Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how participative methods can inform anthropology by analysing a development project of peer to peer life history interviews. It explores how participatory interviews conducted between villagers themselves help to capture the views of marginalised groups and individuals.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore ethnographic lessons that have arisen as part of my PhD fieldwork. While investigating changes in natural resource access related to mineral mining in south eastern Madagascar, I got involved with an NGO project on oral testimony. The project aims to communicate the life histories of marginalised villagers in areas near the mining sites. The project methodology was one of peer to peer interviews, based on training villagers in doing interviews and using voice recorders, with the interviews subsequently broadcast and published. The project proved analytically rich both in terms of experiencing how an NGO "communications for development" project makes use of ethnographic methods, and how the villagers themselves interpreted this experience.

Using extracts from the life histories and analysing the overall project, the paper will evaluate how anthropological methods can be informed by "communications for development" initiatives. Shortcomings will also be highlighted, in particular the gap between NGO intentions and local understandings of the project purpose and outcomes. The paper will consider the inherent limits to "empowerment" projects and the gap in respective needs of donors and "beneficiaries". The need for development anthropology to acknowledge methodological innovations from outside the discipline will also be discussed. As such, the paper aims to explore how participatory interviews conducted by peer researchers help to capture the views of marginalised groups and individuals, through building trust and sharing power in the interview. Finally, the paper calls for a publicly engaged anthropology communicating research findings both to informants and decision makers.