AO: This 2009 co-authored article offers a “research in progress” report by the different authors seeking to bring about conversation about how social cultural anthropology (dis)incentivizes collaboration. The analysts are especially strong in their nano and meta analyses, highlighting how their notion of collaboration differs from other works they have reviewed (they hold that collaboration should enable multivocality as a productive outcome of collaborations with each other whereas most other works aims towards consensus. However, notably, while they are very reflective on their research processes and experiments, they do not mention the data and technical infrastructures that undergird their collaboration.
AO: After reading Griffin and Hayler (2018) (after this paper), I also noted that despite the collective's egalitarian intentions, Anna Tsing seems to have become more well-known for the group’s work, raising questions about the evenness in distribution of the group's collaborative efforts. Griffin and Hayler note that collaborators within an endeavor can become marginalized through the denigration of certain kinds of expertise, since “power structures both within and beyond the immediate interactions can lead to the work of one or more collaborators being reduced or going uncredited, and to the detriment of their institutional and subject standing” (15). This is an important nuance and distinct from the point that many have made about the institutional disincentives to collaborate (which favor individual publications and outputs), highlighting the differential stakes and gains from a collaborative formation.
