As anthropology reckons with its past, present, and future, anthropologists increasingly seek to challenge inequities within the discipline and academia more broadly. Anthropology, regardless of subdiscipline, is a social endeavor. Yet research often remains an isolating (though not necessarily solitary) process, even within research teams and in coauthorship contexts. Here, we focus on peer-reviewed publication as the principal manifestation of knowledge production and propose a method for challenging division, hierarchy, power differentials, and adherence to tradition: writing in community. Writing in community is a collaborative form of writing that centers care, abundance, joy, and personal satisfaction over the individuality currently rewarded by the academy. This process engenders consensus, circumvents normative hierarchical research and writing, and promotes relationship building. Here, we experiment by inviting reviewers and editors into our community to collectively contribute to the writing process and reflect on that experience together. Ultimately, we challenge norms for scholarship, (co)authorship, and ways of knowing to offer a more equitable praxis of knowledge production. We propose that writing in community can help anthropologists enact values of multivocality and research transparency.
Anthropologist Barbara Rylko-Bauer and I coined the term “intimate ethnography” in 2006 to capture the research and writing approach in our respective life-history projects, she with her mother and I with my father. Since that time, the genre has seen growing recognition in anthropology. Intimate ethnography centers on an intimate other—family members or someone known to the ethnographer prior to the research—as the subject of an ethnographic project that is also a study of historical conditions and circumstances. Critical to intimate ethnography is attention to crafting accessible, evocative, and scholarly informed works that engage public conversation on serious sociocultural issues and political-economic conditions, past and present. In this article, I define and describe intimate ethnography in relation to the original vision Rylko-Bauer and I imagined for it. In doing so, I situate the genre in a series of intellectual concerns and conversations, sociocultural formations, and political circumstances and events from the writing culture debates to the politics of representation and discussions on ways to decolonize anthropology. In considering the value of intimate ethnography, I will assess its potential contributions and limitations in a time when the need to rethink and recount lives lived and experienced is increasingly urgent.
Using autoethnographic research, I analyze the experience of being an oncology patient during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lima, Peru, the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per million people worldwide. I reflect on my own fears and decisions related to medical treatment and work, since they organized most of my daily life and were significantly impacted by the public health emergency. These experiences were shaped by global and local inequalities in labor conditions as well as access to healthcare facilities and systemic therapies. I speak out as a “vulnerable participant-observer” from my social position as a lower-middle-class working woman, contract university professor, and medical anthropologist facing a still stigmatized disease in her country.
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