COLLABORATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY AS TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ETHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY[1]
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology
Rhode Island College
For some time I have argued that collaborative research is “ethically conscious” research (2003: 242). Moreover, not only is collaborative research ethical and thus morally preferable to historical models of research, but it is better research because of its methodology emphasizing multiple, polyphonic, perspectives leaving a richer heritage of ethnography to subsequent generations of ethically conscious researchers.
Collaborative research stands in dramatic contrast with historical models of Boasian anthropology-- with its general emphasis on “informants,” “ethnographic subjects,” and a central objective of data collection—and it contrasts sharply with European social anthropology methods with its linkages to colonialism and latter day post-modernism. Uniquely, the sub-fields of applied anthropology in the US and development anthropology in Europe have recognized and embraced the value of collaboration in research as it is necessarily attached to applications of anthropology to institutions and agencies—governmental and non-governmental—whose mission is to promote the well-being of humans. Neglected by the Euro-American dominance of the discipline and profession of anthropology are the numerous examples of practice by indigenous anthropologists, many trained in the Euro-American ‘classical’ tradition, but who are active as collaborative anthropologists in environments where of necessity researcher and researched are co-citizens with shared heritage and common futures.
In the twenty-first century postcolonial, “emerging markets” global context, collaboration is the key to the sustainability of anthropological fieldwork and research, and perhaps for anthropology as a discipline. Voluntary, informed, negotiated, open, and reciprocal research, based in locating a common ground of mutual interest and benefit between researcher and research populations, is increasingly supplanting the individual, self-generated, and externally funded research of previous generations. The unequal partners in research model, with its top-down approach and hierarchy between researcher and “subject,” is shifting substantially toward greater equity in the research relationship. This is not necessarily a result of moral or political motives, but is emerging as an increasing imperative for garnering research permission and conduct research between the traditionally unequal researcher and researched.
Feminist Pioneers in Collaborative Research Models
A debt of acknowledgement and thanks must be paid to ‘second wave’ feminist methodology and epistemology for the novel approaches generated by collaborative anthropology. Feminist methodology employs inductive strategies to elicit voices, narratives and perspectives of the historically suppressed collective voice of women in the West and elsewhere. A classic synthetic work in feminist methods (Reinharz and Davidman, 1992) features chapters on feminist ethnographic and interview strategies, cross-cultural research, oral history, and action research. Indeed, feminist research and collaborative anthropology offer multiple areas of mutually reinforcing approaches. The weakness of Western feminism has been its Euro-American centrism, thus a feminist anthropology had an opportunity to step into this ethnographic vacuum. Collaborative anthropology benefits from the dual strengths of an infused feminism for its non-Western research and the transformation of the research relationship that it represents.
Novel approaches are guaranteed to result. Feminist sociologist and ethnographer of Inuit women Janet M. Billson has practiced for years a collaborative method of data collection and analysis, and standard procedure her collaborators reading and approving the final drafts of published works, including both ethnographic monographs and more summary and analytical books (Billson 2007, Inuit Women, Her Powerful Spirit). Co-researching, co-theorizing, and ultimately co-authoring works based on a mature collaborative anthropology methods are destined to result.
From “Subjects and Informants” to “Participants and Collaborators”
IF a central goal of collaborative research is to work FOR as well as WITH research communities, and to develop reciprocal relationships where projects are initiated, discussed, reviewed, and evaluated through a process of continuous consultation and collaboration, THEN the language of the research relationship needs to evolve and change. At the core of collaborative research is informed consent in the broadest meaning and application of the concept. I have written elsewhere about the resistance among anthropologists to informed consent (1994; 2003), in part due to the perceived non-applicability for the social sciences of biomedical models of research where the concept originated. Although widely adopted by the social sciences, anthropology lagged behind and did not adopt language on informed consent until the 1998 AAA code of ethics. This was perhaps due to a tendency toward anthropological exceptionalism—that anthropology fieldwork ethics are unique-- or from a latent paternalism/maternalism among anthropologists suggesting that the researcher knows what is best for the research population. The obvious lack of agency afforded to the research population implied in the above was less of an issue in adopting the informed consent doctrines than the necessity of anthropologists to comply with federal guidelines regarding informed consent. Critical discussion of mechanical forms of applying informed consent in biomedical research, especially as used in research among vulnerable, non-Western populations justifies some of the reservations by anthropologists that consent is a one-way street where forms are used more to protect the researcher than the human participants. The powerful alternative of collaboration in research is embedded in reciprocal informed consent.
This spirit of informed consent is reflected in the terminology that defines the nature of the research relationship. In traditional and still extant models the researcher is powerful and in charge, and the “subject” is structurally acted upon and is relatively or absolutely powerless. Traditional hierarchical models emphasize the agency of the researcher and the passivity of the research population. Indeed, federal regulation of research is monitored by mandatory university and institutional “Human Subjects Committees,” dreaded by graduate students and some anthropologists where requisite approval is often met with the relief of a successful rite of passage or dodged bullet. Unfortunately, the IRBs, structured and composed by institutions, are often driven by a narrow view of informed consent as obtained mechanically through a signed form. This reinforces the coercive, “one-way street” idea of the researcher informing the ‘subject’ of the terms of research. Standard language of a form may include the “right” of the subject to withdraw from the project at any time, or that the subject’s identity is absolutely protected, a right often not sought by the researched, either the relatively vulnerable or more empowered.
The standard anthropological reference to information providers as “informants” has not been subjected to much debate. ‘Informant’ conjures notions of a special, proprietary relationship between researcher and researched, akin to spying and devoid of the “covenantal” relationship that some admire in the anthropological fieldwork experience (argued by Murray Wax, and reflected in the 1998 AAA code of ethics, A.5). A terminological and thus ideological shift from ‘informant’ to collaborator or participant may be underway spearheaded by such journals as Collaborative Anthropology. However, the fundamental paradigmatic change in research methods and analysis that is represented by this shift is fundamental and radical, and is therefore not to be seen as easy or inevitable.
The process of change is both moral and political. About 15 years ago while I was Chair of our institutional IRB, I was allied with an activist group of medical practitioners (nurses and health care professional educators) to change the name of our committee from “Human Subjects Committee” to “Committee on Human Participants in Research.” It is worth noting that for years the committee continued to be referred to by colleagues as “Human Subjects” not, in my view, simply a result of institutional lag, but the result of a wider federal and disciplinary view of the nature of the social scientific research relationship.
Contemporary Collaborative Research
This paper evolved from my having been invited as a discussant to a 2007 AAA panel, “Collaborative Anthropologies, Public Engagement, and Epistemologies of Equity” organized by Eric Luke Lassiter. Papers were presented that underscore the added value of the collaborative approach. I was asked to discuss a number of papers, and refer to two of these in this discussion.
Melissa Hargrove describes the agency exhibited by her major collaborator, the Chieftess of the Gullah people. This is notable perhaps not as a new, exceptional reality, but as increasingly normative. In my own research I have necessarily and readily adjusted my own methods in an increasingly complex and at times uneasy environment of research in Sudan. Over three decades of research the negotiation of terms of research and collaboration have evolved in response to domestic and international politics. The agency of local collaborators has become demonstrable in response to perceived “agendas” of foreign, specifically of Western and American researchers, as well as from journalists and human rights activists who may appear to indigenous communities as inseparable. As my previous work on the sensitive subject of Shari`a law has now been translated into Arabic and is currently being discussed for the first time, the dialogues (and the silence) that have shaped these new realities have been among the richest and most challenging of my career.
Hargrove’s acknowledged and self expressed white privilege, albeit from an Appalachian woman’s class brand of that privilege, deepens discussion of her research--“What problems, after all, trump racism and social inequality?” she correctly asks. Thus, she situates herself in the “ethics of emancipation politics” with its attendant responsibility toward the reduction or elimination of human exploitation and structural racism. This ethic is one of advocacy that cannot be confused with a general ethical responsibility for anthropological professionals. The convergence of Gullah racial-cultural shame with Hargrove’s—albiet at opposite ends of the black-white binary—is profound and could easily lead to a desirable juncture of researcher-collaborator ‘co-theorizing.’
Les Field’s paper challenged the traditional assumption that the folk-native/ and science-anthropology categories arguing that tools of literacy are used not only by the researcher but by the “subjects” as well. The incorporation of reading/writing back between researcher and collaborator further invites commentaries and indigenous analysis of those with whom one conducts research. This subordinates the historical emphasis on the individual. But in the still real world of employment and career building by even the most committed collaborative anthropologists there may be a lingering reluctance to co-researching and co-writing. The ultimate transformational nature of the relationship between researcher and collaborator is the co-authorship of books or other outcomes of research. The 15 years of conversations related by Field with his collaborators has yielded a high degree of consensus of social reality, thus revealing the relative ease of “co-theorizing.” This is a novel part of a maturing ethnography where the anthropological self and the ethnographic other are less a binary than an evolving pair that seeks together to locate real life and reflections upon it.
Better Research, Better Ethics, a Better “Product” for Applications
The practical applications of collaborative research are not difficult to imagine. New centers offer services to assist agencies and contractors with collaborative initiatives in complex multicultural, cross-cultural, communities especially in the field of public health research. One example is the “Collaborative Initiative for Research Ethics (CIRE)- Community Studies” advertises itself as “a multidisciplinary collaboration of community-based participatory research and environmental justice academic practitioners and community organizations, offering courses, training, educational resources and case study development on improving research ethics in environment and community health” (http://www.researchethics.org). The training courses feature ethics and review board approval as a centerpiece of the outcomes they advertise. Training courses titled “Avoid Research Harms to Human Subjects and Communities;” “Utilize Ethical Review and Analysis with Complex Research Problems;” “Build Effective Research Models and Partnerships with the Community.” Contractual services provided by CIRE are designed specifically for successful review including training from basic biomedical ethical practice (the Belmont Report); international and national community research guidelines with acronyms familiar to social science contract researchers (CIOMS/ Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences; APHA/American Public Health Association; and CBPR/Community-based Participatory Research); Institutional Review Board (IRB) training and preparation; ethical theories/perspectives for complex ethical decision-making and challenges in community research, and review of important case studies in the field.
Such entrepreneurial initiatives have filled a void left by a general failure of the discipline and profession of anthropology to adequately train the latest generation of anthropologists either in theoretical or professional ethics--in all of its present complexity—or in the alternative of collaborative anthropology.
Collaborative Anthropology as Twenty-First Century Anthropology
Whether a result of emerging moral-ethical agendas aimed at decolonizing anthropology, or from an invigorated anthropological ethics, collaboration in research is likely to be necessary to research of any kind, anthropological or otherwise. There is an opportunity for anthropology to move slightly ahead of this curve that amounts to a general 21st century direction of research with humans, biomedical or social scientific. This “win-win” opportunity will be recognized and pursued by a new generation of anthropologists if they are trained to be self conscious, collaborative researchers and if they engage with a critical history of the discipline.
Works Cited
Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn 2003. Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice. Walnut Park, CA: AltaMira Press.
Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 1994. "Informed Consent and Anthropology: We are not Exempt", Human Organization, 53(1): 1-10.
Reinharz, Shulamit and Lynn Davidman. 1992. Feminist Methods in Social Research. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
2007 AAA panel, “Collaborative Anthropologies, Public Engagement, and Epistemologies of Equity” organized by Eric Luke Lassiter. Papers presented by Les Field “”Writing Collaborative Ethnographies” and Melissa Hargrove, “Negative Worker or Race Traitor? Representing the Symbolic Schizophrenia of Contemporary Anthropological Collaboration,” AAA Annual meeting, Washington, D.C. November 19, 2007.
Web: “Collaborative Initiative for Research Ethics (CIRE)- Community Studies,” (http://www.researchethics.org).
[1] 1. Expanding upon discussion of papers at AAA 2007 annual meeting, Washington, DC, commentary on “Collaborative Anthropologies, Public Engagement, and Epistemologies of Equity,” Saturday, December 1, 2007, Washington, D.C.