Moving Past Public Anthropology and Doing Collaborative Research

Abstract

This article is about moving past the debates and arguments concerning public anthropology and how students can realize public engagement via collaborative research (i.e., between and among researchers and local communities of collaborators). I suggest that students should be aware of at least the basics of the current debates surrounding public anthropology; that they should appreciate, as many have argued before, that these debates represent only a point of departure in a much larger anthropological project; and finally, that although students can engage in applied, publicly oriented work (regardless of what you may call it) in many different ways, collaborative research practice presents a special opportunity to do so. I thus begin with a very brief statement about moving past public anthropology, follow this with some of my own ideas about collaborative ethnography and public engagement, and suggest some general advice for doing collaborative research.

Making the unfamiliar personal: arts-based ethnographies as public-engaged ethnographies

“…Working in arts-based ethnographies, as in other forms of collaborative ethnographic work, can pose personal and professional challenges to the participants involved (Lassiter, 2005(Lassiter, , 2008. Working with different communities with different interests and agendas can cause frictions and problems that delay or block the project.…”

“…As a collaborative ethnography, this project responded to the needs of the community of Chilean exiles who wanted to express their feelings about long-term exile (Lassiter, 2005(Lassiter, , 2008. The exiles felt that their stories have been lost during the 17 years of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and by the following democratic government's reconciliation, which had not given full justice to their suffering.…”

A question of quality: the art/science of doing collaborative public ethnography

“…Collaborative public ethnography is a way of doing engaged public ethnography at a local level by systematically involving various publics in collaborative research partnerships at all stages of the research process, moving from identifying the research focus, to data collection and analysis, and finally to the dissemination of knowledge and creation of research reports that are more readable, relevant, and applicable to local communities (Lassiter, 2005(Lassiter, , 2008. Collaborative research refers to a variety of processes such as PAR, community-based research, action research, or collaborative ethnography, but all are founded on activist trajectories, with the underlying aim to represent the plurality of voices and concerns of local communities and to conduct research that is useful for local community collaborators (Lassiter, 2008).…”

“…Collaborative research refers to a variety of processes such as PAR, community-based research, action research, or collaborative ethnography, but all are founded on activist trajectories, with the underlying aim to represent the plurality of voices and concerns of local communities and to conduct research that is useful for local community collaborators (Lassiter, 2008).…”

Reply: solidarity

“…For further details on the role of ''public anthropologists'' seeLassiter (2008),Purcell (2000),Simonelli (2007).…”