A Research Practice Like Escher’s Drawing Hands

Reflections on Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries on Lake Como, Italy

Bibliographic Data

ID6013213
AuthorsSarah Laborde (0000-0002-3985-0200, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume6
Issue1
Pages290-306
Publication date2013-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCollaborative anthropologies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1943-2550 • E-ISSN: 2152-4009
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cla.2013.0004
OpenAlexW1971522484
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited13

A Research Practice Like Escher’s Drawing HandsReflections on Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries on Lake Como, Italy Sarah Laborde (bio) It is increasingly recognized that addressing societal issues necessitates engagements across different knowledge groups, within and beyond the academic sector. In the environmental field, contemporary debates encompass questions of livelihood, social- cultural dynamics, and techno- scientific practices. It has been argued that the entanglements and connections between these various dimensions of environmental issues require more attention from researchers and practitioners, through inter- and transdisciplinary approaches (e.g. Pretty 2011; Toussaint 2004). Scholarship in these fields and interdisciplinary spaces, within and beyond anthropology, is expanding. Interdisciplinarity is also appearing earlier in academic careers, with students developing their research practice and academic identity across disciplines, through joint postgraduate studies and co- supervision by experts from various fields of inquiry. Some universities have established frameworks to cater for joint PhD degrees, proposing, for example, combinations of anthropology with environmental studies (e.g., Yale). In this context, the question of what an engagement with anthropology can contribute to the formation and practice of interdisciplinary scholarship is a relevant one. In this article I hope to provide an original perspective on this question. I write, initially, as an outsider to the discipline of anthropology. My background is in geosciences and environmental engineering. Since commencing my PhD in 2007, I have increasingly embedded my research within the context of social and cultural anthropology.1 My PhD project was concerned with the intersection of various ways of [End Page 290] knowing the water flows in Lake Como (or Lario, as it is called locally), in Italy. It led me to work with numerical models of the lake as a physical limnologist and to spend time with the lake’s fishers as an anthropologist in the field. Here I reflect on these “cross- current” studies, based on an autoethnographic documentation of my scientific practice and ethnographic material from my time at the lake. The story I tell in this article is that of the progressive interweaving of anthropological lines of thought into my practice of environmental research. I am concerned with the ways anthropology has influenced the self- dialogues that have framed and guided my inquiries as well as with the collaborative relationships established during this project. Practicing collaborative anthropologies may require as many degrees and kinds of effort as there are combinations of the people involved, the way success is collectively defined (if it is), and how much integration is sought between the different kinds of expertise at play, including anthropology and outside it. My concern here is mainly with these collaborations that feel at first uncomfortable and arduous, because the traditions of knowledge involved are based on very different and sometimes clashing epistemologies and even ontologies. It is often the case for interdisciplinary collaborations in environmental research, for instance between researchers of the physical and human dimensions of environments, where the mixing of knowledges is “self-conscious” (to use the formulation of Marilyn Strathern 2007: 127) as it deals with different conceptualization and languages for what is considered the object of joint work. The originality of the trajectory in which this article unfolds— from the natural sciences to anthropology within a single researcher’s practice— produces insights that are admittedly difficult to extrapolate to other interdisciplinary situations, especially collaborations between multiple researchers situated in different fields. I do not want to dismiss the influence that collaborating with other researchers, in particular my PhD advisors, has had on my research practice. However, by synthesizing and integrating insights from them and their fields, I bypassed many issues of unintelligibility that have been reported in multi- research and interdisciplinary collaborations (Jolly and Kavanagh 2009; Strang 2009). While I do not have the scope to address these issues fully, here I draw on the related concepts of “boundary object” [End Page 291] and “interactional expertise” developed by science studies theorists (Star and Griesemer 1989; Collins and Evans 2002), to frame an inquiry that examines transformations in my research practice brought about by a progressive engagement with anthropology. The analysis draws two main points. First, my engagement with anthropological theory and practice provided a framework to recognize and explore multiple traditions

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