Collaborative Anthropologies

With this new issue of Collaborative Anthropologies we are inaugurating a new phase of the journal. Founded in 2007 by Luke Eric Lassiter, Collaborative Anthropologies has become a major forum for anthropologists and those in related fields to discuss the ethics, dilemmas, methodologies, and debates associated with a range of collaborative research projects. Lassiter was joined by co-editor Samuel Cook, and between the two of them, they produced volumes 1–6.

Now the baton has passed to a new team, consisting of Charles Menzies from the University of British Columbia, Karen Quintiliani from California State University at Long Beach, and Susan B. Hyatt at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. Menzies is editor-in-chief, with Quintiliani and Hyatt as associate editors.

We all recognize that from the start, and in a relatively very short period of time, the journal has established a reputation for excellence, and the three of us will work to maintain that high level of scholarship. To continue to move the journal forward, we have some new ideas for foci that might either result in special issues or open up the possibilities for new contributors to submit their manuscripts for review.

Charles Menzies is an Indigenous anthropologist and member of Gitxaała Nation. His research, over the course of a quarter century, has focused upon how small-scale producers make sense of the worlds within which they live. This interest has taken him from the waters of his home on the north coast of British Columbia to the downtown streets of Vancouver and then to the coastline of Brittany and Ireland in Europe. His research methods have developed to include participant observation, film, and landscape archaeology. But at the core of all of this is a desire to understand the encounters between different peoples [End Page vii] in the mundane everyday pursuit of livelihood. Fundamental to his approach is to respect Indigenous communities, not as labs or sources of data for experiment but as interlocutors, collaborators, and partners in a common venture.

Karen Quintiliani and Susan Hyatt have had long histories of collaborative work with students and community organizations. Quintiliani has been involved with the Cambodian community of Long Beach for more than twenty-five years. Hyatt has worked on neighborhood projects in both Philadelphia and Indianapolis. One of their shared interests is opening up a conversation in the journal about the kinds of non-academic products we have each produced through working with our students to serve community interests. Quintiliani, for example is co-founder of Camchap, the Cambodian Community History and Archive Project (see https://www.camchap.org/en/cambodianinlb), a resource that provides information about Long Beach’s significant Cambodian community, both online and through a collection of archival materials housed at the Historical Society of Long Beach, including photographs, documents, English and Khmer newspapers, and unpublished reports. The labor involved in creating this kind of comprehensive resource often falls outside the purview of what many institutions consider “scholarship,” yet it embodies the essence of what it means to work collaboratively with communities to serve their interests. Hyatt worked with two communities in Indianapolis to create another type of online archive: scanned historical photographs (https://ulib.iupui.edu/digitalscholarship/collections/NoS), some of which were later used as illustrations in a community history and ethnography published in February 2013, The Neighborhood of Saturdays: Memories of a Multi-Ethnic Community on Indianapolis’ Southside.

These are but two examples of the kinds of projects we want to encourage anthropologists to describe, discuss, analyze, and share in the pages of Collaborative Anthropologies as new models for public scholarship. In some respects the new turn toward what many are now calling “public anthropology” overlooks much of this kind of work, which has gone on for some years yet has drawn little notice from academic anthropologists and traditional journals. The turn also reveals that for a public anthropology to be in dialogue with communities, we need to use both text and visual forms of representation, illustrating the new possibilities for making anthropological scholarship relevant and accessible. [End Page viii]

We further want to encourage contributors to use the journal as a forum where we can contribute to ongoing discussions of newly emphasized pedagogical strategies and values, often glossed as “experiential” or “service” learning or civic engagement. Many of these pedagogies have long been integral to anthropology, where fieldwork has long constituted a component in our curricula. Unfortunately, the discussions of these putatively new pedagogical methods and philosophies have been framed primarily by people in education, higher education administration, and disciplines other than anthropology, even though the issues of representation, voice, and ethics that such endeavors entail have always been essential components of the ethnographic enterprise in anthropology. We encourage anthropologists to share their experiences of “service learning” and to discuss how they deal with questions of authorship, representation, and ethics with students and community members. All of us feel that at our institutions, we as anthropologists have been marginalized from these conversations about service learning, at least in part because we are concerned about the politics of these undertakings, about the sense of responsibility that faculty do—or don’t—feel toward their host communities, and about the very real likelihood that many well-intentioned service learning projects degenerate into a de-intellectualized and de-contextualized experience for our students that we have called “poverty tourism.” We would bet that we are not alone in this.

We would like to see Collaborative Anthropologies include contributions from all four subfields. In many respects, historical archaeologists are at the forefront of engaged and collaborative scholarship. Anthropological linguists also deal with a host of issues that are relevant to community collaboration and current political debates. Biological anthropologists, especially those working with Indigenous communities, are finding creative ways to navigate respectful collaboration in repatriation of ancestors and in contemporary community-sensitive research.

Since its inception this journal has been at the forefront of the struggle to build respectful relations through collaborative research and writing with Indigenous communities. As we move forward we anticipate publishing critical scholarship by and with Indigenous activist-scholars. We consider it a matter of paramount importance that collaboration moves beyond research to include—as we are doing in the very [End Page ix] editorship of this journal—collaborations in control and production as well as in research and writing.

We encourage prospective authors to contact us, check out our new webpage at https://coll-anth.anth.ubc.ca, and send us ideas for future issues. We look forward to working with you!

We are pleased to kick off our tenure as editors with a collection of papers that seek to stretch ideas of collaboration. Our three articles in this issue explore collaboration through art, community photography, museums, and mentorship.

“Making Matrice” is an experiment in collaboration on multiple levels. The article focuses on themes of maternity, motherhood, and reproduction. In a frame of engagement that is reminiscent of Kevin Dwyers’s Moroccan Dialogues, anthropologists and artist come together, and what they produce is unexpected to both: a collaborative work that is simultaneously ethnographic and artistic and that lives beyond the work of art itself.

“Together, We Can Show You” is collaborative in writing. Three authors bring together their unique experiences working in disparate communities to highlight the power of collaborative visual techniques in enhancing research and returning results to participant communalities.

“Critical Pedagogy of Mentoring” continues the practice of the journal in highlighting collaborative student research. Here we have a case study of undergraduate peer mentors working in youth participatory action research projects. [End Page x]