Reflections through Reflexivity: Why My Collaborative Research Project in Arctic Labrador Did Not Work

The best- laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley, an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promised joy.

—Robert Burns (1759–96)

Collaborative ethnography is a complex affair, stratified into many layers of varying and constantly shifting intersubjective, moral, and political imperatives. Each bears the impress of negotiation, respect, and responsibility at every step of the often politically arduous and precarious process that characterizes collaborative fieldwork from start to open-ended—“unfinalizable” (cf. Bakhtin 1963)—finish. Community collaboration may consist (ideally, but not always) of the joint formulation and negotiation of the code of conduct regarding participant observations, establishing the research question, research protocols, style, and format of data collection (Field 2008; Kral and Idlout 2006), along with the co-production (or the possibility thereof) of ethnographic representation in the final text (or video, plays, or other media) through joint theorizing, reading, writing, and editing (Lassiter 2005).

Regardless of the aforementioned elements of collaborative research frameworks, the majority of ethnographies (at least those with which I am familiar) wherein collaborative frameworks are employed rarely mention the specific details of how such projects come to be—that is, from the very first contact made with a community or field site to how the research questions are formulated, how protocols are established, and so on. This type of knowledge and experience is often left for informal “hallway talk” (always seemingly uttered sotto voce) and rarely finds its way into ethnographies in any substantive sense. That ethnographers sometimes elide the messy and often random experiences in their collaborative enterprises deprives students of the pedagogical weight and significance of how to deal with adversity in collaborative situations—especially in Indigenous contexts. The recounting of experiences such as what ethnographers’ improvisational strategies have been and how best to negotiate the multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives of collaborators, or how to navigate the politically charged and turbulent waters of “setting up a collaborative project” from scratch in Indigenous contexts, would be beneficial in preparing students better for the field.

It follows, then, that for undergraduate and graduate students of anthropology, pertinent questions regarding collaborative ethnography—and very interesting ones to have answered—might be: How does something like a collaborative ethnographic project come about (from the initial idea to the first community meeting), especially those where the ethnographer has no prior connections to a community or has prior connections provided from an advisor? How does one start something like a collaborative project from the very beginning— especially for someone who has never attempted to set up a collaborative project? These are questions I pondered long and hard before my first— and very brief— foray into the field as a doctoral student.

I describe here what it is like for a doctoral student in anthropology to enter the field in an attempt to set up a collaborative ethnographic project for the first time in a remote, fly- in community in arctic Labrador. By recounting my experiences, and through the inclusion of actual emails and letters sent to and from the community, I hope to shed light on what I experienced from the initial contact with a Labrador Inuit community’s AngajukKâk (mayor), to my first— and, sadly, only— visit with community members, on through to the seemingly random circumstances that can pose major obstacles or in some cases even prevent collaborative projects from materializing.

I frame my initial experiences with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony— that is, the free interaction and independence of multiple points of view through language. To this end, I try to show how a form of impromptu or improvised polyphony figured quite prominently into the collaborative enterprise and ultimately colored how I interacted with people and how I interpreted their interactions with me. Such an overreliance on polyphony led me to overlook many aspects of interactions with community members, both politically and historically.

Before I address the theoretical details and their practical import into the collaborative enterprise, though, let me provide some background and context with respect to my journey so far...