At the unsettling limits of collaborative life writing: A memoir of an ethnography-memoir

Abstract

This chapter uses a memoir to examine the limits of anthropological collaboration. I draw on 12 years of friendship and fieldwork that culminated in my writing an ethnographic life story of a German-Turkish return migrant (Leyla) and publishing it together with Leyla’s own original memoir. In recent years, anthropologists have rightly celebrated collaboration as the latest incarnation of engaged, public or activist anthropology. Yet, while reflecting on my collaborative project with Leyla and moving forward with further ones, I have found that collaboration is limited in ways that have not yet been fully explored. Researchers have tended to focus on barriers to collaboration stemming from unequal power dynamics, appropriation of an other’s story and the revealing of ethnographic secrets. In this chapter, I argue that important challenges for collaboration lie with the ethics of reciprocity in the ethnographic encounter and specifically with issues of authority, readership and publication goals; the limited training of anthropologists to engage in co-authorship; and the highly fraught nature of friendship itself under the pressures of late capitalism and professional academic anthropology.