Limn

This chapter centers on Limn, a scholarly magazine that focuses on tensions arising at the intersection of politics, expertise, and collective life. It describes Limn as an experiment in scholarly publishing in the interpretive human sciences that aims to make possible new kinds of communication and collective work. It also mentions Martin Høyem, who custom designed Limn with a range of imagery and graphic material related to the contributions, including a featured graphic that links diverse contributions in a common conceptual problem-space. The chapter discusses Limn as a vehicle for exploring new forms of collaboration in the interpretive human sciences. It recounts the changing field of American anthropology during the 1990s and 2000s in which discipline encouraged individualized work and valorized virtuosic interpretation and writing, with little space for collaborative inquiry.

What’s So Funny ’bout PECE, TAF, and Data Sharing?

This chapter points out different ways involvement with collaborative projects share form, shape, or style, and may be imagined as nested within each other, like matryoshka dolls. It deals with the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), the digital infrastructure that support new collaborative projects in anthropology. It also cites the long-standing collaboration of The Asthma Files (TAF), which is an experimental ethnographic research project that eventually led to the conceptualization and development of PECE. The chapter mentions the Digital Practices in History and Ethnography Interest Group (DPHE-IG) that was organized within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global collaboration of individuals and institutions working to make data more easily and openly shareable. It emphasizes how the collaborative form is the experimental form analyzed by Hans-Jorg Rheinberger as essential to a modern scientific style.

Imagination, Improvisation, and Letting Go

This chapter shows collaboration through the research on face-to-face collaboration, a collaboration with George Marcus as co-organizer of a series of “ethnocharrette” events at the University of California, and the results of collaborations between participants in those events. It explores the different subfields of anthropology that tend to display different general orientations to collaboration and sharing. It also discusses archaeology and biological anthropology wherein collaborative research is more or less treated as a given. The chapter cites the training in linguistic anthropology in which participants share their data order to widen the scope of possible interpretations and analyses beyond what the fieldworker can conjure. It sketches the uncommon figure of a lone anthropologist that dominates the subfield's imaginary, and basic collaborative practices like data sharing.