As multisited research has become mainstream in anthropology, collaboration has gained new relevance and traction as a critical infrastructure of both fieldwork and theory, enabling more ambitious research designs, forms of communication, and analysis. Collaborative Anthropology Today is the outcome of a 2017 workshop held at the Center for Ethnography, University of California, Irvine. This book is the latest in a trilogy that includes Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be and Theory Can Be More Than It Used to Be. Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus assemble several notable ventures in collaborative anthropology and put them in dialogue with one another as a way of exploring the recent surge of interest in creating new kinds of ethnographic and theoretical partnerships, especially in the domains of art, media, and information. Contributors highlight projects in which collaboration has generated new possibilities of expression and conceptualizations of anthropological research, as well as prototypes that may be of use to others contemplating their own experimental collaborative ventures.
Table of Contents:
Introduction, by Dominic Boyer and George E. Marcus
1. How Do We Collaborate? An Updated Manifesto, by Douglas R. Holmes and George E. Marcus
2. Imagination, Improvisation, and Letting Go, by Keith M. Murphy
3. Ethnographic Reentanglements in the Collaborative Ecologies of Film and Contact Improvisation, by Christine Hegel-Cantarella and Luke Cantarella
4. Variations in the Ways That Collaborations Surround and Effect Ethnographic Research Projects: Addendum to Chapters 1–3, by George E. Marcus
5. Function and Form: The Ethnographic Terminalia Collective between Art and Anthropology, by Trudi Lynn Smith, Kate Hennessy, Stephanie Takaragawa, Fiona P. McDonald, and Craig Campbell
6. Limn: Experimenting with Collaboration, by Stephen Collier, Christopher Kelty, Andrew Lakoff, and Martin Høyem
7. What's So Funny 'bout PECE, TAF, and Data Sharing?, by Michael Fortun, Lindsay Poirier, Alli Morgan, Brian Callahan, and Kim Fortun
8. A Collaborative Ethnography of Transnational Capitalism, by Sylvia Yanagisako and Lisa Rofel
9. Hypernormalization, Collaborative Analytics, and the Making of "American Stiob", by Alexei Yurchak and Dominic Boyer
10. An Account of the Cultures of Energy Podcast as Collaboration—Offered in Podcast Form, Of Course, by Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe
11. Crafting Lissa, an Ethno-Graphic Story: A Collaboration in Four Parts, by Sherine Hamdy and A. Coleman Nye
Afterword: A Conversation on the History of Anthropological Collaboration with Rebecca Lemov
About the Author :
Dominic Boyer is Professor of Anthropology at Rice University, as well as a filmmaker, podcaster and author most recently of Energopolitics. Follow him on X @DominicBoyer.
George E. Marcus is Chancellor's Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books including Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary and Ethnography Through Thick and Thin.
