reflections through reflexivity

Issues in Student Fieldwork

Reflections through Reflexivity Why My Collaborative Research Project in Arctic Labrador Did Not Work mark s. dolson, Western University, Ontario

The best-­laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-­gley, an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promised joy. —Robert Burns (1759–­96)

Collaborative ethnography is a complex affair, stratified into many layers of varying and constantly shifting intersubjective, moral, and political imperatives. Each bears the impress of negotiation, respect, and responsibility at every step of the often politically arduous and precarious process that characterizes collaborative fieldwork from start to open-­ ended—­“unfinalizable” (cf. Bakhtin 1963)—­finish. Community collaboration may consist (ideally, but not always) of the joint formulation and negotiation of the code of conduct regarding participant observations, establishing the research question, research protocols, style, and format of data collection (Field 2008; Kral and Idlout 2006), along with the co-­production (or the possibility thereof ) of ethnographic representation in the final text (or video, plays, or other media) through joint theorizing, reading, writing, and editing (Lassiter 2005). Regardless of the aforementioned elements of collaborative research frameworks, the majority of ethnographies (at least those with which I am familiar) wherein collaborative frameworks are employed rarely mention the specific details of how such projects come to be—­that is, from the very first contact made with a community or field site to how the research questions are formulated, how protocols are established, and so on. This type of knowledge and experience is often left

for informal “hallway talk” (always seemingly uttered sotto voce) and rarely finds its way into ethnographies in any substantive sense. That ethnographers sometimes elide the messy and often random experiences in their collaborative enterprises deprives students of the pedagogical weight and significance of how to deal with adversity in collaborative situations—­especially in Indigenous contexts. The recounting of experiences such as what ethnographers’ improvisational strategies have been and how best to negotiate the multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives of collaborators, or how to navigate the politically charged and turbulent waters of “setting up a collaborative project” from scratch in Indigenous contexts, would be beneficial in preparing students better for the field. It follows, then, that for undergraduate and graduate students of anthropology, pertinent questions regarding collaborative ethnography—­ and very interesting ones to have answered—­might be: How does something like a collaborative ethnographic project come about (from the initial idea to the first community meeting), especially those where the ethnographer has no prior connections to a community or has prior connections provided from an advisor? How does one start something like a collaborative project from the very beginning—­especially for someone who has never attempted to set up a collaborative project? These are questions I pondered long and hard before my first—­and very brief—­foray into the field as a doctoral student. I describe here what it is like for a doctoral student in anthropology to enter the field in an attempt to set up a collaborative ethnographic project for the first time in a remote, fly-­in community in arctic Labrador. By recounting my experiences, and through the inclusion of actual emails and letters sent to and from the community, I hope to shed light on what I experienced from the initial contact with a Labrador Inuit community’s AngajukKâk (mayor), to my first—­and, sadly, only—­visit with community members, on through to the seemingly random circumstances that can pose major obstacles or in some cases even prevent collaborative projects from materializing. I frame my initial experiences with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony—­that is, the free interaction and independence of multiple points of view through language. To this end, I try to show how a form of impromptu or improvised polyphony figured quite prominently into the collaborative enterprise and ultimately colored how I interacted 202  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

with people and how I interpreted their interactions with me. Such an overreliance on polyphony led me to overlook many aspects of interactions with community members, both politically and historically. Before I address the theoretical details and their practical import into the collaborative enterprise, though, let me provide some background and context with respect to my journey so far as a doctoral student attempting to set up a collaborative ethnographic project from scratch. Regrettably, my initial doctoral project fell through due to a multitude of complications with my research contact in arctic Norway, not the least of which was the fact that his son was very ill at the time. As my interests have centered on aspects of Indigenous health and healing in arctic regions for some time, it was imperative for me to salvage my regional focus by searching for opportunities in other areas of the Arctic—­and this was why I decided to start soliciting interest from Inuit communities in my own country, Canada. My general goal was to follow Michael Jackson’s (2005) clarion call for an “existential anthropology” and explore a community with respect to health, healing, and the interpretations of these. I meant to examine economies of experience and knowledge; the existential, moral, and cosmological textures and exigencies of the community’s lifeworlds; their body politic (both corporeal and intersubjective, and the connections between these); and ultimately how these ways of perceiving, interpreting, and engaging with the world provide purchase in tendering solutions to everyday problems. That none of my committee members had any research experience or contacts in arctic Canada made it extremely difficult for me to establish any clout when presenting ideas to communities. I had to contact communities out of the blue, —­an approach making it next to impossible for a researcher even to broach the topic of social scientific research with a Canadian Arctic population, owing to a historically rooted tendency to associate researchers with agents of forced change (Dickason 1997; Kenney 1994; McElroy 2008; Tester and Kulchyski 1994).1 The prohibitive cost of flights to remote arctic locations (usually $2000–­ 3000 can) made it next to impossible to visit a community briefly before even mentioning research of any sort. After almost two years of dead ends, false leads, and the most unfortunate of disappointments—­notably the informal approval of a potential project by the economic development officer of a small hamlet Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  203

in Nunavut and then its official disapproval one day later by the hamlet’s senior administrative officer, on account of lack of housing—­I was starting to feel despondent. In May 2009, after months of regrouping and refiguring an alternate project, I decided to start from scratch and try my hand at contacting potential communities. I sent an initial e-­mail to the government of Nunatsiavut, located in subarctic and arctic Labrador. My intent was to inquire about the possibility of setting up a collaborative ethnographic project on health, healing, and worldview in one of the communities along the coast. A government official (we can call her Nancy) responded the very next day, suggesting that I contact the AngajukKâk (mayor or leader, in Labrador Innuttut) of the hamlet of a certain community. My initial e-­ mail to Nancy and her response follow: June 07, 2009 To whom it may concern, How are you today? Please forgive me for emailing you out-­of-­the-­ blue like this, but I don’t know anyone in any of your communities personally, so I didn’t really feel comfortable just cold calling. My name is Mark Dolson, and I just have a quick question for you with respect to your community’s research priorities. Before I continue, though, I’ll introduce myself as best I can over email: I’m a second year doctoral student in anthropology at The University of Western Ontario, and I’m interested in possibly working with your community on a community-­based, collaborative research project—­ perhaps one which deals with pressing social, cultural, political, spiritual and/or health-­oriented issues. My background is in cultural and medical anthropology (specifically, psychiatric anthropology). With respect to the kind of research I would be interested in doing, I would be looking at spending around one year in your community conducting in depth interviews with as many people as would be willing, and also participating in as many cultural events as I’m invited to. I would like to go about things a little differently, though, and have your community define and the set the research question and agenda, rather than me, the researcher. Or, if this approach is far too broad, your community and I could come up with a research 204  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

project together. What I can say at this point, though, is that some of my research interests include the following: Inuit traditional knowledge and healing (particularly with respect to mental health issues); potential barriers to the provision of Inuit health care (mental or physical; whichever is more pressing in your community); and lastly, Inuit identity and the importance of the land to the maintenance of Inuit identity, and, ultimately, mental health. Well, that’s it for now. If you wouldn’t mind passing on to me your community’s research priorities, that would be most appreciated. Or, if you find that any of the above mentioned research interests might be of some relevance to your community, please let me know. I would be very interested in working with your community. If you’re interested, I could pass along a copy of my resume/cv—­ just so you can get an idea of the kind of research I’ve conducted in the past. Please take care for now, and I hope to hear from you soon. Kind regards, Mark

June 08, 2009 Good morning Mark; I would suggest that you contact the (X) Inuit Community Government regarding your interest. Our AngajuKak (Mayor) is (X). His email address is (X) or you can reach him at his office at the following number (X). Thanks, Nancy. I took Nancy’s advice and sent the same e-­mail to the AngajukKâk of the hamlet (we can call him Ferdinand). Just three days after my initial e-­mail to Nancy, the AngajukKâk of the hamlet sent me an e-­mail response.

Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  205

June 11th, 2009: 2:44 pm Sounds very interesting and challenging, I would like to encourage you and feel that all of the mentioned aspects of a community based collaborative research project would be benifical [sic] to our Community. I will certainly bring this to the attention of the X Inuit Community for consideration. Yes please do provide additional info on your past research that you have conducted. Look forward in hearing from you again. Regards, Ferdinand. I followed up on Ferdinand’s response, and sent him a copy of my cv. He responded the very next day and asked if I could call him on the telephone the following day. When I called Ferdinand on the morning of June 14, I felt quite nervous and anxious; this was my “make or break” moment. The first thing he asked after I was put through to his office was, “So, what is your intent with all of this?” To which I replied, “Well, you know, I just want to put anthropology—­my discipline—­to work, and try and make a difference, in any way, to your community. Judging by your last e-­mail message, the potential research themes I mentioned seem to be concerns to you, so if I can help you out with any of this, I will do my absolute best.” The rather curt response to my explanation was, “Can you please outline your intent formally in a letter and fax it to me”? I will then present the letter to the Community Council, and let everyone decide on what to do.” I promised to send a letter sent the next day. It follows in full. Before writing it I consulted with my doctoral advisor on how I should go about soliciting interest from a community to take part in a collaborative ethnographic project. My advisor said I should state my objectives clearly, add context by explaining who I was, and discuss my background. After having read my first draft, she gave her characteristic nod of approval. Monday, June 15th, 2009 To the X Community Council: I hope all is well with each of you today. My name is Mark Dolson, and I am a second year doctoral student in anthropology at The University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario. I am writing to 206  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

your community as I am quite interested in setting up a community-­ based, collaborative research project which deals with potentially pressing cultural, social, spiritual, political, economic and health-­ oriented concerns in your community. For those who might not be familiar, what I mean by a “community-­based, collaborative research project” is that your community would define the research question in collaboration with myself, the researcher. Once the research question is defined, I would carry out the research according to your community’s culture, traditions and values—­the Inuit way. The ultimate purpose of my letter today, then, is to see whether your community would be interested in conducting a collaborative research project with me; and, if your community is indeed interested, to request formal permission to conduct such a project. Just for the sake of interest, I will list my current research interests below, which may serve only as suggestions for potential research projects. 1) Inuit traditional knowledge, spirituality/religion and community health (particularly with respect to mental health issues); 2) Inuit strategies for maintaining culture, tradition, community health and resilience, especially in light of such positive changes as the establishment of the region of Nunatsiavut (a belated congratulations by the way); 3) Potential barriers to the provision of Inuit health care (mental or physical; whichever is more pressing in your community); 4) Inuit identity and the importance of the land to the maintenance of Inuit identity and community mental health My background is in medical anthropology which is a discipline that looks at the influence of culture, economics and politics on health. As an example, the research I conducted for my Masters degree focused on how patients drew upon their particular cultural traditions to interpret their mental illnesses (in this case, the patients were recent immigrants to Canada who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia). The purpose of my research was to better inform mental health service providers as to how culture and tradition influence the experience of mental illness, and in some cases, make the experience of the illness more positive. Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  207

Before I continue, though, let me tell you about myself: I was born in London, Ontario, and raised by my mother (a nurse), my father (a field medic who served in World War II), and my maternal grandmother. Since my grandmother was born in 1901, I have always had a very keen ear to listening to stories my grandmother used to tell me about her own traditional knowledge, and life growing up in a traditional Quebecois family near Montreal. Growing out of my interest in listening to my grandmother, I have since become very interested in Inuit traditional knowledge, and how this knowledge is used to solve practical, everyday problems—­ranging from political and economic concerns to health-­oriented issues (or, in many cases, both). As such, if invited, I would be very interested in staying with your community for one year’s time. Spending a year in your community would enable me to participate in community events, interview willing participants, and listen to your community members’ stories about traditional knowledge, health, healing, and all of the social, cultural, economic and political changes which come along with the establishment of the Nunatsiavut region. My intent in potentially collaborating with your community is three-­fold: 1) Quite simply, I think spending a year in your community would provide an excellent opportunity to learn more about Inuit culture, traditions, food and language (which I would be very willing to learn if I had the opportunity in X); 2) I have noticed through various literature searches that the Nunatsiavut region is unfortunately under-­represented regarding health-­oriented and anthropological research (most Inuit-­related research seems to focus on the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Nunavik). As such, through the research I would like to conduct with your community, I would like to change this for the better. Quite possibly, the Nunatsiavut Assembly and Executive Council may be able to use the results of the research to establish better, more culturally sensitive health services provision in your community. And, also, community members, the true “owners” of the research results, might be able to benefit from recorded stories of traditional knowledge—­if these do not already exist. Lastly, 3) since I am aiming for a career as a professor of anthropology, I am hoping that most of the courses I teach—­if not all—­could actually be based on my experience in col208  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

laborating with your community in the proposed project. Some of the courses I am thinking I could teach would be on Inuit traditional knowledge, health, and collaborative research methods. Teaching such classes based on my experience with the community of X would help inform students about the Inuit of Nunatsiavut, and what makes this region and its peoples distinct from the other primarily Inuit regions of Canada. Ultimately, though, as an anthropologist, I would be willing to make a long-­term research commitment with your community which would hopefully last my academic career—­this would enable me to assist with whatever your community might need assistance with, in whatever capacity. To me, any research conducted with Indigenous communities should be based on mutual trust and partnership. As such, if your community is interested in the proposed project, I would be more than willing to come to X for a visit. This would enable me to meet community members directly in order to see whether I would be a good fit personality-­wise with your community; and it would also better facilitate defining the research question, agenda and time line. I would like to thank your community very much for considering my formal request to collaborate in a community-­based research project. If any of your community members have any questions at all about the potential project, or about my intent, please do not hesitate to contact me at the email address or telephone number listed below. Sincerely, Mark S. Dolson Two days after having faxed my letter, I received a response via telephone from Ferdinand. Sounding upbeat, he explained that he had presented my letter to the Community Council the previous evening, and that all seven members were quite impressed and thought this would be an excellent opportunity to benefit the community through socially and culturally relevant research. He then said that the community councilors wanted me to come for a visit to find out what I was like and to discuss potential directions for the research. Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  209

The Community, the Canadian Arctic in General, and the Enduring Effects of Colonialism Within three months, I had my plane tickets booked (costing more than $2,200 can) and my itinerary planned. I was to meet a community member on the airstrip, drop my belongings off at his home, and then go directly to the AngajukKâk’s office to meet Ferdinand and the rest of the town councilors. Before I recount what transpired, though, let me provide—­as a brief aside—­some background about the community I visited, where it is located, and who lives there. The hamlet is one of many remote and isolated coastal communities located northeast of Happy Valley–­Goose Bay. Travel is by bush plane year-­round; however, it is possible to access the community via the passenger and cargo ship the Northern Ranger from June through November. The settlement was founded in 1860 by a Norwegian named Torsten Kverna Andersen, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his wife Mary Thomas, originally from England (Ben-­Dor 1966; Kennedy 1982). The community and its surrounding region was used as a hunting and fishing site for thousands of years, starting with the pre-­ Dorset paleo-­Inuit (Ben-­Dor 1966; Kennedy 1982). The contemporary population totaling approximately 360 people consists mainly of “settlers” (those with mixed Norwegian, Scottish, Welsh, English, and Labrador Inuit ethnic backgrounds) with only “a handful of full-­blooded Inuit people”—­as they were often referred to during my visit. Most settlers, as I was informed, had one great-­ grandparent who spoke Labrador Innuttut.2 As I was to find out later, many of the community members I met did not identify culturally with their Labrador Inuit ethnicity and many, including the AngajukKâk, struggled with the Labrador Innuttut language. When asked to translate certain phrases from English to Innuttut, his reply was simply, “I don’t know, let me ask my wife.” The legacy of colonialism began from contact with the Moravian missionaries who settled in the region in the late eighteenth century (Whitridge 2012). Colonial policies underwent a sea change from 1956 to 1961, when approximately 130 “full-­blood Inuit” from the Hebron and Nutak hamlets some 1,000 km to the north were forced (through violence and coercion) to relocate to the community I visited (Andersen, personal communication, 2009; Ben-­Dor 1966; Kennedy 1982). 210  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

Hebron and Nutak, much like many small communities in Canada’s far north, were closed for various reasons, including lack of fuel for wood stoves, difficult flight access, and the perception by Moravian missionaries that the living conditions in traditional sod houses were unsanitary (Kennedy 1982). Other justifications for relocation in the Canadian north, which was not limited to Labrador, were based on colonial logics: forced evacuation of people to distant sanatoria and hospitals (Waldram et al. 2006); government-­led directives to move entire communities to more remote areas due to putative fears of overpopulation and worries of the sustainability of certain natural resources; the establishment of permanent settlements in the arctic by relocating Indigenous families from more southerly regions in order to strengthen claims of northern sovereignty by means of continuous occupation in the region (Kenney 1994; Kirmayer et al. 2009b; McElroy 2008; Tester and Kulchyski 1994); and ultimately the systematization and regulation of nomadic peoples in order to facilitate provision of education, health care, and bureaucratic management (Kirmayer et al. 2009b).3 In the case of the Inuit of the subarctic and arctic coasts of Labrador as well as for other arctic Indigenous peoples, the colonial logics involved in their movement into permanent settlements in the south was to extend the reach of modernity (i.e., demographic profiling and state rationalization of populations) and inclusive citizenship to all peoples—­regardless of remoteness (Adelson 2001, 2009; Samson 2009; Tanner 2009). This extension of modernity was achieved, in the spirit of paternalism, by providing forced access to permanent single-­ family-­unit housing, social welfare assistance, and aggressive encouragement to reduce involvement in hunting and gathering and to join the industrial economy (Dickason 1997; Samson 2009; Tanner 1979, 2009; Tester and Kulchyski 1994). Ultimately the process of sedentarization—­by way of modernity—­ threatened the entire moral, spiritual, and existential economies of those various circumpolar Indigenous peoples who had practiced a nomadic way of life. For example, according to Tanner (1979, 2009), Northern Cree hunting groups before European settlement, not unlike pre-­settlement Labrador Inuit, were “moral communities” unto themselves, such that during the winter, families were linked together by bonds of reciprocal exchange, solicitude, and interdependence. The more successful hunters would regularly provide meat for less successDolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  211

ful hunters and their families. And insofar as group constitution was the result of the seasonal fission-­fusion of members, hostile relations between individuals were dealt with by the separation of particularly troublesome individuals (Tanner 2009) and their incorporation into other groups. As a result of permanent settlement, the separation of individuals was no longer possible, which resulted in the formation of hostile factions and led to dissolution of moral communities based on the seasonal flux of fission-­fusion of group members (McElroy 2005; Tanner 2009). Along with the rearrangement of intersubjective and moral space, another detrimental aspect of sedentarism and modernity was that it undermined many circumpolar peoples’ relationship to the environment, animals, temporality, and shared and individual experience. In pre-­settlement times many circumpolar and subarctic nomadic peoples based their relation to the land, animals (i.e., other-­than-­human persons), and ultimately themselves—­what might be called their “experiential economies”—­on the flux of seasons, the availability of resources, and the movement and migration of certain animals, such as caribou or geese (Adelson 2001, 2009; Brody 1981; Scott 1996; Tanner 1979). These experiential economies, then, provided a variable “axis of orientation” (Palmer 2005) with respect to places and the protean nature of “home(s).” What colonialism did, essentially, was precipitate a rearrangement of this “axis of orientation,” forcing the people of arctic Labrador and elsewhere to reimagine and reconstruct their social and moral realities and “eco-­realities” completely (Whitridge 2012). As Samson (2009) argues, permanent settlements offered many northern Indigenous peoples an ersatz substitute for life on the land. More specifically, imposed settlement organization, authority external to the local community, and poor physical conditions have worked effectively to undermine any traces of collective well-­being in many remote Indigenous communities in the far north. Some of the most common sociopolitical outcomes of forced relocation, sedentarization, and rapid modernization in circumpolar Indigenous communities are the increased prevalence of political factionalism; breakdown in communication, particularly between youth and elders;, dilution of cultural identity; loss of land and its spiritual, practical, and emotional valences; and shifts in gender roles and traditional leadership and modes of jurisprudence (Adelson 2001; Kirmayer et al, 2009a; Samson 2009). 212  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

After decades of colonial control, whether overt or subtle, in 2005 the Inuit of Labrador had their request for self-­governance acknowledged and granted. This marked the beginning of their “regional ethnic government” called Nunatsiavut—­which means “beautiful land” in Labrador Innuttut. Under the Labrador Inuit Constitution the Nunatsiavut government exists on two levels: a regional Nunatsiavut government based in Nain, the administrative center, and five local community governments. Although certain federal and provincial (Newfoundland and Labrador) laws apply to those living in the Labrador Inuit land claims area, the Nunatsiavut government has the power to enact new legislation regarding cultural affairs, education, health, income support and child services, and environmental assessment projects. With respect to land use and ownership, those living within the Land Claim Settlement area have exclusive access to 72,520 sq km of land and 44,000 sq km of sea rights. Of the 72,500 sq km, the Labrador Inuit own 15,800 sq km of land, including the new Torngat National Park in the northernmost salient of Labrador. The Nunatsiavut government mandate is to protect and advance the Labrador Inuit language, culture, and traditional land use (Nunatsiavut Inuit Government Website 2009). As of 2009, the year of my visit, despite the recent successes of the various “ethnic regional self-­governments” throughout Nunatsiavut (each hamlet, in a way, is considered its own government), the colonial logics I have outlined were still felt in the community I visited. During my visit I was told that there had been only around four of the original 130 relocatees in attendance at the fiftieth anniversary commemoration (held the month before my visit) of their forced introduction to the community. Over the decades the rest of the relocatees had long since emigrated to communities inland or elsewhere on the Labrador coast (Andersen, personal communication, 2009). Despite the fact that many of the community members I met did not openly identify as Inuit and some even seemed outright opposed to it, I felt during meetings with community and council members that the ghosts of colonialism were still present, and I felt this in many ways—­particularly in the skepticism about my presence and intentions.4 In several telephone calls Ferdinand and I had decided on a late October visit. After my travel arrangements had been made, I found myself at Pearson International Airport in Toronto bound for Halifax, Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  213

Nova Scotia, with a mix of excitement and trepidation. From Halifax I took another flight to Happy Valley–­Goose Bay in Labrador, and from there on to the community where I hoped to start a collaborative project—­a total of three flights lasting just over six hours. Once Twin Otter bush plane landed in the community I was taken to a councilor’s home to drop my bags and was then whisked to the Inuit Community Government building for a series of meetings. I was first sent in to see one of the town councilors—­the wife of the councilor with whom I would be staying during my three days in the community. Right away she asked about my intent and what I wanted to achieve with my study. “Well,” I said, “to produce something—­a document, a series of stories, information that would in some way have some positive impact on your community.” Her rejoinder, in a matter-­of-­fact tone, was: “I see that you wanted to focus on health or some issue related to health. But I’m telling you right now, we don’t have any issues with our health care system at all, really—­everyone here loves it, and there don’t seem to be any problems that need looking into; well, except for the fact that a dentist only gets out to see us every month and a half or so.” “Ah, OK, that’s no problem,” I said. Recalling Cerwonka and Malkki ‘s innovative and thought-­ provoking book Improvising Theory, I reminded myself rather frantically: ethnography is improvisational, so improvise, improvise, improvise! My response to her was, “I’ll just listen to people carefully, and get a sense of what they’re talking about; and then we can all put something together with respect to a research theme and questions.” She nodded and said she would think about it and we would discuss things. Soon I was directed to the Community Council meeting room and asked to take a seat. Right away one of the younger council members—­a fellow in his mid-­twenties—­seemed surprised after having shaken my hand. He said, “Wow, we all thought you were going to be way older—­we didn’t think you were going to be this young!” I answered that I was just starting out my degree and was definitely not a professor, wondering meanwhile whether I had somehow misrepresent myself—­were they expecting someone with more academic clout, with years of experience and more political heft? Soon we were joined by two other community councilors and the mayor, each of whom asked me many questions: Why our community? How are you paying for this? What is your intent? What will you 214  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

do with the information when you are done? I fielded the questions as diplomatically as I could and was met with reactions such as: “This is really interesting; I can’t believe you’re choosing us to do something like this” and “This could be good, and the research could actually help benefit us in some way.” After our meeting I was given a series of reading materials—­old newspapers, a children’s book, and a usb drive with hundreds of pictures of various community members hunting polar bear, caribou, and other game—­and asked to spend a few hours “getting to know the community.” Upon returning to the home at which I was invited to stay, I struck up a conversation with my hosts Sarah and her husband Mike, both community councilors, as noted. I soon realized that the situation in the community with respect to identity and culture was quite complex. The telephone rang after we had sat down for dinner, and I could hear that it was Ferdinand. Sarah sounded somewhat disappointed and after two or three minutes hung up the phone. She told me Ferdinand had tried to get two of the community’s only “traditional throat-­singers” to perform for me, a rare event by the sound of it. She said that they were quite young—­in their late teens—­and had a prior commitment and could not make time to perform for me. I said it was no problem and that I completely understood. What I found interesting, though, was the tone of her response. Looking almost put off, Sarah explained to me that it was just as well, since she did not “really care for throat-­singing or any of those traditions; I think that kind of singing is disgusting.” Startled, I asked her why. She replied that those traditions were “theirs” and not hers and that she had absolutely no interest in them. She then said there were only around four “full-­blood Inuit” left in her community, but she rarely interacted with them, with the exception of one who played the church organ on Sundays. I could not help but think there was some sort of ethnic or cultural rift in the community. I asked who she identified with, and she bluntly said she was a settler—­meaning that she identifies more with her northern European ethnicity than with her partially Inuit ancestry. She explained that her great-­grandfather was Inuit. Since I understood this to be a touchy and precarious topic—­no matter where you are in the world—­I decided not to probe further. I thought identity politics at the individual and collective levels in this community must be incredibly complex, situational, and always shifting. Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  215

I then realized the apparent disconnect between what I had read about the community and my subjective experience of it. The two ethnographies I had read—­one written in the 1960s and the other in the late 1970s—­suggested that there was still an Inuit presence in the community (albeit a seemingly remote one) and that, though waning, traditional knowledge remained real in its everyday applications—­especially with respect to fishing practices. Judging by many of the family names of the community members to whom I had been introduced, most were northern European in origin. The next day I spent an hour or so driving around the community with Sarah’s husband Mike in their minivan. As soon as we started driving I noticed that the radio was tuned to a Labrador Innuttut language station. I asked Mike, “Can you understand this?” He said, “Uh, some of it.” I then asked as delicately as possible if his ancestors were Inuit. Unfazed, he said his grandfather was. Though phenotypic traces of Inuit ancestry were visible—­dark hair and olive complexion—­the cultural aspects of this identity were barely visible to me. Over the three days I had the chance to meet with about twenty community members. I visited people in their homes, ate dinner with them, watched hockey on tv, tried to talk to people on the road, and visited the school, where I spoke with teachers, the principal, an education councilor, and a few grade two students. I also visited ninety-­ year-­old “Uncle Bobby”—­the great-­grandson of the founder of the community—­and gleaned some excellent insights regarding community life and politics and how drastically things have changed over the years owing to the modernization of transportation. He played a few jigs for me on his fiddle and gave me a few pictures to take home. As well, I met with three public health nurses from the Department of Health and Social Development. This was tremendously fruitful as I was advised—­yet again—­that health care was not really a major concern for community members or health practitioners. Throughout my interaction with the public health nurses, though, I found them extremely reticent, something I could not quite figure out at the time. Interestingly enough, I was later told that those claiming Nunatsiavut government beneficiary status (i.e., those who can prove they have Inuit status by claiming at least one great-­grandparent whose primary language was Innuttut) have full medical and dental coverage, including home care, prescription drugs, optometry, and patient transportation. Thus from a 216  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

service delivery perspective I understood their (possibly politically motivated) reticence in saying anything negative about their system. During my second day I met with a larger group—­seven in total—­in the community board room, where I was to learn something of vast importance about the collaborative ethnographic enterprise: how to balance and complement the multiple and often contradictory standpoints and voices of those with whom I met, and their interaction with my own voice, biographical positioning, and agenda. Before I knew it, I had a room full of people all talking about fairly different although loosely related issues, each rooted deeply in the individual’s unique stance toward community life and the day-­to-­day experience of it, and each displaying a particular agenda and motive for attending the meeting. To make matters a little more stressful, I was informed that people did not have much time for this initial project meeting—­for various reasons: work, family, bingo, Halloween preparations, and other commitments. These were things I took at face value at the time, and I never really made any connection between community members’ lack of presence during my meetings and how I went about interacting with people during the first meeting. As such, unfortunately, out of the twenty-­one people the mayor invited to the meeting, only seven showed up. And since time was limited, the onus was on me to listen carefully, be as inclusive as possible of others’ voices, and knit together a research theme and accompanying questions that resonated with community members’ concerns. In essence, then, my job was to orchestrate the many different perspectives around me into some form of higher unity.

Bakhtin and the Polyphonic Enterprise: An Anxiolytic with Unintended Consequences As I explain later, it was my overreliance on Bakhtin’s useful theory of polyphony that ultimately caused my collaborative project to fail. Though profoundly interesting and useful, especially in terms of theorizing multiple consciousnesses, creativity, the distribution of voices, and representational fidelity, the ability to balance theory with empirically rooted participant observation is a skill—­one that develops through time and through the accrual of experience of conducting fieldwork. Later in this essay I outline the somewhat ideal conception of poDolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  217

lyphony I had in mind when I traveled to the community. This conception was also at work while I was talking to community members. What I was did not realize while “viewing” and interpreting my interactions through the “lens” of polyphony was that social phenomena are not oriented a priori by theory. On the contrary, wisdom informs us that it should be the other way around: social phenomena should be complemented and interpreted through a fitting theoretical lens a posteriori—­ ideally, the theory should be grounded in the “data” or “information” we receive through observation and dialogue. In reality, though, this distinction hemorrhages, rendering the balance between interpretation and theoretical assistance uneven, unbalanced, and subject to slight modification and reinterpretations of the theory in question.5 Let me provide more context by limning Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963), M. M. Bakhtin uses the term polyphony, as he says, only “metaphorically”: it is a term borrowed from music and used to denote the texture resulting from the combination of two or more separate melodic lines. In a very general sense, polyphony refers to the creative process (Morson and Emerson 1990), way of thinking, and process of representation in which certain authors who are equipped with a certain imaginative ability engage when they write and breathe life into characters; especially when it comes to the production and negotiation of meaning between the free and independent voices of characters in a novel. That polyphony, as I read Bakhtin, is a process; the ability to think polyphonically means to think—­as Bakhtin (1963) said of Dostoevsky—­in terms of points of view, different consciousnesses and voices, and not just thoughts or propositions. As such, the imperative of the polyphonic process is an ideal to represent as faithfully as possible the dialogic state of human sociality—­in all of its contradiction, ambiguity, and desultoriness. It is as if polyphonic writers are able to precipitate willfully a state of multiple-­personality disorder and then capitalize on this experience by representing faithfully each of the respective and distinct personalities—­in all their uniqueness and difference—­as different characters in a story. In polyphonic novels such as Dostoevsky’s, there is no such thing as an objective portrayal or description of reality or everyday life detached from a particular character’s standpoint (Bakhtin 1963), much like the situated, historically grounded, and perspectival nature of representing our informants through the ethnographic process. 218  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

The literary result of polyphony is the representation of the processes through which meaning, co-­produced as it is by the separate and distinct characters of a Dostoevskian novel (much like a real conversation), is emergent—­one might even call this “the polyphonic venture.” As such, in portraying the emergent production of meaning between characters, polyphonic authors such as Dostoevsky strive toward the ideal of what might be called “representational fidelities”: that is, the faithful representation of the difference, uniqueness and differential distribution (in short, an economy of dialogue) of the voices and standpoints of a novel’s characters—­those voices that meet alongside the author’s voice as equals (or this is the ideal, anyway) in a dialogue that is open-­ ended and often contradictory, ambiguous, and unfinalizable. As a point of caution, before I proceed further: a common misconception of polyphony is that the author’s voice or social location is somehow effaced or weakened in the overall interaction of voices in polyphonic works. Much to the contrary, the polyphonic author’s voice is present alongside the voices of the characters; in fact, as already noted, the author participates in the dialogue as an equal—­though, to me, this is an ideal to be reached, not a dialogic given. As Bakhtin (1963) suggests, the author’s voice is profoundly active in a dialogic sense: alongside the characters, the author takes part in a questioning, provoking, answering, agreeing, and objecting activity. It is this active dialogic engagement that serves, to me, as the connecting point between the polyphony as a literary enterprise and as an ethnographic enterprise. Although practitioners of both approaches make use of polyphony for different ends and in different ways, both share the imperative (whether creative or ethical) to strive toward the ideal of “representational fidelities”—­whether it be for the characters of a novel or the various collaborators in a community-­based collaborative ethnographic research project. As I saw it, the practical importance of the polyphonic venture as a creative process, way of thinking, and process of representation was as follows: when I was confronted with the task of synthesizing the various perspectives of the community members with whom I met, I felt overwhelmed as there were so many people, with so many things to say, but they had only a couple of hours to devote to helping me formulate the research question; like the polyphonic author, I felt myself engaging in a fairly stressful but ultimately creative process of listening, orchestrating, and synthesizing. Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  219

As part of the polyphonic enterprise I was forced to give up my “authorial” viewpoint and let go of any preconceptions regarding projects, or any other idea I brought to community—­including all the initial e-­ mails and telephone conversations I had had with Ferdinand. Again hearing Cerwonka and Malkki’s (2007) clarion call that ethnography is fundamentally a sensibility (and not a strict methodology), and that as such it is always improvisational in nature, I let go of the “way of seeing” framed by my previous research interests—­those outlined in the official letter to the Community Council. Heeding the call of the phenomenologists, I held my preconceptions in abeyance as much possible, and listened carefully. Key themes kept coming up in the conversations during my one-­ on-­one time with community residents (both in their homes and at the school and Community Council building), as well as during three community meetings I attended (where attendance ranged from three to twelve people). The recurring themes were a feeling of lack of local control and lack of power over community resources, programs, and institutions, and a feeling of uncertainty regarding the direction the new (as of 2005) Indigenous self-­government of Nunatsiavut would take in the future. During my second last meeting with community members things seemed to fall into place “polyphonically.” As I listened to community members, the crux of the matter at hand was to understand better the role of self-­government and whether it would provide them with a sense of agency and control over their everyday affairs (whether politically, economically, or culturally). The ultimate purpose of the research, it was decided, would be to offer the Nunatsiavut government information outlining what direction the members of the community wanted their government to take, and what might be done to make them feel more in control—­whether over cultural revitalization efforts or the environment and natural resources, such as issues related to the proposed uranium mine that would open right beside the community. How, then, in coming up with a research theme and corresponding questions, was I to include all these disparate perspectives (underwriting the many voices that inhered in said perspectives), including the fields of power in which they are intermeshed, into some sort of “higher unity,” as Bakhtin (1963) calls it, wherein no voices or perspectives would be left out, including my own? I took a moment during the 220  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

meeting—­during a side conversation between two of the community members—­to jot down some ideas; and on the fly I was able to come up with three broad research questions (bearing the inflection, though somewhat diluted, of my own interests and influences) that synthesized everything people had mentioned to me during the meeting and during previous one-­on-­one meetings that day and the day before. When I was finished, I read the following preliminary questions aloud: (1) How do the community members of X, Nunatsiavut (Newfoundland and Labrador), feel that self-­government will—­over time—­ enable the capacity for full, local control of community resources and services? (2) How do those community members who had been relocated to X in the late 1950s feel that the Nunatsiavut government will offer them a newfound sense of meaning in their lives? (3) How do they feel that self-­government will give them more of a voice in community affairs than the previous government? (4) How do community members feel that self-­government will offer the opportunity—­as per the Nunatsiavut government mandate—­ to promote, protect and advance cultural resources such as the language, values and heritage of Labrador Inuit? As I stumbled nervously on my words, I was met with some initial skepticism from community members: “Those sound really broad,” someone said. “Hmmm, that’s uh, that’s going to be difficult, I think,” someone else said. “I think this is great as it will allow people to talk about what’s important to them,” said another. After another hour of discussion, negotiation, and modification, we settled on three provisional questions that were broad enough to include perspectives from all community members who would be willing to participate: children, adults, elders, those fluent only in English, and those fluent only in Inuttut (of whom there are now only a handful). Near the end of our meeting—­or what I thought was the close of our meeting—­I was asked a very important question: “How are you going to analyze what you’ve got from us?” I replied: “I’m going to treat it like a conversation, really.” Without mentioning Bakhtin or polyphony, I elaborated by stating that I intended to be as faithful as possible to what people said and how they might say it (“representational fidelities”), even if it contradicted or conflicted with what I said or meant to say. Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  221

And so it was decided that the best way to go about the analysis would be to record interviews with willing and consenting collaborators and then transcribe the material, the usual practice. The difference from the usual practice would be this (by no means original): my plan was to conduct an initial analysis of interview content and then document my initial interpretations. The next step was to follow up with each individual with whom I conducted an interview, and go over the respective transcript and initial interpretations together, all the while recording this “dialogic” interaction and subsequently transcribing the results. Once this process was completed with each willing participant, we were then to select the most appropriate or representative discussions and include those in the in the final product. The key—­in attempting to reach the polyphonic ideal—­was to include the free and unmerged perspectives of the collaborators and their interactions with myself; however, all without the constraint of the ethnographer acting in the capacity of the final “interpretive arbiter.”

A Failed Attempt During my finalt meeting with Ferdinand, a town clerk, and a cultural resource representative, it was decided that I should clean up the questions and e-­mail them back to those with whom I met, so that they could review these and provide suggestions for the questions individually. Toward the end of the meeting Ferdinand expressed great interest in contacting the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc) North in Nain—­we talked about the possibility of conducting an over-­the-­air interview for the one of the Inuit-­speaking radio news shows, in which I would explain the purpose of my research and the benefits to the Nunatsiavut Inuit government. The title of the project, as decided at the close of the meeting, was to be Amisut-­Nipi—­“Of Many Voices,” in the language of Labrador Inuttut. Ferdinand said he would then hold a community meeting—­ including myself through conference call—­ in which all interested parties would submit their suggestions and come to a decision as to what the final questions would be. Once the questions were finalized, I would submit my application for a research license to the government of Nunatsiavut in Nain and await approval before commencing fieldwork in the spring of 2010. 222  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

As I left the Community Council building, accompanied by Sarah, I could not help but feel a hint of skepticism mixed with the frigid and still October air as we slowly walked up the main dirt road to her house. Even though the project would be collaborative in nature, she explained, the very presence of an “outsider” would make her and other community members feel as if they were “under the microscope as part of an experiment.” I thought this was a glaringly adumbrative statement; however, I tried to allay her fears of feeling as if her community were the “object” of research by saying that we were all in this enterprise together and that the collaborative research process is one full of constant adjustments. If there were ever any part of the research that made her or any of the other community members uncomfortable, I said, we could meet as a group, discuss openly what aspects of the research needed adjustment, and make revisions accordingly. “Right,” she said curtly and without looking at me, as she opened the front door of the house for me. I returned home, cleaned up my questions according to Ferdinand’s request, and sent them back to him, three other community councilors, and the cultural resource representative who had joined us at our last community meeting. Within a week, I received an e-­mail from Sarah—­ the only one to respond: November 22nd, 2009: 5:47 pm Hello Mark, I reread the questions again this evening, and had nothing to add. I think they are broad enough to encompass most things that will come up in conversation. Hope you and your family are doing well. Sincerely, Sarah I sent a few more e-­mails to other community councilors and got a response from Ferdinand saying the councilors had to meet again to go over the questions. I decided to leave things for a month before getting back to Ferdinand. When I did so, his e-­mail response seemed very positive in tone. We then exchanged a number of e-­mails back and Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  223

forth regarding the logistics of where my wife and our then six-­month-­ old daughter would stay. Housing is at a premium in the community; unfortunately, there was no reasonable accommodation available for my family save a two-­bedroom house on the coast—­with a severe mold problem as it had been vacant for around six months. Trying to persevere, I asked Ferdinand to inquire if anyone in the community would be willing to let use house sit, in the event that someone was to be away for an extended period. As it turned out, the principal of the school—­whom I had met for an hour during my visit—­ was to be leaving for around six months on vacation and other matters. I asked Ferdinand if he would contact the principal for me, and inquire on my behalf if it would be possible to house sit during that time. Ferdinand agreed and also gave me the principal’s e-­mail address and phone number so that I could contact him directly. My last e-­mail correspondence with Ferdinand follows: December 7th, 2009: 11:51am Hi there, Ferdinand. I hope things are well in your community. I haven’t yet heard anything from the principal of the school, so I was wondering if you could send him a quick reminder? Also, I’m not sure if you’ve had a chance to look into it at all, but I was wondering if there was any word on what the housing situation will be like for next April? Thanks again! Talk soon,
 Mark

December 9th, 2009: 12:55pm Will check into the housing situation right after Christmas please remind me again, very hectic as for the school principal try emailing him at X. Have a great Christmas all we will do a follow up in the early new year. Regards, Ferdinand.

224  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

December 9th, 2009: 2:01pm Excellent. Thanks for the response, Ferdinand. Make sure to have a great Christmas, too. I’ll email the principal, and then get back to you in the new year. Say hello to everyone for me. Take care for now, Mark

December 9th, 2009: 3:06pm Right on, Kuve Inovia. Nakkumek. Ferdinand. After I received the last message from Ferdinand, I sent emails to both the principal of the local school and the cultural resource manager. After no response, I followed up with reminder emails but never received a response. The silence opened up a space of reflection for me wherein I thought that probing too deeply into the community’s new self-­government affairs was perhaps too risky—­and so I decided not to pursue anything more with the community. This was where my journey through the collaborative ethnographic research process, the polyphonic venture, came to a halt. It was not the denouement I had hoped for; and one can only imagine what the political implications of my research were—­especially in light of the fact that Nunatsiavut Inuit self-­ government was in its infancy and therefore still under the watchful eye of the Newfoundland and Labrador provincial government.6

Taking Stock and Coming to Terms: Reflections through Reflexivity I can only state the obvious and agree with the cliché that hindsight is often 20/20. After almost three years of reflection and reflexivity, the result of many reorienting discussions with fellow academics, I have come to the realization that the reason my collaborative project in Labrador did not work was simply because of lack of experience. Difficult as it is for me to write this, I have realized through hindsight that admitting this to myself is not only sobering but also cathartic. However, I Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  225

must explain that my lack of experience is anything but a simple lack of knowledge. On the contrary, in a way I can chalk this up to having too much knowledge as well as to the inability to reconcile practical and theoretical knowledge. Let me explain. Throughout my coursework I found myself drawn to Bakhtin’s works. In fact, I made it a point to purchase his entire oeuvre in English so that I could become intimately familiar with his ideas. That I kept examining his notion of polyphony in various contexts throughout my coursework—­whether through class discussion or reading papers that referenced this idea—­I took it upon myself to read carefully his book on Dostoevsky, the work in which Bakhtin first expounds this idea of polyphony. After having read the book cover to cover many times, I felt it had had a profound influence on my thinking, writing, and unfortunately—­in a very strong but no less well-­intentioned sense—­on my way of seeing and interpreting social phenomena. What happened during my community meetings was that I was trying so hard to render the situation into a polyphonic context (to give up my “authorial control”) that I tried too hard and ended up forcing a theoretical and interpretive frame onto my interactions with community members—­in an unintended interpretively violent way. What was meant to be a theoretical complement or support literally became a theoretical imposition. Much like what Devereux (1967) discussed in his work From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, during my meetings I felt I was confronted by a situation that was anxiety provoking, ambiguous, and stressful (to be honest, I had said to myself: Now, you have three days to set up a project or you fail). Several times during the flight home from Happy Valley–­Goose Bay, I found myself tapping my head lightly on the window of the aircraft, silently wondering: What the hell am I doing? How on earth did I wind up in this situation without any prior connection, support, or even knowledge of this community—­am I crazy? Having a strong passion for social and critical theory (especially an interest in Bakhtin’s works) afforded me the tools necessary to quell my anxiety by immediately drawing upon Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony—­ which, in essence, became a theoretical and interpretive anxiolytic or an anxiety-­numbing device. However, the numbing of my anxiety came at a tremendous price, and that price was blindness. It was a blindness (almost absolute in its coverage) that prevented me from actually opening up intersubjectively to the many complexities of the ethnography 226  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

of speech and cross-­cultural communication in my particular context, especially with respect to speech in both its verbal and nonverbal correlates—­what Hymes (1964) and Sherzer and Darnell (1972) have called alternative “modalities” or “channels.” My incipient ethnographic sensibilities were occluded and clouded before they even had a chance to unfurl and develop through dialogue in this particular context. Instead of allowing theory and experience to complement and modify each other iteratively, as they should in a dialectical manner, mine was a case where the theory I espoused was seemingly “stuck” in place and constantly getting in the way of what should have been relaxed and friendly interactions with community members. Rather than my allowing dialogue just to happen, rather than just “hanging out” with people, rather than letting the pieces fall where they may, my own academic and moral imperative took over the situation, influencing it before I was even aware of what was happening. Dialogue, in this case, was ironically colonized, domesticated, and framed—­the exact opposite of what polyphony means—­by myself. That I should have let things be, and let my interactions run their course, is more than painfully obvious to me. Writing against the preframing of social phenomena, and the forced correspondence between (theoretically driven) expectations and outcomes, Favret-­Saada pointed out many years ago that “if the ethnographer is led astray, if nothing he [sic] finds in the field corresponds to his expectations, if his hypotheses collapse one after the other in contact with native reality even though he set up his investigation with great care, these are signs that we are dealing with an empirical science and not a science fiction” (1980: 13). This is sound advice that should have guided my inquiries—­though sadly it did not. To the contrary, as I have already noted, rather than serving as an analytical aid in clarifying the data, making its ambiguous contours perhaps a little more easily defined, my theoretical framework—­in essence, my project hypotheses (read: hopes)—­had a muting and somewhat obfuscating effect, one that in “situational” terms was ultimately more ironic than analytical. By dint of this overreliance on theory, what could have been a polyphonic situation was rendered monologic. In my defense, though, I must add that I truly believe we as ethnographers are always already theoretical in some senses; however, there are cases—­mine in particular—­where a theory can in effect become the “data.” The imposition is so strong that the results are, in a way, preDolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  227

determined by the theoretical framework. And this, much as I do not want to admit it, is a tremendously novice mistake—­a mistake to be avoided at all costs. What makes my case even more interesting after the fact is how this overwhelming desire to be dialogically egalitarian, to be polyphonic, also occluded my ability to understand the colonial context in which all my interactions with community members took place. My initial observations in the community were that an Inuit-­settler divide did exist, and it fell along cultural and linguistic lines; and I was led to believe mistakenly that settlers were more “European” than “Indigenous” in their thinking; and this is made even more complex given what we know about “situational identities” and how identities shift according to existential, moral, and political imperatives. This assumption was corroborated in my conversation about the throat-­singers with Sarah; however, I should never have assumed that aside from in this one person, those historically durable “structuring structures,” those social and bodily dispositions that Bourdieu (1977) referred to as “the habitus,” had all but dissipated in this community and left the scene, as it were. The skepticism, the sideways glances, the all-­out disregard for my presence (in one particular case), the concern about being under a microscope, the questions regarding my intentions and my commitment to the community, and especially the silence that ensued after I returned home were justified and warranted responses, set in place and structured by the colonial framework still very much alive in the community. In contexts like the community I visited, the traces of colonialism (however faint they seemed to me) may be indelible; even when there were only four remaining members of the original 130 full-­blood Inuit who were relocated, the memories of this violence were felt by the whole community, settler and Inuit alike. The historical traces continue to be felt in the present—­hence the fifty-­year commemoration of the relocatees. Had more funds been secured, a longer initial visit—­possibly of some weeks—­would likely have afforded me a more nuanced understanding of settler-­Inuit dynamics and the colonial frameworks that orient these dynamics. Having more funding and time would also have limited my anxiety over attempting to set up an entire collaborative project in just three days (I expand on this later). 228  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

Aside from the aforementioned blindness, another complication setting this project up for failure was the nature of my institutional situation. When I started my graduate program, I was assigned to my current advisor. Though her specialty is in Canadian First Nations groups and epistemologies, we both thought it would be a productive and fruitful match even though I intended at the time to follow through with a project involving the Saami of northern Norway. When the project in Norway fell through, my first thought was to pursue something in another arctic region, and I set out to find a project in my own country, which I thought would be easier than setting one up in another country. Perhaps a fitting rejoinder to this explanation would be: when you found out that your project in Norway was not going to work, and since you wanted to pursue another similar project in arctic Canada, why did you nit switch programs in order to find an advisor with more fitting, complementary interests? Unfortunately, there were other complexities that prevented me from changing programs and finding an advisor with perhaps more suitable interests. First, my wife teaches at the same university where I am currently undertaking studies, so asking her to pick up and move was not an option. Also, my scholarship was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Canada Graduate Doctoral scholarship (sshrc-­ cgs), which precluded my from taking it to the United States—­where I might have had better luck in finding an advisor in anthropology who focused on research in the Canadian arctic. In the end I decided to take a risk and stick with my advisor. That my advisor has no current ties to the arctic was a risk that I was willing to take. It was through my own perseverance and industriousness that I was able to establish contacts in Nunatsiavut, an accomplishment of which I was quite proud when I received my initial phone call from Ferdinand. As I see it now, though, if my advisor had had connections in the Canadian arctic, or even if she had introduced me to a community herself, I might still have made the potentially fatal mistake of “dialogic blindness through theory.” This was a mistake I had to make; and it was a mistake I had to reflect on and be reflexive about in order to learn from it fully. Some aspects of my experience in this community were very positive, especially Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  229

the community’s reaction to my initial letter. Each person to whom I was introduced—­those who had read the letter—­complimented me on my honesty and on discussing aspects of my personal background. As can be imagined, I was quite pleased upon hearing this. Sadly, though, it was something unintended and completely unbeknownst to me at the time (again, my theoretical perspective) that ultimately rendered the project a failure—­pretty much from the start. In the end, such a mistake—­from my perspective—­has nothing to do with inadequate training or advising on my committee’s part. It has to do with personality. And because I have such a passion for social and critical theory, I let my passion literally take over in this case. But passion is not the only thing in play. Since I had gone two full years without any project, this gave me the opportunity to read a great deal, and read I did. During that period I read five days a week from nine to five. Such immersion in topics that interested me ultimately had a detrimental effect, for I believe I possibly went into the field situation knowing too much about the wrong sorts of things. As it stands, I feel that if a student or new researcher wants to start any kind of collaborative research project from scratch—­that is, without the assistance of a well-­connected advisor—­it is advisable to wait until one has already established a career for oneself and is able to apply for a faculty grant of some sort. What is crucial here is not necessarily the academic clout that comes along with the title of professor but the experience that comes with having seen several collaborative projects to their completion—­that is, from the co-­formulation of the research project to the successful publication of co-­authored articles. Doing so would accord one the requisite experience of the sometimes subtle political and interpersonal negotiations concomitant with any collaborative ethnographic project.

Recommendations and Advice: Key Things to Remember for Novice Ethnographers Attempting to Set up a Collaborative Research Project At this point in my academic career I would think the best advice I can give to those just starting out is the following: (1) if a student is committed to conducting a collaborative ethnography for dissertation research, it is imperative to select an advisor from the start who has pri230  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

or interests in collaborative ethnography as well as prior research ties with a particular community; (2) if at all possible, I feel it is crucial to visit the community in question with your potential advisor; (3) in order to establish rapport with community members, I cannot stress enough the importance—­funds permitting—­of repeated visits to the community; (4) if at all possible, seek many avenues through which to attain the requisite funding for collaborative research; and (5) questions about researcher accommodation should be raised with the community as early as possible. If there is no available housing in the community, it is probably not productive to follow through with exploratory discussions. Any research conducted in the far north of Canada is tremendously expensive—­in most cases prohibitively so. Even with my sshrc-­cgs at $35,000 can per year for three years, the costs of research in the north would have far exceeded my monthly scholarship income. As I sat down one afternoon with Sarah, she was able to tally up some of the costs associated with research in her community. If available, the rental of a house—­if one plans on bringing a family—­and the associated utilities are expensive in the north; however, it is food and heating that are the most prohibitive. Though heating costs are partly subsidized in the far north, most homes are heated by oil, and oil is extremely costly. Sarah had informed me that one barrel of oil costs approximately $300 can, and one can go through a couple of barrels per month. On the last morning of my stay Sarah had gone through her cupboards with me and pointed out that things like cereal were overpriced—­in this case, a small box of Raisin Bran cereal cost approximately $8 to $10 can.7 Making multiple trips to the community in question shows dedication and respect; a dedication and respect to the community members first and foremost (and not to the project itself ). Coupled with this is the imperative to spend more than just three days in the community in question. In my case, I should have spent the three days I stayed in the community just getting to know people as people first, not as potential collaborators. Though I did “hang out” with a few community members, there was still a guiding sense of urgency that accompanied all my interactions. Framing all my initial interactions according to the researcher-­collaborator dynamic, I feel, hurt my chances of getting to know people on more relaxed and friendlier terms. After having built a friendly rapport with the community members over the course of three Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  231

days, I should have made several trips back to the community—­ideally over several months. And only then, after several trips, should I have started to talk strategically about what could have been done in terms of a collaborative project. I cannot stress enough that framing relations rigidly from the start—­that is, seeing people as “contacts” and “potential collaborators” and not as “Martin the fisherman” or “Deb the daycare provider”—­possibly positioned me in the eyes of community members as someone who viewed community members as a means to an end and not as people, with their everyday concerns, fears, joys, dreams, and aspirations. That I saw people as contacts and not first as everyday people was definitely symptomatic of the financial and therefore temporal constraint—­both real and perceived—­under which I felt I was working. Admittedly, another limiting factor for my initial trip to the community was the fact that I had to leave my newborn daughter at home with my wife, something I was reluctant to do. Small independent airlines that run small aircraft like Twin Otters often do not allow newborns on board. This and the cost of airfare for my wife meant that bringing them along with me was not an option. Again, it is important to explain that if a student wants to bring along a family for the research period, it is imperative—­if at all possible—­to bring the family for the initial community visit. I was asked many times during my visit if I had a family, and where. I had to explain that the cost of airfare and accommodation would have been far out of our monthly budget.

Resolutions through Insight: What Happened in the End? I almost dropped out of the doctoral program after I received no responses from Ferdinand or the principal. But in the end I sent an e-­mail to a previous contact of mine in the Faculty of Nursing at my current institution, Western University in Ontario. Though I was reluctant to make this contact, as did not envision myself conducting ethnographic fieldwork in my own city, I realized that making this contact could possibly lead to participation in an existing research project, which would allow me to write a dissertation and follow through with my degree. In February 2011 I joined an existing participatory action research project on homeless youth experiencing mental illness and substance abuse in London, Ontario. My dissertation research context was a very far cry from arctic Lab232  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

rador, but it was a collaborative project nonetheless, and it allowed me to engage with my previous research interests in medical and psychiatric anthropology. I finished and defended my dissertation, The Wounded Bricoleur. My research focused on the neoliberal reorganization of social assistance (now relabeled “workfare”) in Ontario, Canada, and how it affects the existential predicaments of street-­involved youth with mental health and addiction problems. I managed to conduct one year of fieldwork at various “points of intersection” through the downtown core of London, a midsized Ontario city. It was through everyday contact with homeless and street-­involved youth that I gained a more sustained understanding of the utmost importance of the spontaneity (and, in my cases, volatility) of dialogue in its various contexts. Through my reflections through reflexivity about my failed research project in arctic Labrador, I feel that I became a much more sensitive and conscientious ethnographer, that much more attuned to subtleties and nuances of communication as well as to the purely unpredictable and uneven nature of authorial inclusions and exclusions, regardless of how well-­intentioned the author. mark s. dolson (ba, Western University, Ontario; ma, McGill University) recently completed his PhD in sociocultural anthropology at Western University of Ontario, Canada. His dissertation research focused on probing ethnographically the interplay between the neoliberal reconceptualization of Ontario’s social assistance system as a moral regulatory and normative state apparatus, and the various tactics of creativity (art, creative writing, poetry, and social manipulation) employed by marginalized, street-­oriented youth—­all of whom were recipients of social assistance—­in the downtown core of London, Ontario. Mark’s current research interests are in creativity as a social, cultural and phenomenological process of becoming (i.e., of escape), existential transformation, and change.

Notes 1. This was an activity to which I had grown quite accustomed. Before I enrolled in the PhD program I held a research assistant position through the Faculty of Medicine, Department of Family Medicine, wherein for the greater part of eighteen months I had to “cold call” various First Nations communities throughout northern Ontario to ask if they were interested in taking part in the nationwide Indigenous diabetes project to which I was assigned. One learns a certain tack when soliciting interest from leery—­ and rightly so—­First Nations communities, some of whom are bordering on “research fatigue.” 2. In order to be recognized as an Inuit community by both the Canadian federal and provincial (Newfoundland and Labrador) governments, a settlement must have a Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  233

majority of residents able to prove that they had at least one grandparent whose mother tongue was Labrador Innuttut. 3. An example based on resource sustainability concerns was relocation of the community of Port Harrison in Nunavik, in northern Quebec, to a remote location at Craig Harbour on Ellesmere Island (McElroy 2008). 4. It was many of the community’s youth who were interested in tradition and outward expressions of Inuit identities. 5. The distinction hemorrhages for those who are theoretically inclined, which means pretty much all of us, inasmuch as it is impossible to be completely atheoretical. 6. Though the Nunatsiavut government, qua regional ethnic self-­government, has the authority over many central governance areas (health, legislation, culture, and language), it is still part of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador (Nunatsiavut Inuit Government Webpage) as well as being subject to the Canadian federal government, and therefore subject to certain of both provincial and federal economic policies. 7. In southwestern Ontario, for instance, a small box of Raisin Bran costs around three Canadian dollars.

References Adelson, Naomi. 2001. Being Alive Well: Health and the Politics of Cree Well-­Being. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2009. “Toward a Recuperation of Souls and Bodies: Community Healing and the Complex Interplay of Faith and History.” In Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, ed. Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, 272–­88. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Andersen, Sarah. 2009. Personal communication, October 29. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1963. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ben-­Dor, Shmuel. 1966. Eskimos and Settlers in a Labrador Community—­A Contrastive Study in Adaptation. St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brody, Hugh. 1981. Maps and Dreams. New York: Pantheon Books. Cerwonka, Allaine, and Liisa Malkki. 2007. Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Devereux, George. 1967. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton. Dickason, Olive. 1997. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Favret-­Saada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Brocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Field, Les. 2008. Abalone Tales: Collaborative Explorations of Sovereignty and Identity in Native California. Durham nc: Duke University Press. Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York: Berghahn Books.

234  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013

Hymes, Dell. 1964. “Introduction: Toward Ethnographies of Communication,” pt. 2: “The Ethnography of Communication.” American Anthropologist 66 (6): 1–­34. Kennedy, John Charles. 1982. Holding the Line: Ethnic Boundaries in a Northern Labrador Community. St. John’s: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Kenney, Gerard. 1994. Arctic Smoke and Mirrors. Prescott: Voyageur Publishing. Kirmayer, Laurence, Christopher Fletcher, and Robert Watt. 2009a. “Locating the Ecocentric Self: Inuit Concepts of Mental Health and Illness.” In Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, ed. Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, 289–­314. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Kirmayer, Laurence, Gregory M. Brass, and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis. 2009b. “Healing/ Invention/Tradition.” In Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, ed. Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, 289–­314. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Kral, Michael J., and Lori Idlout. 2006. “Participatory Anthropology in Nunavut.” In Critical Inuit Studies: An Anthology of Contemporary Arctic Ethnography, ed. Pamela Stern and Lisa Stevenson, 54–­70. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cerwonka, Allaine, and Liisa H. Malkki. 2007. Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McElroy, Ann. 2008. Nunavut Generations: Change and Continuity in Canadian Inuit Communities. Long Grove il: Waveland Press. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. 1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nunatsiavut Inuit Government Website, 2009. www.nunatsiavuit.com. Palmer, Andie Diane. 2005. Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Samson, Colin. 2009. “A Colonial Double-­Bind: Social and Historical Contexts of Innu Mental Health.” In Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, ed. Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, 109–­39. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Scott, Colin. 1996. “Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Cree Knowledge Construction.” In Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power and Knowledge, ed. Laura Nader, 69–­86. London: Routledge. Sherzer, Joel, and Regna Darnell. 1972. “Appendix 2: Outline Guide for the Ethnographic Study of Speech Use.” In Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, ed. John Joseph Gumperz and Dell Hymes, 548–­54. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Tanner, Adrian. 1979. Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Production among the Mistassini Cree Hunters. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of St. John’s. ———. 2009. “The Origins of Northern Indigenous Social Pathologies and the Quebec Cree Healing Movement.” In Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, ed. Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, 249–­71. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Tester, Frank James, and Peter Kulchyski. 1994. Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic, 1939–­1963. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Dolson: Reflections through Reflexivity •  235

Waldram, James Burgess, Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young. 2006. Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural and Epidemiological Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Whitridge, Peter. 2012. “Invented Places: Environmental Imaginaries and the Inuit Colonization of Labrador.” In The Nunatsiavummuit Experience: Settlement, Subsistence and Change among the Labrador Inuit, ed. David C. Natcher, Laurence Felt, and Andrea Procter, 42–­60. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.

236  • collaborative anthropologies • volume 6 • 2013