Introduction

By its very nature, collaborative anthropology embodies many qualities, limitations, and potentialities. Lassiter (2005, 2008) synthesizes these in a rich complex of definitive ways, noting that ethnographic work not only defines collaborative methods, ethics, and emphases; it can also be, and often is, inspired by community aspiration, knowledge, and concern (see also Fleuhr-Lobban 2008). Collaborative research can also be colored by a unique set of circumstances and expectations, some of which imbue conflicting motives or result in unanticipated outcomes that might reveal the bruising politics of inequitable power and a “difference” in knowledge and cultural life (Cook 2009).

Attempts to work collaboratively over time, place, idea, and practice regularly give rise to multiple challenges for anthropologists and the communities with whom they work (Toussaint 2007). For example, when project partners are unclear about strategies or ambivalent about the qualities of working together. Strohm (2012), similarly to others writing in this field, observes eloquently that to some degree ethnographic research relies on establishing and maintaining a “cooperative relationship” (99). However, despite its qualitative potential, such a relationship is sometimes unevenly conceptualized and enacted.

Since the inception of Collaborative Anthropologies, its contributors have highlighted the values, implications, and complexities of collaborative design, research, and writing, particularly in North and South America (Rappaport 2008). Articles in this special section explore similar themes, while also situating the discussion in a wide spectrum of locations that are mostly but not always Australian- inspired. Building on the concern of Lassiter (2005, 2008), Escobar (2008), and others to identify the ethical and epistemological intricacies of contextual analysis, contributing authors introduce a myriad of interrelated sociocul-tural, economic, and political issues about the why and for whom of collaborative work.

A key raison d’être for this special section dedicated to the qualities and potentiality of collaborative work is that it arose from a panel I convened for the annual conference of the Australian Anthropological Society (aas) at the University of Queensland in 2012. In broad terms the concern was to expand understandings about epistemological and ethical issues as these are emerging in Australian and Pacific settings. Responses to the Panel Abstract were both many and varied, attracting contributions about Australia and the Pacific but also about Melanesia, Southeast Asia, and Europe.

The articles that constitute this section represent a selection of papers given at the conference. Each has benefited from audience commentary, review, and revision as well as a rethinking and inclusion of broader debate and the relevant literature. While a certain resonance with collaborative work in other parts of the world is evident, and each author engages with literature from close and distant places, a variety of distinctions can be discerned, due in part to geographic, spatial, and political differences. There are nonetheless a number of parallels to be drawn with the United States, Canada, and South America, for instance, in the anthropological research that has occurred and continues to take place with colonized Indigenous groups in the field of land and native title claims. A pronounced difference in postcolonial circumstances for each location is that Aboriginal women and men now increasingly train as anthropologists. While not without its complexities and tensions, anthropology is no longer the domain of non-Indigenous persons to the extent that it once was. Such an outcome adds a qualitative dimension to the intellectual, practical, and ethical aspirations and inspirations of collaborative research as well as to anthropological thought and practice more broadly.

Hedda Askland’s contemplative piece, not focused on an Indigenous setting, opens the special section. She reflects on study in Norway and Australia, influences and fragilities along the way to becoming an anthropologist, and the value her research has added to a School of Architecture at an Australian university. Evident in Askland’s commentary is that the creative and dynamic potential of an evolving collaborative anthropology often exists in ways not readily understood or anticipated, including by anthropologists themselves. Alan Rumsey, on the other hand, shows the long- held collaboration between anthropology and linguistics, especially in the United States but increasingly in Australia. Through Rumsey’s fine- grained, substantive insights readers can discern not only a changing...