Comments on: What Type of Collaborator Are You?

By: Adam Fish

Adam Fish — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 04:39:10 +0000

bold and real, Kerim.

By: MTBradley

MTBradley — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 04:38:46 +0000

And here I thought this thread was going to be about the Great Patriotic War.

By: E. Parker

E. Parker — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 02:49:46 +0000

I cringe every time you use the word “subjects” to describe the people you work with in the field– particularly in a piece about collaboration! I won’t give my Anthro101 here’s-why-they-aren’t-subjects lecture, but I will say it makes for a condescending light cast over the fieldwork relationship.
And, Paul, I agree with you wholeheartedly.I did a project working in a community that had been frequently studied in the past. Only after some time there did I start to hear history repeating itself, quite literally, as the phrases, concepts, and writings of my ethnographic predecessors came flowing from the mouths of the research participants. And this, indeed, was in a low-income community where the education level was high school or GED at best.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 02:27:17 +0000

this seems like what marcus calls the paraethnographic – leveraging the participants who have already “gone meta” about their environment… i find there’s a danger to working too much in that mode (having worked with activists and organizers as well) in that it can take a while before you discover that the articulate positions are sometimes more a function of what they’ve read themselves (or what researchers who preceded you have told them) and how they’d like things to be than an articulation of what actually goes on.