Editor's Introduction

This second volume of Collaborative Anthropologies takes up in the main prospects and problems of collaborative research in what has conventionally been posed as that between researchers and research participants/ interlocutors. The articles featured here clearly illustrate that the lines between researchers and so-called subjects are becoming increasingly blurred, especially as diverse expectations for and multifaceted understandings of collaboration shift in the context of ever-evolving research partnerships.

Such researches, of course, yield ever more complex and complicated experiences with, modes of, and notions about collaboration and its role in anthropological theory and practice today. While many anthropologists have done and theorized these kinds of collaborative researches before-in many cases articulating the critical reasoning behind why such approaches are necessary and appropriate-much theoretical space remains, as I noted in this annual's first volume, for charting how these complexities and complications tie into and inform a larger project to integrate collaborative research into broader streams of and changes in anthropological theory and method. Taken together, the articles in this volume push toward this end.

The first section, "Collaborative Archaeologies," grew out of an invited session sponsored by the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), at the latter's 107th annual meeting (November 2008) in San Francisco, California. Titled "Collaboration and Archaeology," and organized and chaired by GAD Board Member Celeste Ray, the session joined with the AAA meeting's larger theme, "Inclusion, Collaboration, and Engagement," by emphasizing the intersections of past and present archaeological researches with growing opportunities for working with descendant communities as collaborating partners in the research process. As Ray points out in the introduction to this section, differences about intellectual property rights, conflicts over material culture and human remains, negotiations concerning repatriation, and a host of other complexities make collaborative research particularly complicated in archaeology, a point that these articles make abundantly clear. Many thanks are due to Ray for organizing the session and facilitating the submission and editing process for featuring these essays here. Thanks too to Collaborative Anthropologies Board Member Larry Zimmerman, who presented at the AAA session and who also helped facilitate the review of these papers for the journal.

The section that follows, "Experiments," brings together three papers in which diversely situated authors experiment in different ways with issues of collaborative ethnographic research; their work engenders diversely situated research products as well as very different navigations through the ebbs and flows of collaboration. In introducing this section Collaborative Anthropologies Board Member Samuel R. Cook-to whom I owe a deep debt of thanks for his help in facilitating and editing these articles-appropriately contextualizes the papers by noting that the authors struggle to varying degrees with the unavoidable power dynamics that such approaches underscore, and the prospects and problems of collaborative research that inevitably follow.

We conclude with several book reviews pertinent to chronicling the creative and innovative use of collaboration in anthropology and closely related fields. As I noted in the introduction to volume 1, the possibilities for exploring and theorizing collaboration continue to expand, and I hope that those interested in these issues will feel welcome to submit their work to Collaborative Anthropologies.