When Anthropology Meets Contemporary Art: Notes for a Politics of Collaboration

Decolonization obliges us to reconsider the relationship between the observer and the observed.

—Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe, "Rethinking Fieldwork and Ethnographic Writing"

If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is speech coming out of their mouth.

—Jacques Rancière, "Ten Theses on Politics" (translation modified)

Ethnography has always been collaborative. To varying degrees the anthropologist in the field has always relied upon a "cooperative relationship" with those being studied to explain, to confirm, and even to proffer their own observations and interpretations. The trouble is that this collaborative relationship has habitually been expunged in the ensuing ethnographic text—Malinowski's oeuvre being the favorite example—leading to the false and misleading impression that the ethnographic subject is passive and anthropological knowledge a mere matter of data collection. While much has changed in anthropological practice since the late 1960s, from an acute reflexivity and various calls for experimentation to the more recent call for engagement, in the last decades there has been a growing consensus that if anthropology is to address responsibly the crisis of representation and its myriad of ethical and political challenges, one promising route, though not the only one, would be to highlight, systematize, and prioritize the collaborative nature of ethnography. Indeed, if one of the key challenges facing anthropology lay in exposing and overturning the vexed authority of the anthropologist as ethnographer—an authority tacitly permitting representations that too often turned out to be distorting, if not repressive and dominating—how better to do it than to embolden and broaden the collaborative nature of the ethnographic project itself? That would be a working with that displaces the conceits of ethnographic authority.

The focus in what follows is not on the merits or potentialities of collaboration, nor is it a consideration of specific collaborative ethnographies. Neither is my goal to assess collaboration and its role in the "refunctioning" of ethnography (Holmes and Marcus 2005).¹ My aim, rather, is a critical consideration of what I see as the guiding principle of the recent collaborative turn, namely, collaboration as an ethical commitment. In particular, I wish to inquire as to whether this proclaimed ethical focus has not limited the impact of collaboration in its contribution to a critical anthropology; that is, an anthropology that allows for politics. To begin I present this guiding principle of an ethical commitment, its background, and its claims. I then offer a critical examination of this principle and its potential shortcomings in terms of collaborative ethnography by arguing how this commitment presupposes a claim of inequality that risks depoliticizing practices of collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of equality as a presupposition and as political gesture by turning to the writings of French philosopher Jacques Rancière. In the section that follows I draw out the implications of equality for politics through a consideration of two books presented and edited by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright that explore collaborations between art and anthropology.

Although Schneider and Wright nowhere mention or discuss equality, I want to suggest that arguments they put forward for collaborations between anthropology and art nonetheless presuppose an equality that, in turn, allows for politics. Specifically, Schneider and Wright highlight how art practices can challenge anthropology by providing "new ways of seeing," which I argue presents a unique opportunity for taking collaborative practices to their full political potential. Turning to my own fieldwork with Palestinian artists in Israel, I take on Schneider and Wright's project by outlining how my experience was met with an assertion of equality that reconfigured the ethnographic encounter. Resonant with the work of anthropologists in Latin America, one of the key points I put forward is that a politics of collaboration is fundamentally about decolonizing anthropology, its knowledge, and its methods: the disruption of the boundaries between anthropology and its other.

The Collaborative Turn in Anthropology

As collaborative methods have come to the forefront of anthropological research...