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Lassiter, Luke Eric. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 201 pp. ISBN 0226468909, $12.00. Reviewed for the Anthropology and Education Quarterly by Nancy H. Hornberger University of Pennsylvania nancyh@gse.upenn.edu This is a worthy book by a worthy individual. One comes away from it with a sense of having encountered a deeply thoughtful and highly committed scholar who draws on and shares a rich trove of experience and reflection, and does so with a vulnerability and humility befitting the ethnographic honesty he urges us all to aspire to (p. 109). There are two parts to the book, the first exploring the history and theory of collaborative ethnography and the second presenting four main commitments characterizing the practice of collaborative ethnography. The four chapters of part one trace a trajectory from textual to dialogic to collaborative metaphors guiding the development of ethnographic research, informed by successive theoretical moves arising from humanistic (Sapir, Benedict), symbolic (Turner), interpretive (Geertz), and especially feminist (Behar, Rosaldo, Lamphere), postmodern (Clifford, Marcus, Fischer), and critical anthropology. In tracing the "ever-evolving [...] negotiation of moral responsibility between and among ethnographers and consultants" (p. 74), Lassiter draws on a wide sample of ethnographies- including early classic works from Native American studies such as Franz Boas' collaboration with Kwakiutl Indian George Hunt, Lewis Henry Morgan's with Seneca Ely S. Parker, and Alice Fletcher's with Omaha Indian Francis La Flesche, as well as more recent work such as feminist Elaine Lawless' collaboration with Sister Anna, feminist Moraga and Anzáldua's affirmation of a diversity of ethnographic writing styles (such as had been practiced for example by Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead, Elsie Parsons and Ruth Landes), or Lassiter's own collaborative ethnographic research and writing. It is this fund of his own experience with collaborative ethnography, and the self-critically reflective use he makes of it, that renders the second part of the book a particularly rewarding read, in my view. In these four chapters, Lassiter recurs to a series of collaborative multi-year ethnographic projects he has carried out, from his undergraduate thesis research with drug addicts in Narcotics Anonymous, to his Ph.D. dissertation research with Kiowa singers and a subsequent study of Kiowa Christianity, and finally research on the "other side" of Middletown - a collaborative ethnography of Muncie, Indiana's African American community undertaken with an interdisciplinary team of Ball State University faculty, students, and local community consultants while Lassiter was professor there. Lassiter tells stories of challenges and successes encountered in these experiences, musing on them and on related examples and insights from other ethnographers' work and writings, to explore the complexities, contradictions, paradoxes, and possibilities of the four commitments on which "a deliberate and explicit" collaborative ethnography is founded: ethical and moral responsibility to consultants; honesty about the fieldwork process; accessible and dialogic writing; and collaborative reading, writing, and co-interpretation of ethnographic texts with consultants (p. 77). This slim and exquisitely edited volume is itself an exemplar of the carefully honed and accessible writing Lassiter posits as the third of the four commitments. It is beautifully structured and tightly coherent, each part and each chapter introduced by a succinct statement of purpose, recapitulating what has been said thus far as starting point for the chapter(s) to come. The coherence goes far beyond those introductory pieces, however, as the author weaves a rich texture of themes and ethnographic examples from beginning to end. To give just one instance, in discussing the use of jargon as a way authors seek to convey authority (chapter 7), he invokes briefly three ethnographic examples -- Geertz's cockfight raid, Malinowski's tent, Americanists' narratives of adoption by Native Americans-that had been discussed in the previous chapter, as another means by which ethnographers claim authority by saying "I was there." Lassiter begins the volume by clarifying, in his preface, that his discussion centers on ethnography in the U.S. rather than other parts of the world, on collaboration between ethnographers and "nonprofessionals" rather than that with professionals, and that he does not argue that collaborative ethnography is appropriate for all ethnographic research or researchers. Despite these well-placed caveats, he acknowledges that collaborative ethnography has great potential and may indeed be emerging as mainstream; and later in the book, that it is "situated right at the center of [the] newly emergent and publicly engaged trajectory of anthropology" (p. 73). For this reader, at least, the book presents a persuasive case that collaborative ethnography is in fact what mainstream ethnography is or should be all about. As Lassiter shows, this is so because of both the historical and theoretical trajectory behind ethnography and the ever-increasing representational demands of the real world contexts in which it is practiced. This is a book that all ethnographers and would-be ethnographers would do well to read and take to heart. © 2006 American Anthropological Association. This review will appear on the web site http://www.aaanet.org/cae/aeq.html, will be cited and indexed in the June 2006 issue (37.2) of the Anthropology & Education Quarterly. The Anthropology & Education Quarterly publishes reviews of current books in the anthropology of education and related fields. The Book Review Editor identifies the books to be reviewed and solicits each review from an appropriate scholar. The Book Review Editor may also consider reviews submitted voluntarily at his or her discretion, but volunteered reviews are rare. The Book Review Editor makes the decision whether to accept the review for publication. This policy has applied and continues to apply to all book reviews, whether published on the AEQ web site or in the paper journal.
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