Editors' Introduction

Volume 4 of Collaborative Anthropologies features several new and engaging discussions of collaborative research and its many complications and complexities. The volume opens with a special issue on collaborative anthropologies in Latin America, guest edited by Editorial Board members Joanne Rappaport and Les Field. As they note in their introduction, collaborative researches have a long history in Latin America. Many in English-speaking North America, however, are unfamiliar with this past and, indeed, its ongoing developments. While these developments are in some ways shared with those working in other areas, the unique dimensions of Latin American collaborative anthropologies provide fresh and new insights into the larger work of democratizing research methodologies. Rappaport and Field invited several contributors to submit essays for review and to organize what we think is a particularly exciting and thought-provoking collection. We should note that several of the essays were originally written in Spanish, reviewed thus, and then translated into English for inclusion in this volume. With our ever-modest journal having no monies for translation, Joanne Rappaport donated her time and energies translating two of the essays as well as editing a previously translated one. We thus owe her a deep debt of thanks for helping to make this happen.

This volume also contains an interview that we hope will be the first of a regular series featured in future volumes of Collaborative Anthropologies: interviews with anthropologists who have distinguished themselves as contributors to the development of and dialogue concerning collaborative anthropological endeavors. This first interview is with J. Anthony Paredes, past president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, American Indian studies scholar, and well-known advocate for Native American issues and peoples.

We continue in volume 4 with exploration of issues in student fieldwork, which we began in volume 3. For the present volume, Editorial Board member Charles Menzies agreed to submit for review a set of essays originally written by a group of graduate students involved in doing collaborative service learning and anthropological research with members of Gitxaała Nation, an indigenous community of which Menzies is also a member. The students present a series of reflections that are both honest and candid, illustrating the joys and difficulties of doing work that is responsible and responsive to multiple constituencies. A commentary from Nees Ma'Outa (Clifford White)—a hereditary leader of the Laxgibou, Gitxaała, and former Chief Councilor Gitxaała Nation—ends the piece. In an effort to encourage dialogue about field schools, service learning, and student fieldwork, we invited two anthropologists well versed in these areas to comment on the essays: Susan Hyatt, of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; and Tim Wallace, of North Carolina State University. Their responses are followed by a reply from Charles Menzies.

Volume 4 concludes with reviews of several recently published books that, like the research articles herein, imagine and engage in various and contested articulations of collaborative and anthropological work today, whether it be with the military (as in Lucas's Anthropologists in Arms); within shifting fields, methods, and pedagogies (as in Faubion and Marcus's Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be); or between and among variously situated museum professionals and indigenous peoples (as in Sleeper-Smith's Contesting Knowledge).