Experimental Collaborations

In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration. Through creative interventions that unfold what we term as fieldwork devicessuch as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythmsanthropologists engage with their counterparts in the field in the construction of joint anthropological problematizations. In these situations, the traditional tropes of the fieldwork encounter (i.e. immersion and distance) give way to a narrative of intervention, where the aesthetics of collaboration in the production of knowledge substitutes or intermingles with participant observation. Building on this, the book proposes the concept of experimental collaborations to describe and conceptualize this distinctive ethnographic modality.