Transcript

[00:00] [AnthroPod theme music, All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]

Alejandro Echeverria (AE) [00:14]: Collaboration is often celebrated in anthropology today, but what does it really mean to work together, and who decides how that work unfolds? Hello, and welcome to AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

In today’s guest episode, “Thinking Through Problems Together: Comparison and Collaboration in Anthropology Today,” guest contributors Martina Weber and Lena Löhr explore collaboration and comparison as deeply intertwined processes, full of tension, negotiation, and possibility.

Yichi Zhang (YZ) [00:47]: From leadership decisions that appear top-down to collective practices that slowly erode fixed hierarchical boundaries, through contrast and comparison, this episode invites us to rethink and reflect on how anthropological knowledge is made, shared, and transformed, and how transparency and fairness are located around anthropological work within the current power structure of academia. Please stay with us.

Martina Weber (MW) [01:21]: In anthropology, collaboration and comparison take many forms. They can begin in the field, between researchers and the people they work with, or at the desk, between projects, institutions, and theories.

Arne Harms (AH) [01:34]: We are thinking across institutions like a seawall or like an eroding island, where we then kind of sit together and think through what that means.

MW [01:46]: Maybe collaboration begins with an ideal, meeting at eye level. But that ideal rarely holds in reality. Collaboration often takes shape where hierarchies, expectations, and methods collide.

Lukas Ley (LL) [01:59]:  What was most valuable for me was to see how specific decisions as a leader can be collaborative, but also they often become portrayed as collaborative when they’re not, when they’re actually more top-down decisions. To compare is to perceive difference, not to erase it.

MW [02:20]: What is distinct, what stands apart, becomes the moment of understanding.

Ursula Rao (UR) [02:24]: And I tend to use contrast and compare as a pair, because what we do is not only compare, but that in fact very often comparison is a contrasting, like what is different.

MW [02:38]: Collaboration and comparison are closely linked. Both are ways of learning together through difference, entangled processes that create as much tension as understanding.

Lalitha Kamath (LK) [02:50]: They’re interdependent processes, but they’re also processes that happen almost with some amount of dynamic tension, I would say, because they sort of evolve in different ways, both collaboration and the comparative element.

MW [03:03]: Moving beyond the outdated image of the lone anthropologist, fieldwork today is rarely an individual pursuit. And collaboration and comparison, these are two methods that are intertwined with each other.

Both are ways of thinking through problems and questions together, both uncertain, both unfinished. For this podcast episode, we are taking part in a workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. Here, anthropologists from different fields will discuss what it means to engage in comparison and collaboration today. We see this podcast as an attempt to start an audio archive on the topic of comparison and collaboration.

The archive can be added to and reorganized. It’s open to new additions. This podcast episode is realized by two former anthropology students and audio producers, Lena Löhr and Martina Weber.

AH [04:07]: Welcome to Halle and welcome to the Max Planck Institute. It gives me such a great pleasure to see all of you here, those of you who have traveled far and those of you who have come in early to join us for this workshop. And I’m really happy to see new and familiar faces and to embark with all of you on two and a half days of discussion on comparison and collaboration and how these two intersect and how the intersections of comparison and collaboration might be helpful to grapple with infrastructures, Asia, or the polycrisis.

MW [04:50]: It’s the first morning of the workshop in Halle. In a conference room, more than 20 people are sitting around the table. They hail from the U.S., Indonesia, India, Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, introducing themselves, where they come from, what their research field is, why they’re here.

What they have in common is that they work on various research projects across Asia. They are interested in infrastructures and what we can learn through them about globalization, environmental change and technological interventions. They made their way to Halle to spend nearly three days thinking and talking about comparison and collaboration in their work and in the work of others—an invitation that came from two people.

AH [05:40]: I’m Arne Harms. I’m a postdoc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and there with the Department of Anthropology of Politics and Governance.

UR [05:49]: So my name is Ursula Rao and I’m director of the Department of Anthropology, Politics, and Governance here at the Max Planck Institute.

MW [05:56]: Here is a director, a full professor, and a postdoc researcher, both working within the same research institute and both occupied with a question of collaboration and comparison.

AH [06:07]: To me, the curious thing here really is that comparison has been tabooed a little bit in anthropological theory. It used to be kind of the one guiding method in the early 20th century, then it has become kind of tabooed and something that’s impossible or not even desirable—for good reasons.

MW [06:25]: To kick things off, let’s talk about comparison first. Many social scientists use comparison as part of their everyday work. I wonder, is the practice of comparison already an integral part of anthropology?

AH [06:39]: And sometimes I feel people pretend that they’re not comparing, but they’re comparing all the time.

MW [06:45]: However, this seems to be more problematic, as comparison is associated with earlier evolutionary thinking.

UR [06:53]:  How do we move beyond kind of a Eurocentrism? How do we move beyond, you know, the claim that, you know, Europe produces universal knowledge and everyone else has local knowledge? And here, comparison played a big role.

But it wasn’t theorized so much in terms of comparison, because comparison had actually lost credibility because of older traditions of kind of racist form of anthropology in which you have kind of evolutionary anthropology. And so, in this tradition of a kind of cultural relativist school of the Boasian kind, comparison somehow had become, kind of, not very fashionable.

MW [07:42]: Those were indeed formative moments in the history of anthropology that Ursula Rao mentions. Comparison once served an evolutionary logic, a way to rank societies along imagined lines of progress. Franz Boas—you might remember him—rejected this idea, insisting instead that cultures must be understood from within, on their own terms. Well, cultural relativism, not comparison.

That was the late 19th century. But this is not where we’re going. We’re not digging up old debates. We’re looking at how comparison and collaboration work today, in practice. So, let’s move from theory to fieldwork, to the everyday work of anthropologists.

UR [08:30]: But also because comparison is something that our interlocutors bring to the case, and I think this also came very, clearly through some of the papers. So comparison is something that, we not only, do ourselves, but that we also write about, as interlocutors in our field compare their situation.

MW [08:53]: Ursula Rao has been collaborating with a writing lab in Delhi. Three parties are involved in this project: researchers like Ursula, an NGO called Ankur, and a group of what are referred to in the project as research practitioners. Ursula Rao explains how this works, and here is where collaboration comes into play.

UR [09:13]: And so in the collaboration with this NGO, Ankur, we have created a dialogue in which, you know, we have trained these young people to think ethnographically and write ethnographically, which is then facilitated by, you know, the team leaders at Ankur and the head of the writing lab.

MW [09:37]: So the process starts with training, learning to observe and write about everyday life in Delhi from an ethnographic perspective. But it doesn’t stop there.

UR [10:06]: And so together we have produced a number of outputs that are both at the level of kind of ethnographic stories, you know, written by these—we call them research practitioners because they don’t have like a formal research degree, nor are they employed for research or nor do they do research in the very classical sense. But they do, kind of, the practice of ethnography.

MW [10:10]: The writing lab becomes a collaborative space where experience meets analysis and where voices often missing from academic texts take center stage. A multimodal way of experiencing life in the city, told by those who live it.

UR [10:25]: So that is, for example, we did something on health, we did something on digital banking, we did something on COVID, we're now doing something on heat and environment more generally. And this is usually eye level, very collaborative conversation. We agree on something where we both sides feel it’s like valuable.

And then with this topic, Ankur goes back to their writing teams, and these are young people who come voluntarily to these writing labs. And then they discuss these topics, they kind of think about how they are present in their neighborhood, and then they decide on doing interviews or they write about their own experience.

MW [11:08]: In this new form of collaboration, writing itself becomes a shared practice, a form of reciprocal knowledge-making. The research practitioners are not just subjects of study, but active writers and thinkers.

UR [11:21]: The practice in Delhi is very similar to what we know from academia, namely that they come together once a week and then they read to each other stories and then they comment them, critique them, maybe give ideas of how to shape the story of maybe what other information to get. So, as these stories mature, then at some point they’re shared with us. And then we also discuss with them, like, you know, what is it that we see in the stories, where we also feel there’s maybe, you know, need for more information, where we could refine them.

MW [11:56]: What emerges is a two-way exchange. The stories are not simply data, but contributions that feed back into theory building and academic reflection.

UR [12:05]: So these research practitioners write stories, these stories are there, but at the same time, you know, these stories inform further work by my own research, but also that of other researchers, and they get cited in articles and underscore theorizing there.

MW [12:27]: Ursula Rao provided insight into a research practice, a distinct approach to fieldwork that involves working with interlocutors in ethnographic research in a different way. Through this process, researchers take a step back from the usual position of observing and documenting. But is it also a step back from their authority? Does it shift Ursula Rao’s own positionality as a researcher?

What is distinct to ethnographic research is the often in-depth encounter of people. The engagement in life works on a seemingly personal yet professional level. The challenge lies in the exploration of the dynamics that emerge when individuals with diverse interests collaborate. The collaboration is a process that inherently incorporates hierarchical structures.

Within anthropology, the relationships between researchers and interlocutors have been vividly discussed since at least the 1980s, with its dialogical turn. You might remember this term.

UR [13:36]: So having said this, you know, we have another ten minutes. If anyone wants to share something.

MW [13:43]: In the seminar room in Halle, I'm slowly feeling my way forward.

Collaboration in field research. How do hierarchies manifest themselves there? Arne Harms set the frame for the workshop in Halle at the Max Planck Institute. What is his stance when it comes to collaboration in the field—for example, when working with fieldwork assistants?

AH [14:07]: A fieldwork assistant is being paid and the social capital being gained through the collaborative or not collaborative research project is most often with the researcher who gains his or her PhD, who opens up a career. So, there is a huge kind of gradient in forms of what it is researcher and fieldwork assistant collaborative teams doing, why they’re doing it, and who profits in what ways.

MW [14:36]: So collaboration in this sense becomes a layered relationship, unequal by design, but also full of subtle negotiations. The question arises, when does collaboration truly begin and when does it turn into mere assistance?

AH [14:52]: So I think on one hand, it’s really important to think about the relationships with fieldwork assistants. And of course, they are of a collaborative nature. But in some ways, they’re also not. So I think this is a good point to think about where does collaboration start and where does providing a service end, in a way.

MW [15:15]: Doing this kind of research, there are many things that emphasize the differences between the groups. It is important to think about whose work is paid or unpaid, the social status within a given context, and the decision-making processes involved in determining the methods and topics at play.

AH [15:34]: During my fieldwork in the mangrove wetlands, I tried to work against these differences. But I also noticed that at some point my fieldwork assistant, he didn’t actually want to do that. He was actually really content in the role of being someone who helps me finding the ropes, who helps me translating very complicated kind of narrative accounts and draw a salary from that and was particularly, was content with that. He never was in the role where he thought, okay, I want to join you in writing. No, not at all.

MW [16:10]: Arne Harms defines collaboration as working on equal terms. So should collaboration with a fieldwork assistant be called teamwork with hierarchies? Arne has looked closely at the relationship between researchers and their assistants, exploring their nature. Open questions remain. The archive has space for more ideas on power relations.

Let’s move to another example from one of the participants in the workshop, where hierarchies in collaboration are negotiated.

LK [16:40]: I’ve been doing ethnographic work with fisher communities, the traditional communities of Kolis, who are a fisher community, customarily. So these are communities that live on the coast.

MW [16:53]: Lalitha Kamath is trained as an urban planner, someone who is accustomed to thinking about cities in terms of design and policy. For almost a decade now, she’s been doing ethnographic work with fishing communities along India’s eastern coast.

LK [17:07]: And more recently, a lot of the discussion from fishers has been about the tremendous pollution and the degradation of the creek, the fact that increasingly there are no fish in the creek.

MW [17:19]: Lalitha’s work grows out of a collaborative project called Climate Action Stories of Mumbai. Together with academic colleagues, she explores how people live and adapt within the city’s wetscapes, to learn from local experiences of environmental change, and from the everyday ways communities respond to rising tides, pollution, and new forms of urban life.

LK [17:41]: So, this was really the collaborative aspect where we worked within our team at one level, but also then with people within the fishing village, and then a series of different kinds of experts.

What I’m calling experts [are] people who are seen as fishing leaders within the city, who were the heads of different kinds of fishing associations...

MW [18:01]: When listening to Lalitha, it is apparent that collaboration becomes more than a method. It’s a way of seeing, combining perspectives to understand a landscape that is constantly in motion and moving between different worlds of languages.

LK [18:16]: So one thing that I will say is that the project of translation, I think, was perhaps a very very difficult one.  In the team, we were comfortable and fluent with Marathi, Hindi, and English. We primarily discussed and talked in Marathi with fisher communities—sometimes in Hindi, but primarily in Marathi. At one level, it was a project of translating language. At another level, it was really the issue of particular terms that are almost impossible to translate.

There’s a certain untranslatability the team really grappled with. We didn’t know how to translate either certain terms, like even dushkal, for example. The term in Marathi is called matsya dushkal, and the English translation of it is “fish drought.” And so initially, the focus was really on thinking about this, similar to agricultural drought, as the disappearance of fish, no fish in the creek. These traditional creek fishers, what are they to do if their livelihood is—that, their fish are vanishing?

MW [19:24]: In the field, language becomes a pivot, both bridge and barrier. Here, collaboration starts through debate and careful listening.

LK [19:33]: So it involved, in fact, many times a lot of very heated arguments, discussions about how do we understand a particular term or a particular concept. Even the term matsya dushkal, in fact, evolved through this kind of collaborative process—which was, as I said, had a fair amount of disagreement. So I wouldn’t call it conflicted, but it had its moments of tension. But I would also see this as productive tension.

MW [19:58]: Meaning is shaped in friction, not through consensus, but through testing, stretching, and reworking ideas in dialogue with others.

LK [20:07]: And perhaps the third was one where there were real silences.

For example, many women fishers, didn’t feel very comfortable speaking—certainly not in front of the camera or in front of a voice recorder or even to outsiders. So I think there were silences and there were times when we felt very stuck because we were sure that something important was happening, but we didn’t have a way of apprehending it.

MW [20:32]: And yet, these silences were themselves a kind of language. They marked presence and absence, knowledge and restraint. They demanded attention, patience, and sensitivity—a reminder that some things are not easily captured and that understanding is often partial.

LK [20:50]: It’s somewhat painful and troublesome and frustrating, but I do think that if you do stay with the trouble, if you stick with these concepts and work at them and sort of... gnaw at them and bash at them for long enough in collaboration and in conversation, but also keeping alive a certain kind of openness.

I think that openness to be challenged and to revise your own thinking and your own sort of positionality and reflexivity, this is critical, I think. But if you can do that, then I think it’s really rewarding. And then once you succeed a few times, then it becomes easier—[even when] it certainly never becomes [truly] easy.

MW [21:35]: An itch that’s uncomfortable yet impossible to ignore. Part of the very process of thinking together.

LK [21:43]: It’s painful sometimes, especially if it’s a really bad itch and you’re really scratching. And in some ways you're like, do I really want to scratch this?

MW [21:50]: Maybe even feeling the need to scratch an itch is itself a method of knowledge—or at least a motor of collaboration, the gentle pressure that drives shared inquiry.

Voices together in the background [22:03]: I mean, you didn’t actually frame what is crisis, but I was sort of thinking, like, what is the crisis? There might be a way of thinking about that as a matter of comparison, that's sort of like... Just opening up comparison as a process…

MW [22:17]: At the Halle workshop, participants engage in lively discussions about their papers. I can sense the passion these researchers have for their work. I observe them thinking aloud and experiencing the joy of pushing the boundaries of academic thought. My conclusion? Collaborative work is not yet a routine in academic workshops. I want to know more—and about the potential impact when the comparison lens evolves in collaborative work.

So, the next conversation turns to a research collaboration that quite literally digs into the shaping material of sand.

Lukas Ley (LL) [22:57]: We’re all trying to answer the same question, which is how do uses of sand shift over time? And what are the social dynamics, the material dynamics of these shifts?

MW [23:12]:  The research group S.AND brings together four long-term ethnographic projects from Goa, Mombasa, an island off the coast of Bangladesh, and Marseille, initiated and guided by Lukas Ley.

LL [23:25]: I am head of research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. I’m leading a junior research group funded by the DFK and Emmy Noether Research Group.

MW [23:38]: The group has been developing a collective approach to theorizing sand in its political, historical, and social context. Since coming back from the ethnographic fieldwork recently, they discuss, compare, and think together, keeping the specificity of each field site in tension with broader questions. What connects these cases and what transcends them?

LL [24:00]: My interest in sand cannot be imposed on other people’s commitments to interlocutors, to other people’s projects. I had to leave a lot of space for these sand-related projects to evolve and also develop their own foci, potentially even deviating from this comparative angle that we had. And that’s precisely, I think, what happened.

MW [24:28]: In this collaborative project, Lukas describes a process that didn’t follow a fixed design. His role was less about steering and more about allowing the work to take shape on its own terms. What emerged, he explains, was not a single unified story about sand, but many stories, each tied to distinct contexts, practices, and struggles.

LL [24:51]: Currently, I think we’re in a writing process, which is the most intense phase, where we’re trying to overcome differences between the projects, but also really holding them and cultivating these differences. And I think it really comes to kind of disjunctive way of comparing, where we’re not necessarily speaking about the same thing, but we do notice from time to time materialist overlap really in the ways in which sand behaves, in which sand becomes present in people’s lives.

But I think this writing process is currently quite open-ended. And I’m not sure if this comparative angle will be in the end the most productive angle. I think that’s difficult to ascertain at the moment.

(MW) [25:43]: While Lukas describes comparison as a disjunctive moment and an open-ended process, others have encountered moments where comparison suddenly clarifies and offers a glimpse of coherence. Ursula Rao recalls such a moment.

UR [25:57]: Suddenly you got this 360-degree picture, and that you understood so much more because you got to see not just a specific part of an infrastructure, but a set of intersecting elements that all in some way exist separately, but at the same time produce consequences that preconfigure what is possible in another lifeworld.

So, it’s from here that I kind of began thinking more about how far apart do things have to be that they can be useful comparison, and how close do they have to be together in order to facilitate comparison.

MW [26:37]: For Ursula and her colleagues, this became the starting point for a larger project—one that aimed to understand comparison not just as something anthropologists do, but as something that could guide theory and methodology itself: A framework that makes explicit what field workers already do implicitly, connecting, contrasting and making sense across difference. Back to Lukas Ley.

LL [27:03]: Personally, I would say comparing allows you to take a step back from your own work. I think it just provides a different contextualization, to see how other people feel about their work and what they learn from it. It’s just this really productive exchange that can happen.

MW [27:24]: Researchers constantly weigh their experiences against one another, asking whether a method worked in one place as it did in another, or if collaborating with interlocutors or an NGO brought up similar dynamics elsewhere. Comparison happens almost naturally in conversation and reflection.

But as Lukas Ley points out, the real limits appear when it comes to drawing conclusions, when similarity begins to blur the specificity of each field site.

LL [27:52]: And then I think for me, comparison is also a way to establish companionship within research. We have been trained over a long time that ethnography is this rite of passage where you go alone and you come back a changed person because you have entered new relationships with the world and objects.

MW [28:18]: Nowadays, many researchers still carry out this kind of lonely fieldwork, often with only partial support from supervisors, institutions, or funding buddies. Looking back, Lukas recalls finishing his PhD with a lingering thought.

It would have made a difference to be accompanied through some of those stretches of research rather than navigating them alone.

LL [28:41]: And so, I think having a comparative lens or inviting people into your thinking, into your project, I think that’s a healthy way of getting to reflect on decisions you’ve made, were they good for mental health, you know, were they good for your research, and just really build also solidarity between projects and stand up for each other if something doesn’t work well.

So I think this companionship also comes from doing comparative work, whether or not this is sort of the ultimate goal of your research.

MW [29:25]: I look around in the seminar room. Around twenty people are sitting at tables arranged in a rectangle facing each other. They are discussing and thinking together. Such collaborative thinking spaces, where scientists meet in person, have become rare. They spend much more time with their laptops than with their colleagues, alone, writing.

What happens when writing is done collaboratively? Let’s listen to some familiar and new voices from the workshop.

AH [29:59]: Right now, I sometimes don’t know whose idea was it actually, but it just emerges and it’s like, oh yeah, this is it, cool, this is really nice, this is really, really nice.

So it can be very rewarding, intellectually stimulating. Magic happens in terms of gaining new perspectives, gaining new concepts, and also engaging the joy of co-writing together.

UR [30:18]: So I remember collaborations where we could almost kind of finish each other’s sentences and where we could fully trust each other with, you know, writing the text just simply together, you know, just, you know, bouncing it back and forth and everyone would just continuously improve on the text, which was deeply, deeply, deeply kind of collaboratively.

Unknown Speaker #1 [30:38]: We’ve written articles that take the form of an interview back and forth. So she speaks, I speak, she speaks, I speak.

AH [30:46]: There is this idea of, you know, the genius writer, and we all want to be genius writers, so therefore it hurts.

It hurts sometimes, and some people more than others, it hurts to see your phrases being kicked out. It hurts, your phrases being reworked by others. You think, no, I did much better. I noticed this idea was much more interesting. So it’s also a very vulnerable moment.

Unknown Speaker #2 [31:10]: Usually at first it would be like a defending mechanism. So usually if I get a critique, then I just stay out of it for a while, and then after everything is settled down, looking at it again with a clear head, you will like, okay, there’s a point in that critique, and then you’re starting to, like, think about it, how to adjust your idea and writing.

AH [31:18]: And not getting pissed when someone kicks out a particular phrasing that you thought was really helpful. And it happens a lot. Oh my.

MW [31:52]: You’ve heard about the writing process, the struggles, the frictions, the small breakthroughs that make collaboration so rewarding. But in academia, where careers are often built on single authorship, individual credit, and clear ownership of ideas, such collective work can be risky.

Is all the effort, the negotiation, and the shared uncertainty really worth it? It seems the system still rewards the lone author.

UR [32:19]: I must admit that collaboration really only became a topic once I was an established professor. Before that it was having a career.

And having a career, certainly in that period when I kind of grew up, was still very much, and it is still today, that you have to show your individual capacity as a scholar. And this is how I was brought up and this is what I did. And I did my doctoral thesis and then my postdoctoral book, my second book.

MW [32:51]: Ursula Rao, one of the three directors of Max Planck Institute, openly and honestly talks about how she was encouraged to make a name for herself as an individual scientist, rather than to collaborate. Fair enough.

UR [33:05]: When I did my doctoral thesis and my postdoc, there was already a very vigorous debate about dialogical anthropology. So fieldwork was already kind of becoming much more—it wasn’t collaborative to the degree that some of the things are now, but it was certainly very dialogical and much more reflective of the way that different kind of voices, kind of, come into your work—that it’s not like you, the sole author, but that you actually become the curator of, kind of, these voices of different people. Something that came out of the critical reflection of the 1980s.

MW [33:43]: Since the 1980s, anthropology has increasingly questioned the notion of the researcher as a solitary, single author, the lone voice interpreting the world.

Arne takes the thought a step further, asking, is there really such a thing as a single authorship at all?

AH [34:01]: For me, it’s sometimes really impossible to pinpoint really what is actually my thought and what emerged kind of in a larger conversation and what are my parts in that. Therefore, there is also hardly a way of really kind of clarifying that in one’s writing. And then of course—I’ll leave it at that.

Because it’s a difficult, very, very, very difficult, very dangerous terrain in a way, because where does the author start and where’s the end to the author? And can we actually speak of a single author? But the way the academic system works only wants you to speak as a single author, but there is none.

MW [34:47]: I like that idea: having a plurality of authors for collective texts in academia. It’s a field where honoring single shining careers is a tradition. Multi-voiced ethnographies already exist. The same goes for co-authored articles.

Taking this further, could you imagine that single-authored texts will disappear?

AH [35:09]: I have sometimes difficulties in seeing really the single authorship. But I think it’s still important in terms of who’s taking responsibility for a text. It’s someone who says, I am responsible for the text, that I’ve done whatever is in this text to the best of my knowledge, for instance.

MW [35:32]: Taking responsibility for a text. Would that also work for collectives?

UR [35:37]: So, I think there is space for collaboration, there’s also space for collaborative writing, but there’s also something to be said for kind of the individual kind of author and the acknowledgement that, you know, from my position, this is how I want to tell the story.

MW [35:56]: Let me just clear this up. Collaborations with people on the ground, with research assistants, in writing labs, with research practitioners, and within academic circles—none of these methodological approaches take place in isolation. They depend on the structures that sustain them: foundations, universities, and research institutes like the Max Planck Institute in Halle. These institutions provide the fertile ground for collaboration, but also define its boundaries.

UR [36:36]: How do you bring people at different career stages into an honest conversation? How do you also create space for kind of democratic conditions for true collaborative work?

MW [36:50]: Ursula Rao, director of a well-funded research institute, explains her strategic vision of bringing researchers together.

UR [36:57]: There’s a process in which you actually design research and for researchers to take different positions, from which their research will speak to each other. I call this neighborhood.

So how close and how distant do different projects have to be in order to generate creative, interesting conversations? I think many of these collaborative research projects work with a very kind of simple diagramming where they say, okay, I take, one person in this locality, another person in this locality.

But what if we could theorize to make kind of the design of these different projects that are supposed to talk to each other and complement each other to lead to broader theorizing, you know, more adventurous and more risky?

MW [37:47]: The current research landscape in Germany and Europe requires researchers to fulfill two roles: Be successful as an individual with a long list of publications. At the same time, research funding bodies primarily offer collaborative projects. Listening to the participants of the workshop on comparison and collaboration in Halle, you heard how researchers are trying to meet these demands.

Though, one final thought came to mind. To what extent are they free in their decisions on how to conduct research depends on their position in the academic system.

AH [38:23]: People like me who are currently employed at a research institution and are free from teaching, have more time to engage in the sometimes risky, definitely time-consuming processes of writing collaboratively.

I’m not saying that people at a teaching university cannot do the same, but they have, of course, different time resources at their hand and I think can maybe not always kind of engage in these lengthy and sometimes uncertain projects.

MW [38:55]: Within academic structures, even inside a single research group, inequalities of rank and access are always at play and must be continuously negotiated.

LL [39:06]: Right now, as a research group leader, I think that I’m more evaluated based on leadership skills than collaboration skills, which are not necessarily the same.

MW [39:22]:  In his position, Lukas Ley has joined a coaching program for group leaders at the Max Planck Society. The program offers space where people can think about how decisions are made.

LL [39:33]: What was most valuable for me was to see how specific decisions as a leader can be collaborative, but also they often become portrayed as collaborative when they’re not, when they’re actually more top-down decisions.

MW [39:50]: He advocates for fairness—even when access to resources, networks, and recognition within academia is uneven.

LL [39:58]: These coaching programs should also be offered to anyone else at any level who wants to engage in collaboration to really kind of foment a rethinking about what it means to meet, to think together, and to approach research a little bit more, yeah, collaboratively, democratically. And to have collaboration also that is fair despite existing hierarchies.

MW [40:27]: And Lalitha Kamath, you met her before, the anthropologist who teaches in Mumbai—she wishes for changes in the structure of academia to enable collaborative work by younger scholars.

LK [40:37]: I don’t want to romanticize this process. It’s a tough one. And I do think that while it’s very rewarding and it certainly should be rewarded more structurally, in academia—that’s something that I do feel, because otherwise I think it’s very hard for younger scholars to not be able to experiment and improvise in these kinds of collaborative, provisional ways, largely because these are not valued very much within our academic structures.

So it forces younger people to then wait or hold off on more innovative ideas that they might have, or the desire to collaborate, that might be very strong but they might be counseled to not do it.

MW [41:21]: Lukas Ley, who works with PhD students, stresses which values have been brought forward in PhD work so far and what is missing.

LL [41:29]: Yeah, I think it seems to be at a stage where it’s incredibly often encouraged, but not necessarily structurally supported. It’s something that people do specifically on top of individual workload that they have as PhD students.

On top of writing a thesis, they would also collaborate with scholars, build networks, and work with local communities. It doesn’t always become visible either. It certainly is not what people look at first. I assume when evaluating a project proposal or an application, a cover letter, I think it is difficult within the current setting, you know, the way we evaluate the merits of a researcher, to really foreground your expertise as someone who collaborates.

AH [42:36]: I mean, I think of course it would be it would be excellent to have a research landscape that is not marked by such deep hierarchical differences—to have a landscape where academic precarity is not the norm, where people don’t have to fear all the time about the next contract.

Because when you’re fearing about the next contract, you have to prioritize into what kind of collaboration have you got the time and resources to invest, and what kind of collaboration you are wise to leave aside.

MW [43:13]: Here, Arne Harms emphasizes the influence of economic considerations on methodological decisions in science. Lukas Ley leaves us with another question. He calls for transparency of collaborations in a field where correct citation is taken seriously.

However, acknowledging contributors does not equate to equal social capital.

LL [43:38]: What does it mean to collaborate within the German system specifically, which is very uneven and hierarchically organized, and where it’s not always clear, you know, who calls the shots and who, in the end, actually is published and whose name is, you know, mentioned first, and who gets to who gets to reap the applause afterwards.

MW [44:04]: You have just heard an excerpt of voices, moments of thinking and reflecting aloud, of comparison and collaboration in the making. What you’ve heard isn’t a conclusion, but the beginning of a shared, open discussion, the sound of a group learning to think through problems together.

It’s an ongoing process. It’s an evolving archive that may soon welcome more voices, more ways of comparing, and more questions about what it means to think with, rather than about, each other.

Let’s listen to some final thoughts from the workshop participants.

Unknown Speaker #3 [44:44]: I think this workshop seemed like the place to bring together those very first ideas about collaboration and what it means to think across sites, across scales, across contexts to kind of start this conversation.

Unknown Speaker #4 [44:59]: It is not only anthropologists who compare, but are interlocutors to engage in different kinds of acts of comparison in their attempt to navigate in a changing world.

Unknown Speaker #5 [45:15]: Some of the “aha” moments have come out of reading other people’s papers, having written our own, and thinking about the ways that particular categories are used to make connections across. And I think for me the most helpful ones have been categories that have been deeply historicized so that you can see how the meanings have shifted over time.

Unknown Speaker #6 [45:37]: When we do our work at one particular site, we always have an imagination of a model somewhere else. So the models are in a way historically constituted. Very often the present models that we have are based on earlier understanding of history. And frequently when we work in Asia, our models are based on European models. So inevitably, we will have the kind of implicit comparison with European examples.

Unknown Speaker #7 [46:05]: I’m not sure that we solved the problem of comparison, but we at least opened up many different types of comparison and ways to think about how they may be useful in the future for anthropology and anthropologists.

MW [46:24]: This podcast was commissioned by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Editorial supervision, Arne Harms. Script and production, Martina Weber and Lena Löhr. Narration and sound design by Martina Weber. Voice direction, Lena Löhr.

Voices which appeared in the podcast: Ursula Rao, Arne Harms, Lukas Ley, Lalitha Kamath, Lisa Björkman, Andrew Haxby, Gafadir Ahmadian, Celia Lau, Tarini Monga, Lisa Mitchell, Jelena Salmi, and Chuck Wee Chang.

Thanks to our participants and interviewees.

YZ [47:16]: We hope you enjoyed today’s guest-produced episode. We would like to thank Martina Weber and Lena Löhr and all the guests who collaborated in this episode. We would also like to thank Yichi Zhang and Alejandro Echeverria for their work for transcribing and disseminating this guest episode.

If you would like to see a full transcript of this episode and any work referenced in the episode, please visit us at CulthAnth.org. That’s C-U-L-T-A-N-T-H.org.

Thank you for listening to AnthroPod, the Podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. See you next time.

[47:55] [AnthroPod theme music, All the Colors in the World by Podington Bear]