Participar em quê? Reflexões sobre o conceito de colaboração/participação em etnografia, a partir de uma experiência de coprodução de vídeos musicais

Abstract

Whilst conducting field work for my doctorate thesis on the Caribbean island of San Andrés I had the opportunity to actively participate in the making of music videos with a local production house. Although this was not an experience central to the construction of ethnographic data used for the thesis (which focused on the role of local musical traditions in the processes of ethnicization, the experience radically changed my relationship with the subjects involved in the research. Thanks to this experience, I was able to establish a reciprocal relationship which was sufficiently symmetrical to dissolve the usual barriers between the researcher and the researched. In this paper, following a brief personal narrative of my collaboration with Cotton Tree Media and its implications for ethnographic work, I will reflect on the different shades of the concept of collaboration/participation applied to ethnographic research. In particular, I will discuss aspects of the American tradition “collaborative ethnography”, then present some “politically committed” renderings of the term (participatory action-research with social movements) and finally I will trace the differences of my experience of collaboration/participation, demonstrating some advantages and disadvantages.