Moving Past Public Anthropology and Doing Collaborative Research

Abstract

This article is about moving past the debates and arguments concerning public anthropology and how students can realize public engagement via collaborative research (i.e., between and among researchers and local communities of collaborators). I suggest that students should be aware of at least the basics of the current debates surrounding public anthropology; that they should appreciate, as many have argued before, that these debates represent only a point of departure in a much larger anthropological project; and finally, that although students can engage in applied, publicly oriented work (regardless of what you may call it) in many different ways, collaborative research practice presents a special opportunity to do so. I thus begin with a very brief statement about moving past public anthropology, follow this with some of my own ideas about collaborative ethnography and public engagement, and suggest some general advice for doing collaborative research. © 2008 American Anthropological Association.