Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices

TitleExperimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices
Publication TypeBook
AuthorsEstalella, Adolfo, and Tomás Sánchez Criado
Number of Pages236
PublisherBerghahn Books
CityNew York
ISBN Number978-1-78533-854-0
AbstractIn 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 devices”—such as coproduced books, the circulation of repurposed data, co-organized events, authorization protocols, relational frictions, and social rhythms—anthropologists 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.
Short TitleExperimental Collaborations