Affective collaboration in the Westfjords of Iceland

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article advances the need for participatory, affect-based approaches to research through reflection on two projects: the first, concerning the work of a District Committee, the inhabitants of the district and the Municipal Government in the Westfjords of Iceland; the second, a qualitative research project conducted for Red Cross branches in the same area. Anthropologists and ethnographers have always practised collaboration of some sort. This collaboration was until recently mainly driven by the anthropologist who sought to represent ‘native points of view’ in ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ forms. This unequal hierarchical relationship was severely criticised in the 1970s and 1980s and led to various experiments such as ‘Collaborative Anthropology’, which shifts the control process out of the hands of the ethnographer into the collective, equal hands of the ethnographer and the community with which they are working. However, collaboration and other social arrangements are based in the intersubjecti...