Uncomfortable Collaborations: The Ethics of Complicity, Collusion, and Detachment in Ethnographic Fieldwork

Collaborative methodological approaches, increasingly popular within anthropology, emphasize the need to build meaningful engagements with participants that include them more deeply as partners in the process of research, from inception to textual representation. In this article I engage with methodological debates about collaboration to argue for greater disciplinary and narrative openness about the modes of relational detachment and disconnection that emerge within fieldwork collaborations. Through a series of reflective fieldwork vignettes, I consider three types of collaborative detachment. These include how the diverse and competing relational obligations within fieldwork can shift collaboration into the terrain of collusion and complicity, how participants may demand a detached stance as a preferred mode of engagement, and how the conflicting effects of anthropological engagements on participants' life projects may demand of us ethical modes of detachment. Through these examples, I argue for a more nuanced debate about the politics and ethics of detachment within collaborative anthropology.