When the field is collective: NAU’s fractal fleet and its collective ethnographic practices

Abstract

This article aims to exam the individuation and collectivization play unfolding from the relations and practices of the so called “collective research” carried out by the Urban Anthropology Nucleus Laboratory. I claim that individuations and collectivization emerge from relations and practices that simultaneously produce researchers, researches, publications and other artifacts in processes of assembling and disassembling, by which relationships with the subjects and fields of research also develop. Against expectations that collective researches would achieve more data volume or a total apprehension of a particular ethnographic context, or that interdisciplinarity would emerge by mere gathering of researchers and research protocols from different disciplinary fields, I claim that different instances of collectivization – in fieldwork, in shared field diaries, in conceptual and methodological iterations over distinct contexts, in writing – produce and multiply partial and composite perspectives, fractals, with ethical and methodological implications. In face of the common way of building stories of formation of researchers and research fields using metaphors of kinship and lineage, I aim to tell stories of LabNAU, focusing on the researchs described at the Etnografias Urbanas book and in Amazonian cities that I participated, by means of a small twist, with Amerindians and Melanesists influences.