February 14, 2007
Collaborative Anthropology
Cambridge has established a Professorship of Collaborative Anthropology. Here is what it is about:
Report of the General Board on the establishment of a Sigrid Rausing Professorship of Collaborative Anthropology
1. The Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge is a leading centre of the subject in Britain, focusing on innovative research. Themes of current research in the Department include: new forms of kinship and family reproduction; bioethics; the social implications of technology; shamanism and medicinal plants; new religious movements; the political and economic transformations of post-socialist societies; new legal forms and institutions; cultural creativity; and artefact-based theory. The Department undertakes collaborative, innovative, and cross-disciplinary research in a wide range of areas with a special emphasis on engaging researchers in host countries, and its staff are actively engaged in research projects involving other institutions, both within and outside the University. The Department’s research is intimately linked with its teaching programmes through optional papers in Parts IIA and IIB of the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos and research seminars for all levels of graduate students and academic visitors led by teaching staff.
2. Collaborative anthropology describes the intellectual interaction between anthropologists and the creators of knowledge among the people they study. Traditionally, anthropology has been carried out by trained scholars from the first world undertaking fieldwork in another place, gathering materials, and then returning to write up the results. This model is no longer thought to be appropriate as it fails to recognize the collaborative process of anthropological research and the contributions of the interlocutors. From an ethical point of view, it should be replaced by a practice that encourages and gives due weight to interaction and critique between different cultures and systems of knowledge.
3. A opportunity to further develop work in this area has now arisen as the Sigrid Rausing Foundation wishes to endow a Professorship in the Department of Social Anthropology, to be called the Sigrid Rausing Professorship of Collaborative Anthropology. It is further proposed that the first holder of the Professorship should be Professor Caroline Humphrey, who holds the Professorship of Asian Anthropology established for her tenure by Grace 2 of 28 October 1998. Subject to the approval of this Report the University Lectureship, held in abeyance during Professor Humphrey’s tenure of the personal Professorship, will be suppressed. The Foundation has generously agreed to donate to the University the sum of £2m towards the costs of endowing this Professorship. The Foundation has a tradition of funding projects in this area and wishes to make contribution to the development of collaborative anthropology in the modern world. Professor Humphrey’s research interests include theories of ritual and religion, socialist/post-socialist economy and society, political forms and the political imagination in East Asia; she welcomes the change in title. Future elections to the Professorship would be made by an ad hoc Board of Electors.
4. The Council of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Faculty Board of Archaeology and Anthropology have formally recommended the establishment of this Professorship. The benefaction will also enable the School of Humanities and Social Sciences to release some additional funding to the Department of Social Anthropology to further strengthen the academic work of the Department and this will offer an outstanding opportunity to develop further its collaborative activities with other disciplines and research groups across the University.
5. The General Board recommend:
I. That a Sigrid Rausing Professorship of Collaborative Anthropology be established in the University, for Professor Caroline Humphrey in the first instance, from 1 January 2006, placed in Schedule B of the Statutes, and assigned to the Department of Social Anthropology.
II. That the regulations for the Sigrid Rausing Professorship of Collaborative Anthropology, as set out in the Schedule to this Report, be approved.
I’m not sure retitling Caroline Humphrey from professor of Asian Anthropology to professor of Collaborative Anthropology gets us very far. If the idea is to remedy the erasures or misreprentations of the past, shouldn’t they use that $2million to endow some status on those interlocutors in Nepal, India, Mongolia, Tibet and elsewhere?
I haven’t read Humphrey’s work. Also, she was just the first holder of the position.
The interesting part of the description is obviously point 2. In our vocabulary, it is the vexing problem of first order and second order observation. How are they related? How can we make the distinction doing some work for us?
Finally, the current holder of the position has just published a piece on multi-sited ethnography…; a concept that is certainly still worth discussing and engaging.
Although the endowment might have its genesis in a wish to right the wrongs of asymmetric power relations in fieldwork, the announcement is more open, I think with regard to both technique and topic. They want a model for “practice that encourages and gives due weight to interaction and critique between different cultures and systems of knowledgeâ€, which could be PR’s fieldwork with biologists (beyond “two culturesâ€) or Kevin’s with French police (not denunciation). The trust (http://www.sigrid-rausing-trust.org) paying for the professorship says, “It rarely funds the delivery of services, preferring instead to try to tackle the root causes of problems.†They see funding collaborative anthropology, which they hope will be a remediation of former or other ways of doing anthropology, as a way to produce social change. Presumably the social change they want to affect is not just saving the subjects of anthropological research from the discipline itself, but would come from insight into those problems anthropologists study. So they want second order observations – they think they are sufficiently useful to fund them and as Carlo points out, the question it raises for us is the role of second order observation. In some ways, asking what second order observation can do is the old anthropological question of how to ethically produce something accurate and useful for all concerned. It came up for me studying people and medicinal plants, for example. I never found anyone with a really good solution though.
Someone should write this foundation and inform them about ARC.
Should/Could it be part of our “connectivity” cluster?
This conversation is a good example of how “collaboration” is developing an aura to which many can be attracted, and why it deserves to be an object of anthropological observation. The group funding this collaborative anthropology professorship is a human rights philanthropic organization using a “rights based approach to social change.” People at Cambridge might put the money to good use–no reason to think they won’t–but certainly we must see evidence here of a contemporary buzzword deserving of our reflection and not just our mirroring.
One reflection on this buzzword action is what I said above, that they propose “collaborative anthropology” as a remediation of former, unsavory anthropological practices. Discussions about this came to the fore in the wake of Project Camelot and the Thailand Controversy, and have remained active in applied anthropology. What is interesting is that it seems like the desired results of “collaboration” are second order observations, although of course it could be they actually want “deliverables” – some specific ways of producing or proof of rights based social change.