Walking the Walk in Collaborative Fieldwork: Responses to Menzies, Butler, and Their Students

Editors' Note: In an effort to encourage dialogue about student fieldwork, we invited two anthropologists to comment on the Gitxaała-UBC field experience—Susan Hyatt and Tim Wallace, whose responses follow.

Terms like partnership and collaboration have become ubiquitous in academic circles these days. While many individuals and institutions talk the talk, it is much harder to find examples of walking the walk. Charles Menzies, Caroline Butler, and their students have presented an impressive set of papers documenting their experiences doing service learning projects in a First Nations community in British Columbia. Like Menzies and Butler, I too have involved my students in a series of community collaborative projects in the very different setting of Indianapolis. Menzies and Butler's introductory remarks, along with the reflections of their students, provoked my students and me to think about how their ruminations jibe with our own experiences.

As faculty members leading a field school, Menzies and Butler make some key points that are too often overlooked in planning and executing community collaborative projects with students. As they note, "For an instructor, the most difficult part of a field school is finding the balance between providing a safe and supportive learning environment and allowing students to experience the true difficulties and complexities of ethnographic research." In setting up projects in Indianapolis, I do not have the same kind of connection to neighborhoods here that Charles Menzies has with the Gitxaała Nation; therefore, I work to forge these relationships well in advance of involving students in local projects. In some cases this has led students to complain that they are getting a skewed perspective on the neighborhoods where our projects are located, in that they are relying on networks that I have established ahead of time. Because students in these courses have often not done fieldwork before, they do not understand that first of all, any genuinely collaborative project does require months and even years of groundwork, and second, in the time span of a semester-long weekly course, for students to participate in as many fieldwork activities as possible—including in-depth interviewing, participant observation in community settings, archival work, and mapping—it would be far more challenging, if not impossible, for each of them to accomplish individually as much work as we collectively produce in such a short period of time. I find that many of my colleagues in the academy who have embraced the notion of service learning similarly underestimate the extent to which community collaboration requires huge investments of their time before, during, and after the project. (And it is also fair to say that many service learning projects do not even pretend to embrace the value of collaboration.)

Among the many other trenchant comments Menzies and Butler make about the nature of this kind of research is their observation that academics' claims of being "invited" into a community to do research are often overblown. As they note, "Being invited, we would suggest, is more a measure of a community's organization and history than an award of honor bestowed upon a researcher." I concur fully with this important observation, and in fact I would hesitate to claim that I was ever spontaneously "invited" into any of the communities where I have done fieldwork, either with or without students. These relationships emerged as a consequence of long and deep conversations, which, as Menzies and Butler aptly put it, "lead to research connecting the desires of the researcher with the needs and expectations of the community." I have made proposals for student projects to various kinds of local organizations; in most cases, they have responded with enthusiasm, but I am in agreement that to characterize these reactions as "invitations" overstates the case.

The field school compilation by Menzies and Butler and their students is a critical piece because it strips away the romanticism of collaborative fieldwork to show how, as is the case with any other...