AO: The analysts use post-structuralist work to aruge that the current imaginary of the “subject as informant” does not stand given the desire for the epistemic partner to perform an intellectual operation. The analysts argue that the renegotiation of the rules of engagement with the dialogic, epistemic subject opens the intellectual space for a rethinking of collaboration.
AO: The analysts are engaging with two senses of the term collaboration (which they argue they are not using). First are critiques of collaboration with the less powerful and formally silent subject in traditional ethnography. Second are the “collaboratory of the information age and the operating ethos of the organziations that define the processes that anthropologists study worldwide”; the blending into the ideological order (i.e. going along with the collaborative milieu but still functioning under the independent fieldworker conception of fieldwork (85).
AO: the analysts build on Marcus work on “complicity” in multi-sited work and Holmes’ work at the European parliament (88)