative enquiry in so-called ‘knowledge societies’. Assertions today that the ethical conduct of fieldwork requires fresh approaches towards collaborative models of research (see, for instance, Fluehr-Lobban 2003; Lassiter 2005) have arisen in part as a response to emerging organizational and epistemic shifts in the growth of global contexts of research and learning.³ Collaborative fieldwork, whether it is undertaken with other scholars and fieldworkers or with the people, organizations and groups we work with and write about, or some mix of both, takes us straight to the heart of creative relationality. One aim of this collection is to foreground the kind of complexities that attend to the work of positionality and relationalities as interactions unfolding along spectrums of intellectual association and as professional alliances. This cannot be anything but the revision of new social intensities.

Whatever the arrangements and combination of sensibilities that creative relationality assumes in these fieldwork contexts – and the following chapters we hope speak for themselves – such work arguably is taking place at a time of increased investment in the ethos of social collaboration. Collaborative endeavour between countries, universities, and individuals is a growing phenomenon in diverse spheres of human activity as ‘collaborators’ today communicate in the languages of different nations and disciplines, and through an array of technologies and multiple forms of expertise. Mindful of these trends, the contributors to this volume are all writing with a view to describing the kinds of professional networks that are relevant to the conduct of particular kinds of research. As a number of essays here observe, there may be times when one neither works exactly ‘with’ other persons, nor can one necessarily identify collaborators as ‘others’ in the sense anthropologists traditionally evoke.⁴ Collaboration may be about working as kinds of knowledge counterparts and assuming positions ‘alongside’, whereby collaborative endeavour occasions forms of juxtapositionality generated through complex relational moves of compromise, cathexis, extrication and so on. It is then collaborative practices at the level of conducting research and the ways in which such processes of research can be analysed ethnographically – and given more legitimacy in scholarship – that we are primarily interested to explore.

Some quandaries have caught our attention too. Thinking through the conceptual models anthropology can offer to theorize how knowledge is produced and disseminated by collaborative research raises philosophical questions about the very idea of collaboration, and therefore its possible modalities as collaborative fieldwork. If collaborative ethnography is to recognize shared intellectual ‘returns’ between plurally invested knowledge producers, is a relation among equals a prerequisite? Are minimum commonalities needed as a basic starting point for collaboration? If not, what conditions for collaboration do prevail, or should prevail, when no level playing field is apparent?

In different ways, the authors all provide concrete exemplars that bear on these questions. At the same time as grounding fresh empirical material, the present volume links with and loops back to some notable turning points in the genesis of recent social critique. As a critical rejoinder to the problematic of relevance, applicability, publics and engagement that inform a recent body of writing about ethics, the academy and anthropological knowledge futures (for example, Moore 1996; Riles 2000; Strathern 2000; Brenneis 2004; Ong and Collier 2005; Eriksen 2006; Konrad 2007), Collaborators Collaborating offers a contemporary response to Observers Observed. In his collection, George Stocking remarked that despite anthropology’s century as an academic discipline, the ways in which we attribute social value to anthropological enquiry remains, in certain respects, more problematic today than at the time of the subject’s early institutionalization (Stocking 1983). At the same time, Collaborators Collaborating picks up from another pioneering critique about the relation between weakly and strongly contextualized knowledges in knowledge society. Re-thinking Science by Helga Nowotny and colleagues argues that changes in the production of knowledge and the emergence of hybrid institutions in advanced democracies have brought about profound shifts in the nature and distribution of expertise in science–society relations (Nowotny et al. 2001). A third moment, and one which speaks back indirectly to both aforementioned texts, is the late Diana Forsythe’s (2001) Studying Those Who Study Us. In my student tutorials, I have found this monograph a brilliant teaching resource for the way it begins to detail some of the recursive relations in the writing of an interactive ethnography between North American artificial intelligence engineers who were ‘studying’ the science studies anthropologist, as Forsythe herself was ‘studying up’.

Yet the position we take in Collaborating is not one of documenting an inevitable epistemological crisis as such. We are addressing ourselves rather to emergent forms of international research collaboration at a time when knowledge intensification appears to assume explicitly collaborative forms. And it is quite particularly this newly pronounced explicitness that we want to question carefully and put through its conceptual paces. In its entirety, the collection derives analytical coherence by confining its focus to a particular field of action. This coalescent field is international bioscientific collaboration.

Why international collaboration in the biosciences? One oft-cited reason for the expansive growth of collaboration in the ‘knowledge economy’ is the widely held assumption among leaders of OECD countries, and many of their counterparts in resource-constrained states, that economic growth depends on science-driven technological innovation. Adherence to this belief has resulted in numerous decisions by governments all over the globe to commit investments in science and technology as part of national or cross-country collaborations in innovation (Box 2001; Sonnenwald 2007; Wagner 2008; Xu 2008). In turn, formulating inclusive polices for the long-term sustainability of international science is seen to correlate in large part with increased funding commitments by national governments and other stake-holders. As biocapital – in the form of knowledge, skills and investments – moves with ever greater frequency from its locus of origin in First World settings to resource-poor communities with weak or little infrastructure in healthcare research and provisioning, at the same time a number of countries with emerging economies, notably Brazil, India and China, are building up indigenous science bases of their own,⁵ and while much of this effort takes place domestically, increasingly there are calls to engage external country partners. Japan, South Korea and Singapore, also with advanced market economies, have been heralded in science innovation and policy domains as rising ‘research superstars’; but it is clear, too, that it is becoming increasingly circumspect not to take heed of politically weaker neighbours whose ruling elites are starting to invest substantial sums in science hubs for their own regions (e.g., for the case of Southeast Asia, see Chapter 12).

It is therefore significant that a number of UK and overseas development agencies are taking steps to move away from the design of capacity-building initiatives as uniquely developmental aid-driven donor models.⁶ Attention these days is directed instead towards bi- and multi-lateral ventures that are explicitly collaborative in design. These ventures may be cultivated as strategic plans or ideas that seek to bring together global science and technology with local knowledge and realities, and where collaboration is seen as key both to the promotion of scientific capacity and economic competitiveness, as well as being a criterion for relations of ‘best practice’ for international knowledge exchange. Whilst these initiatives develop apace on the ground, it is striking that little is known about the ways in which these joint ventures come into being and how they are enacted in practice.

To begin to address the gap, most of the volume authors take the subject of international research collaborations as their central ethnographic focus and deal with aspects of social innovation within and between academic settings, corporate worlds and biosciences research. The chapters focus on the actualities of doing research collaboration: they analyse some of the ways that protocols, clinical samples, ethics review boards and ideas of beneficence are configuring as forms of engaged alignment, whether this be the implementation of cross-country experimental clinical drug trials (Chapters 2, 3, 7, 8); or as particular biomedical interventions or emerging health alliances between high- and low-income country partners (Chapters 4, 5, 9, 10). Two of the essays focus on bioconservation practices in the context of international collaborations between environmental scientists (Chapters 11, 12). Overall, the point of such intellectual endeavour is to begin to specify the ambiguities, tensions and complexities of collaborative practice, and by the same token, to attempt to link such enquiry to a series of critical responses that address how the collaboration concept itself can be articulated as forms of social value.

In many of the cases outlined, we see that regional disparities in economic capacities between country collaborators pose ethical and political questions about the relation between equity claims and collaborative endeavours. We take this as an invitation for anthropologists and others to think about the following issues: in what sense can we speak of collaborative egalitarianism as a virtue? What kind of meritocracy could collaborative egalitarianism be and what forms of attribution would support such knowledge conventions? At the same time we are moved by the way that these equity claims play themselves back as a critical analytics of detailing at a time when anthropological strategies for disciplinary distinctiveness are politicized anew. On the one side, it can be no accident that both within and beyond the academy the programmatic ascendancy of interdisciplinarity is being promoted as the new virtue of institutional collaboration (see this volume, Holmes and Marcus; cf. Bodenhorn). Equally, though, it may not be so surprising to find that social anthropologists are starting to discern processes of internal differentiation on the ground and that they are seeking ways to commit their critical expositions to descriptive caveats that resemble ‘collaboration within collaboration’.

Collaborative Impetus: Contexts and Antecedents

Across much of academic and public life these days, it would seem there is no easy way of getting away from the multiplicity of calls to act upon collaboration. ‘Join our collaboration! Be collaborative! You too can collaborate!’

What is behind this collaborative impetus? The following summary, which is by no means an exhaustive overview, traces five formative aspects that practicing anthropologists may find clarifying and which, by way of introduction to the volume, makes our argument hopefully more accessible to those beginning, or altogether outside, social anthropology. The five aspects, strongly interrelated, can be grouped as follows:

1. Presumption of Benefit

The presumption of benefit is often elided with the transformative effects of collaborative outcomes on social spheres. Across wide-ranging policy arenas and associated literatures such as ethics codes and other norm-inflected documents, the collaboration ideal is taken up usually in terms of the pragmatism of anticipated outcomes and certain strengthening measures, for instance, on infrastructural organization and resource acquisition. As initiatives or guides for action, these anticipated outcomes are commonly grouped around the policy rhetoric of ‘capacity building’.

In his critical exegesis of risk in collaborative research groups, Edward Hackett introduces one conventional rendition of the term. ‘Collaboration’, he notes, is seen as ‘a family of purposeful working relationship between two or more people, groups, or organisations’. They are formed with a view to ‘share expertise, credibility, material and technical resources, symbolic and social capital’ (Hackett 2005a: 6...