I’d also refer you to a couple of citations that might be relevant — my advisor Peter Brosius (1999, “Analyses and interventions; anthropological engagements with environmentalism” Current Anthropology 40[3]) freely available online at http://www.anthro.uga.edu/PDFs/brosius/Analyses.pdf
and Andrew Herod’s 1999 “Reflections on interviewing foreign elites: praxis, positionality, validity, and the cult of the insider” Geoforum 30(4).

Could you tell us, John, a little more about the presentation you’re planning to make that brought this all up? Sounds interesting.

I have no objection to you citing me, but I think you should probablu just say that it comes from conversation on Savageminds.org…

Beyond the Ivory Tower: Collaborations with Business Folk
by John L. McCreery

“Collaboration” is a term that points in many directions. For Professor Huang Shu-min, the organizer of this conference, it points to the possibility of “interdisciplinary research, either currently or in the past, especially projects involving humanists/social scientists and natural scientists.” For Luke Eric Lassiter, the author of “Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology” (Current Anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005, and The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, University of Chicago Press, 2005), the issue is collaboration between anthropologists and the people whose lives they study. In Science and Technology Studies, these two themes converge; natural scientists appear both as subjects of study and collaborators whose assistance is required to achieve the goals of research.

These, however, are familiar domains. This paper addresses yet another possibility—collaborations with business folk, who live and work outside the academy. By reflecting on the collaborations that make possible my own research on Japanese consumers and Japanese advertising, I want to suggest that this type of collaboration is potentially very fruitful. To harvest that potential, we must,
however, carefully negotiate moral minefields. On the one hand there is access to research on a scale that modest academic resources can rarely, if ever, afford. On the other there is the slippery slope to work controlled more by corporate than academic goals. My final purpose here is to offer some thoughts on how to access corporate research while maintaining a firm footing in academic integrity.

Any additional thoughts that anyone here might have on this topic would be most welcome.

To Adam and Ckelty, in particular, I ask permission to cite you and how, if I do cite the remarks you have made above, how you would like to be cited.

The long answer, however, like the discussion of Tsing’s Friction, goes to the heart of problem of adequately constructing a conceptual vocabulary around the multiple and conflicting subjects present in even the most basic fieldwork today (and Adam’s example sounds like a particualrly rich example here).

The problem is also hardly restricted to PR departments demanding oversight– it includes IRBs demanding artificial ethics and absurd standards of documentation; it includes issues of copyright/trademark control; it includes issues of (accusations of) corporate espionage; it includes profesional issues akin to attorney client privilege, or journalist-source secrecy; the list could go on. In short, the idea that there is some simple way in which we write “with” our informants in order to better their lot rests on a model of ethnography in which groups of people are easily identified and represented– precisely the kind of myth that is beaten out of every graduate anthropology student in the country in semester one. Or rather, can now thankfully be beaten out of them thanks to the Military Detainee Act of 2006.

So my study population consists of conservation biologists, environmental activists, forestry engineers, timber company PR people, gov’t officials from the forestry and agriculture ministries, and indigenous and labor advocates. It’s a thoroughly heterogeneous mix, in terms of the types of knowledge they deploy as well as the large differential in power and resources. This poses a number of problems for me methodologically and in terms of the relationship ethics this post brings up. I generally situate my research somewhere in the spectrum of ’studying-up,’ but it’s not straightforward by any means. I’m interested in troubling my own authorial voice, in keeping with the ideas of collaborative work and the whole ‘Writing Culture’ school of ethnography, but how? Some of my subjects are in direct conflict with each other, and my own interests and subjectivity (as foreigner, environmentalist, etc) don’t fit clearly with any part of the whole complex ecology.

Generally, I’ve been re-reading Kim Fortun’s awesome _Advocacy After Bhopal_ as some kind of model. The text includes big chunks of dialog with the victim’s advocates who she studies, reproductions of the documents that Dow Chemical and various rights organizations put out, and other sort of extra-textual devices. So that helps resolve the issue of authorial voice and all, but so far as participatory elements of planning the reserach itself, not so much…

I’m waiting for the issue of corporate accountability and PR clearance and etc to come up – I’ve only started the part of my research that deals with corporate interests. As it does, though, I’m curious to see whether anyone cares about my attempts to make my situatedness transparent, or what…