{"title":"Collaborative Visual Ethnography as Anarchist Anthropology","authors":"Steve Moog","doi":"10.1353/cla.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In DIY punk scenes around the world there are varying interpretations of what ‘doing-it-yourself ’ means. For the punks at Rumah Pirata, a punk collective near Bandung, Indonesia, DIY is a form of practiced anarchism. They frame their definition of DIY around interactions based on mutual aid, non-hierarchical organizational practices, and deep-seated anti-capitalist sentiments. To them, doing-it-yourself means doing-it-with-friends and doing-it-without-profiting. In many ways, the power dynamics embedded in standard ethnographic research run counter to Rumah Pirata’s collectivist ethics. In this article I discuss a collaborative visual ethnography project done in conjunction with the Rumah Pirata collective, designed to incorporate DIY anarchist principles into ethnographic methods. Through participatory ethnographic photography and the collective construction of a photo-book/zine, I demonstrate that collaborative visual methods offer a way to curtail the power dynamics inherent in ethnography, thereby facilitating enhanced understandings of the interworking of a punk anarchist collective.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"14 1","pages":"21 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42850537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"My Cry Gets Up to My Throat: Dysplacement, Indigenous Storywork, and Visual Sovereignty in the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation","authors":"J. Shannon","doi":"10.1353/cla.2021.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2021.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The repatriation of sacred objects from the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History to the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation in North Dakota established the foundation for a long-term research partnership that resulted in an oral history project and documentary about the life and times of a missionary to the reservation in the past, and it provided a means for elders to historicize the present and communicate to the next generation their concerns about contemporary times. Through a collaborative filmmaking process that highlighted visual sovereignty and engaged in Indigenous storywork, the resulting video represented the past in the community members’ own terms, sparked dialogue in community vetting sessions about the oil boom, and became a teaching resource for the tribal college.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"14 1","pages":"44 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41955438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Maybe the Body Does More: Trying to Dance on Collaborative Grounds in North India","authors":"W. Russell","doi":"10.1353/cla.2021.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2021.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article reflects on one ethnographic method deployed during field-work in India in 2018. Drawing from decolonial, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of ethnography, I suggest that the type of “collaboration” that is often prescribed as the best way to navigate inequalities between the researcher and the researched may become more feasible if both parties practice embodying an unfamiliar relationship. In India dance is the primary expressive form in the community where I conduct research. By asking a group of women to teach it to me, I found we could momentarily subvert the expert-student relationship that is inherent in any research endeavor undertaken with people, but especially with a community where so many oppressions intersect to devalue and exclude knowledge in the community, while simultaneously supporting the knowledge I produce as expertise. When we danced we practiced, through embodied experience, what it is like for the outside researcher entrenched in the privileges of institutional knowledge to have her knowledge rendered inconsequential, perhaps laying the ground for research that could, in the future, be collaborative.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"14 1","pages":"1 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46448562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
O. Aijazi, Emily Amburgey, Bina Limbu, M. Suji, James Binks, Courtney Balaz-Munn, K. Rankin, S. Shneiderman
{"title":"The Ethnography of Collaboration: Navigating Power Relationships in Joint Research","authors":"O. Aijazi, Emily Amburgey, Bina Limbu, M. Suji, James Binks, Courtney Balaz-Munn, K. Rankin, S. Shneiderman","doi":"10.1353/cla.2021.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2021.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piece, some of us felt that the paper did not adequately reflect their experiences, others felt it put them in the hot seat too quickly, and some thought that it mimicked the faulty modes of collaboration we wanted to unsettle in the first place. Realizing the power dynamics within our own writing collective, we stepped away from a centralized narrative to make room for our diverse, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory experiences. The paper is a bricolage of reflections that focus on issues such as the division of labor, coauthorship, and community engagement. We use these reflections as a way to think critically about the current juncture of transnational, collaborative research and propose a series of open-ended reflections that prompt the problematization of the inequities, tensions, and emotional labor inherent in collaborative work.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"13 1","pages":"56 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/cla.2021.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45968690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Immovable Object: Mitigation as Indigenous Conservation","authors":"C. Butler, B. Watkinson, James Witzke","doi":"10.1353/cla.2021.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2021.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:On the North Coast of British Columbia, First Nations face dozens of major industrial development proposals, including both crude oil and liquid natural gas pipelines and associated tanker traffic. In response to this overwhelming industrial expansion, First Nations have expanded their environmental stewardship programs to meaningfully engage in regulatory review, impacts research, and environmental monitoring. The Gitxaała First Nation provides an interesting case study of transforming such processes through integration of Gitxaała values into environmental assessment methodology and the application of Aboriginal rights and title. Protecting their territories against colonial intrusions and environmental change requires Gitxaała and their neighboring Nations to use Indigenous knowledge and collaborative governance institutions to limit and mitigate the impacts of these projects. For Indigenous societies under such extreme pressure, conservation is not only the achievement of higher or newer forms of protection, but simply maintaining the environmental status quo against encroaching industrial development. As other departments and programs engage in the selection of marine protected areas or developing conservancy management plans—recognizable conservation initiatives—in the face of rapid industrial development, the real frontline of Indigenous conservation can be considered engagement in regulatory review, the negotiation of impact benefit agreements, and long-term and cumulative effects monitoring. It is on the environmental assessment battleground that the unstoppable force of industrial development meets the immovable object of First Nations sovereignty and territorial protection, and where invisible but critical conservation wins are achieved.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"13 1","pages":"1 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/cla.2021.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43729331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Looking for Collaborative Moments: Lessons from a Workshop on Mental Vulnerability and Photography","authors":"C. Christiansen","doi":"10.1353/cla.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Although collaborative experimental methods are gaining ground in anthropology, there is little research on the forms such collaborations take. This article begins to explore the question of form with assistance from two recent analyses of \"moments\" within collaborative projects by Hastrup (2018) and Korsby and Stavrianakis (2018) respectively. The article discusses the potential for knowledge production in such moments, using examples from a collaborative project in the form of a workshop initiated by the researcher and carried out with two photographers and a group of four young interlocutors in a city in Denmark. The ambition of the workshop was to articulate and understand the emergent phenomenon \"mental vulnerability\" in novel ways through the experimental production of photographs and text. The article shows how, by working collaboratively with both visual and textual modes of expression, new experiential (understood as emotional, sensorial, atmospheric or even magical) points of entrance for understanding mental vulnerability could be reached momentarily. The aim of the article is firstly to convey ethnographic insights from the project and secondly to discuss the epistemological potentials of moments in collaborative research.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"13 1","pages":"29 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/cla.2021.0002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43316854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making It Home: Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL/Standing Rock Encampments","authors":"D. Powell, R. Draper","doi":"10.1353/cla.2020.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2020.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The movement to defend tribal sovereignty and resist construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) in Standing Rock, North Dakota, was a fleeting yet deeply significant site of experimentation in collaboration and solidarity. We argue, through the paired concepts of kinship and home, that central to #NoDAPL’s lasting significance is the way that allies in the resistance camps worked across various registers of difference to align interests in such a manner that Indigenous territorial sovereignty emerged as the shared matter of concern, and thus achieving a powerful relationality and sense of collaborative possibility. We offer an ethnographic lens on the #NoDAPL encampments to show how solidarity was achieved and places where it wavered. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, activist research, and digital ethnography, we show how the linchpin of moral alignment across difference (the element that made solidarity hold) was the induction of allies into an Indigenous-led critique of settler colonialism, exposing tensions in the difficult process of collaboration, and generating a strong vein of reflexivity on the part of non-Native activists.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"13 1","pages":"1 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/cla.2020.0003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46625431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Land, Language, and Food Literacy: Co-Creating a Curriculum at Lach Klan School with Gitxaała Nation","authors":"A. Smith","doi":"10.1353/cla.2020.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2020.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Food is and has always been more than a source of physical nourishment for Gitxaała Nation; it is a way of life, a source of pride, and integral to community wellness. Like First Nations across Canada, Gitxaała continues to experience the lasting effects of colonization, impeding community access to traditional territories and relationships supporting hunting, gathering, fishing, cultivation, and trading of Indigenous foods. The profound dietary shift as a result of colonization has contributed to disproportionately high rates of food insecurity, diet-related health issues, and barriers to the transmission of cultural knowledge around Gitxaała foods. Food sovereignty has emerged as a movement and framework for Indigenous peoples in Canada that emphasizes strengthening traditional food practices, food sharing, and trading networks in order to support community health and well-being. For Indigenous peoples of Canada, food sovereignty is also about the right to feeding and teaching children about foodways rooted in community knowledge, stories, memories, and wisdoms. This research explores how the Gitxaała community garden and the summer reading program at Lach Klan School can be leveraged as a platform for learning—or “food literacy”—toward achieving the broader goals of food security and food sovereignty. Through hands-on learning activities that integrate local, Indigenous language and knowledge, this research suggests that food literacy activities have the potential to contribute to the goals of food sovereignty in Lach Klan by better equipping students to define, demand, and make decisions that shape what their food system looks like now and into the future.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"13 1","pages":"46 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/cla.2020.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49227203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brown Paper Chronicles: Refusal and the Limits of Collaborative Design Work with Indigenous Youth","authors":"Amy R. Mack, Jan Newberry","doi":"10.1353/cla.2020.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/cla.2020.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In a collaborative project between a small university and a local nonprofit devoted to Indigenous children and their families, ethnographic improvisations based on design approaches were used as part of a digital storytelling project. Encounters were designed to produce an “ethical space” for translating childrearing values for which transmission has been interrupted by histories of residential schooling, assimilative adoptions, and continuing patterns of foster care. The final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission framed these improvisations to ethnographic methods that were meant to incorporate experts including researchers, young and old, university- and agency-based, settler and Indigenous. Hopes for moments of partial attunement between ontogenic-epistemic worlds to be achieved through para-ethnographic collaborative design approaches were challenged by moments of refusal. These moments took place in a collaborative space created to engender design thinking and co-conceptualization among para-ethnographers as part of the transition work that many are now calling for in the era of truth and reconciliation. Still, the translation work demanded of young Indigenous researchers meant a kind of doubled burden as cultural experts as well as young Indigenous people. Their refusals were generative, even as they suggested that collaborative methods may serve as yet another politics of recognition in the era of reconciliation.","PeriodicalId":88456,"journal":{"name":"Collaborative anthropologies","volume":"13 1","pages":"108 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/cla.2020.0001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42497623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}