The Dynamics of Collaborative Research Relationships: Examples from the Warlpiri Songlines Project

In November 2005 I arrived in Yuendumu, Central Australia, where I planned to live for the following fifteen months to undertake PhD field-work connected to an Australian Research Council–funded linkage project titled Warlpiri Songlines: Indigenous, Linguistic and Anthropological Perspectives. Within a few short months, I formed relationships with two Warlpiri people, a husband and wife, Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan and Thomas Jangala Rice.¹ They were both written into the project as key collaborators and we worked together extensively for all the time I lived in Yuendumu. We continued our collaborative research when they traveled to Canberra, and I returned for visits to Yuendumu in later years. In this article I discuss the particular dynamics of this relationship and how it shaped the kind of ethnographic research undertaken and, more broadly, the outcomes of the Warlpiri Songlines Project. As Fluehr-Lobban has shown:

Not only is collaborative research ethical, and thus morally preferable to historical models of research, but it is better research because its methodology emphasizes multiple, polyphonic perspectives, which will leave a richer heritage of ethnography to subsequent generations of ethically conscious researchers.

(2008: 175)

I hope to add to these observations by demonstrating through examples from the Warlpiri Songlines Project that the particular dynamics of collaborations among anthropologists and community members largely shape the ethnographic research results. When I lived in Yuendumu, a community located in Australia’s Northern Territory, the contingencies of daily life continually reshaped the relationship I had with Egan and Rice, affecting the research and its outcomes. In a similar way to Mathias (2010), I argue that collaboration is in this way often “uncertain,” as it is dependent on the dynamic that exists between co-researchers. For these reasons it is often difficult to plan a collaborative project, and the requirement for it to be flexible is essential. To demonstrate these points I present some background to the Warlpiri Song-lines Project, particularly its formulation. I also consider other people who were involved and the particular work that Egan, Rice, and I did as a collaborative team. One of my aims is to demonstrate that collaborative relationships blur the boundaries between traditionally accepted factors of participant-observation-based anthropological research, emphasizing as Rabinow has that “no matter how far ‘participation’ may push the anthropologist in the direction of Not-Otherness, the context is ultimately dictated by ‘observation’ and externality” (1977: 79–80).

When describing the special collaborative relationship I shared with Egan and Rice, I outline that the subject-object positioning so central to the power relations underlying much ethnographic research can be turned on their head when collaboration with co-researchers takes a slightly different path than anticipated. I show how this different kind of power dynamic results in multiple voices emerging in the ethnographic material, producing a much richer form of ethnography.

The examples from the Warlpiri Songlines Project provided in this article highlight several aspects of our research that were enriched through having multiple research agendas and perspectives constantly present in our research team.

The Warlpiri Songlines Project

From the beginning our project had broad objectives. The particular avenues of research were largely determined later according to community interest and appropriateness. The project was based primarily in Yuendumu but also incorporated research in other Warlpiri communities across the Central Desert of Australia, particularly Lajamanu and Willowra. These Warlpiri communities have been central to scholarly research for many decades, being the subject of ethnographies such as Mervyn Meggitt’s Desert People (1962), Nancy Munn’s Warlbiri Iconography (1973), Francoise Dussart’s The Politics of Ritual in an Aboriginal Settlement (2000) and Yasmine Musharbash’s Yuendumu Everyday (2008). Extensive linguistic research has also been conducted on the Warlpiri language, resulting in many linguistic and language learning resources. The Warlpiri dictionary compiled by Mary Laughren and colleagues (2007), for example, is the largest dictionary for an Aboriginal language in Australia. The Institute for Aboriginal Development in Alice Springs has published extensive resources compiled by Robert Hoogenraad and Mary Laughren that aim to assist Warlpiri literacy and language learning (see, e.g...