Collaborators Collaborating: Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations edited by Monica Konrad (review)

Multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologists and others may lead to a variety of challenges related to research design, implementation, and subsequent outcomes. As collaborative research efforts garner increasing support from academic and nonacademic institutions, and as some anthropologists continue to embrace collaborative methodologies, exploring varying types of collaborative research is necessary to examine the circumstances surrounding this specific type of knowledge production. Each contributor to Collaborators Collaborating: Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations, edited by Monica Konrad, dedicates a chapter to describing the process of collaborative research and reveals lessons learned from the engagement. As Konrad explains, the volume primarily focuses on the “actualities of doing research collaboration,” discussing the “ambiguities, tensions and complexities of collaborative practice” (7). Contributions to the volume are organized around six themes—intersections and alignments, transactions and benefits, currencies and imperatives, research and ethics, alliances and diversity, and expertises and attributions—but undercurrents of power relationships and ethics run throughout the book. As a result, Collaborators Collaborating is a body of work useful not only to anthropologists interested in collaborative research but also to anthropologists specifically interested in scholarship of anthropological research ethics and power relationships. Additional discussion about how multidisciplinary collaboration may impact social science disciplines in the future would have strengthened the volume, but each contribution deepens understandings about collaborative research processes.

The volume begins with Konrad identifying five general aspects behind the impetus for collaborative research, following individual authors’ descriptions of their collaborative endeavors, which primarily occur outside academic settings. Although collaborative work outside academic settings may yield beneficial results, collaboration can also have many challenges and may limit the scope of sharing beneficial information. Barbira-Freedman’s contribution to the volume highlights the way in which some collaborative work may constrain anthropologists’ ability to share information with others and perhaps place stress on some interactions. Describing her need to be careful not to reveal her pharmaceutical company collaborator’s information to competitors, Barbira-Freedman’s chapter draws attention to the way in which anthropologists may feel some strains in their collaborative relationships, particularly when the relationships may surround potentially profitable product development.

Barbira-Freedman’s chapter is one of many that focus on public health and biomedical practices. The health-related contributions of the volume demonstrate how specific public health endeavors or biomedical practices are often entangled in larger power networks or political webs. Empson’s contribution specifically highlights this phenomenon by drawing attention to the way in which some biomedical practices, specifically organ transplantation, draw together networks of medical collaborators. Her work is set against a backdrop of Mongolia’s changing health system, where an emerging neoliberal economy shapes access to health services and figures into ideas about progress. Similarly, in describing global health research and development alliances, Marjanovic highlights the challenges in assessing collaborative global health initiatives, further underscoring the need for interdisciplinary perspectives in attempting to understand social phenomena that underlie global health inequities.

The politics behind public health endeavors and biomedical practices leading to collaborative research designs raise questions about ethics and knowledge production. In providing two accounts of a single collaborative endeavor, the Human Genome Project, M’charek describes opinions about the project while pointing to potential concerns surrounding such large, ill-structured projects. One of the concerns present in her contribution surrounds the ethics of conducting a project that could potentially reinvigorate racialized notions of difference. Questioning the ethics of collaborative research can also reveal how ideas of “ethics” that underlie research endeavors may not actually fulfill aims of protecting human research participants, as Simpson’s chapter highlights.

Although Collaborators Collaborating is not exclusively about ethical dimensions of research, several contributors detail ethical challenges related to their collaborative work. Simpson, for example, describes his participation in collaborative research in Sri Lanka, where the local population is suspicious of outside researchers. Simpson describes the death of a local man, which was believed to have been caused...