Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on a participatory film project with a Williche Community (2010-2012) and an interinstitutional multimodal research on food and health with a Rural School (2022-2024) I discuss how collaboration in medical anthropology is complicated by coexisting authoritative and emancipatory moments.

Contribution long abstract:

Collaborative, participative, action-research, feminist and critical methodologies have been central to my research on health, care and life over the last 15 years in the South of Chile. Through facing the many challenges of collaborative projects within different healthcare initiatives, with different institutions and people, I have moved from a pretty naïve to a more nuanced engagement with collaboration as a method, as an ideal and as a real-life practice.

In this paper I aim to discuss some of the pitfalls of collaboration in medical anthropology drawing on two ethnographical projects that took place in the Island of Chiloé in separate times and places with different groups of people: A participatory film project as part of an ethnography of a Complementary Health Initiative with a Williche Community (2010-2012) and an interinstitutional multimodal research project on food and health with a Rural School (2022-2024). In the first one, I was myself a doctoral student, in the second one I am part of a team of more or less established researchers and ECRs. Being quite different in its methodological proposal and institutional constrictions, both projects addressed health-related issues intending to counter epistemic and social inequality by including diverse forms of knowledge production and experimenting with ways of doing health-research as a caring and loving practice. In both cases collaboration had to be negotiated and transformed in the research process. It ended up including at times pretty vertical or authoritative practices along with some horizontal and emancipatory moments.