Editors’ Introduction

Volume 6 of Collaborative Anthropologies begins with an important and critical essay on collaborative linguistic research. Sarah Shulist suggests that while linguistic anthropologists have embraced the reevaluation and re-theorization of fieldwork, ethnography, and other research epistemologies, they have not yet fully realized the possibilities for collaborative ethnography and other modes of collaborative research in practice. She argues that concepts like co-theorization—developed by scholars such as Joanne Rappaport in this annual and elsewhere—offer linguists theories and practices that have great potential to expand their work on language. Dominant modes of linguistic documentation, Shulist points out, often lead linguists to organize their fieldwork around particular preservation goals, which focus their field collaborations “with members and subgroups within communities that share these goals” in very predictable ways. Collaborative ethnographic practices, however, have potential to open up these field collaborations in ways that actively encourage engagement with difference and with broader community discussions that advance “vital questions about what language is, what it means to be a speaker of a particular language, and what (or whom) revitalization is for.” We are extremely pleased to feature this essay in the pages of Collaborative Anthropologies.

We are also very pleased to feature a special section on issues of collaborative ethnographic research in the study of music and sound. Five essays—on hip hop, Senegalese praise music, public ethnomusicology in Bali, musical aesthetics on the Greek island of Skyros, and Kazakh fiddle playing—consider how collaboration and collaborative research has had a unique role in bridging ethnographic fieldwork with disciplinary and theoretical understandings of musical practice. Also pulling from ideas about co-theorization, guest editor Amber Clifford-Napoleone points out that “collaborative ethnography offers scholars of music and sound an avenue for developing theoretical perspectives within the field, in collaboration, in ways that pay attention to both culture and the specificities of performer and listener.” But as Cliford-Napoleone also points out, “the goal of this project goes far beyond notes and songs. The scholars, from anthropology and ethnomusicology, academic and public sector, instead posit that collaborative ethnography can itself be stretched, tested, and pushed beyond its current borders. We suggest that collaborative ethnography itself must be interrogated, and in turn used to interrogate disciplinary ideas about fieldwork, subjects, writing, listening, and the contemporary.”

Our commentary section continues in this vein of disciplinary questioning and reevaluation. Charles Menzies revisits well-known debates about the often antagonistic relationship between indigenous communities and the social scientists who study them. He suggests, however, that this colonial experience—which still often privileges and follows from academically centered debates, theories, and practices—can enter rapprochement via serious attention to indigenous intellectual traditions of inquiry. Pulling from his own Gitxaała background, as well as his own research in Gitxaała and associated Tsimshian communities, Menzies elaborates three Gitxaała concepts that he suggests have great potential to encourage a different kind of collaboration with rapprochement at its core. “In the same way that Euro-American social science locates the tension between individual and collectivities as one of its central concepts,” writes Menzies, “the Gitxaała approach, in common with that of other Indigenous peoples, locates the central contradiction as being between related and not related. Putting this idea at the center results in a focus on interconnections and social continuity. This differs considerably from the key notions embedded within mainstream Euro-American intellectual traditions that tend to highlight individualism and the problems of conflict.”

This volume also includes another “Issues in Student Fieldwork” section, which features a dynamic of doing collaborative research that is still rarely written about: collaborations that fall apart. Describing in detail a research project in arctic Labrador, Mark Dolson reflects on some of his study as a doctoral student and how an overreliance on academic theories of dialogue and polyphony ironically positioned his work in Labrador in such a way as to create the opposite result in the field. His own “form of impromptu or improvised polyphony figured quite prominently into the collaborative enterprise,” writes Dolson, “and ultimately colored how I interacted with people, and how I interpreted their...