One of the things that I’ve thought over and questioned through my own research process is the discipline’s tendency towards not sharing any research data (speaking in the context of situations with the research participants have given permissions to the researcher to share data more widely and publically than academic publications). I’m curious in how that as a default practice developed in anthropology. In my own research, I’ve been challenged and compelled by my research participants to share and withhold certain information in ways that I sometimes did not expect (for example, certain topics to be much more contentious than others), and also in the way that photographs, videos, etc have served as helpful and at times, exciting, joy-inspiring, elicitation tools. In thinking of the future of anthropology, I am interested in how more broadly data sharing can have a similar effect on our research and data sharing practices as well as the role anthropologists can play beyond the avenues of academic publishing for a primarily academic, anthropology/social sciences audience.
More collaboration across disciplinary boundaries! Ultimately the work that sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists (or even researchers in other fields entirely) is not that different—and even when it is, nearly all of our work would benefit from cooperation with people approaching the same problem from different perspectives.
Yes, maybe more a dream. Ethnography that seeks to engage multiple publics needs to develop a rich visual and auditory literacy. Digital multimedia is incredibly powerful tool, but using those tools will require collaborative practices with technicians, artists and digital design specialists who share a commitment to public works and public knowledge and have access to funding that can support these types of collaborative works.
In my view, the future of anthropology lies less in the filling out of new ethnographic enclosures and more in increasing our capacity to open up what were once unthinkable lines of inquiry. Archive ethnography facilitates this, as it leaves the ethnography open or unfinished, reaching outside itself, so that the tensions that animate it and render it productive persist beyond any “final word.”
In a sense, my view of a possible anthropology is inspired by something like an "archival ethic," characterised by slowing down and reconsidering how we think about our work, across numerous stages, all the way from research design to write up. To be ok with having many fits and starts and restarts. A prime example of this ethic may be found in the way Foucault characterized his approach to the second volume of his history of sextuality, which took much longer and a much different form than he originally expected:
"As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next-as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet” (The Use of Pleasure, 7).