Paper short abstract:

An examination of different sets of collaborative practices that emerge around ethnographic research on the enactment of ‘community’, embedded within an evaluation of a community initiative. Reflections on implications for calls for a more publically-engaged, applied anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I seek to explore different sets of collaborative relationships within an evaluation study, arising not only between research practices and the 'field', but also between different research agendas and trajectories. I draw on experiences of applying ethnographic approaches to explore the enactment of 'community', embedded within a broader programme of research evaluating the public health impacts of a community-based initiative. I reflect on the practice and meaning of collaboration in this context; I consider how dialogic relations between the epistemologies, methods and goals of my research and of the main study are negotiated, and have come to shape other collaborative relations, namely those between my ethnographic practices and the people, spaces and objects of the field. The specific focus of the research also raises further questions about the meaning of collaboration, and the political rationales underpinning movements towards a publically-engaged, collaborative anthropology (Gottlieb 1995). In the specific initiative being evaluated, 'communities' are cast as autonomous agents with control over the management of financial resources. If, as Lassiter argues, ethnographic fieldwork is "by definition, collaborative" (2005 p84), there arises potential for conflict between the aims and practices of ethnography, and the research object (and subjects) of this study, the supposedly 'autonomous community'. I will consider the extent to which this autonomy and collaboration can be compatible, and the implications of this for positioning my research within an evaluation agenda, and for how different practices of collaboration may strengthen and undermine the potential value of an applied anthropology.