Team Ethnography: Collaborative Approaches to Multi-Sited Fieldwork Research

Picture the classic image of an anthropologist: one person, one notebook, one remote village, living there for a year or two until the culture reveals itself. That picture is still true in parts of anthropology, but it is no longer the whole story. A lot of research today happens across factories in three countries, refugee camps on two continents, or online communities that never occupy a single physical place at all. One researcher simply cannot be everywhere at once, which is exactly why team ethnography has become such an important part of contemporary fieldwork.

Why anthropology moved beyond the lone fieldworker 🔗

For most of the twentieth century, ethnography followed a fairly fixed script: a single scholar spends an extended stretch of time in one community, learns the language, builds trust, and writes up findings alone. This worked well when the questions anthropologists asked were mostly local. But as research questions expanded to cover migration, global supply chains, health systems, and transnational movements, a solo researcher working one site at a time became too slow and too limited in scope.

Team ethnography answers this problem by putting multiple researchers on a single project at the same time. These researchers might be colleagues from the same specialisation, scholars from entirely different disciplines working together (making the project interdisciplinary), or team members based in different countries studying connected sites (making it a form of global ethnography). The scholar George Marcus described this broader shift toward multi-sited work as a move away from single, bounded field sites toward tracing people, objects, and ideas as they move across multiple, interconnected locations. Team ethnography is, in many ways, the practical, on-the-ground response to that shift: if the phenomenon spans several sites, it makes sense to have several researchers stationed at each of them, collecting focused data simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Two distinct ways team ethnography works 🔗

It helps to think of team ethnography as covering two related but different practices.

Multiple researchers with defined roles 🔗

The first form is the most literal reading of the term: several trained researchers work on one project, each with a clearly defined role. One might focus on interviews, another on archival material, another on a specific sub-site or population. This division of labour lets a project cover far more ground in a short time span than any single fieldworker could manage, while also allowing different specialists to bring their particular strengths to the table.

The researched become co-researchers 🔗

The second form goes a step further. Here, the people being studied are not just sources of information; they actively help conduct and even write the ethnography. This is usually called collaborative ethnography, and it changes the basic relationship between the person asking questions and the person answering them. Both forms are still called team ethnography, but the second one is far more radical in what it does to traditional research hierarchies, a point worth keeping in mind as the two are easy to conflate.

How a team is actually structured 🔗

Simply putting several researchers on a project does not automatically make it work well. Anthropologist Diane Austin studied this problem closely through her long-running work on community-university-agency partnerships in the United States, and her 2003 study on collaborative team ethnography laid out a practical framework for how such teams should be composed and organised.

Austin’s framework identifies a few recurring roles within a research team:

Resident ethnographers are the researchers embedded on-site for extended periods, building the day-to-day relationships and trust that fieldwork depends on. Non-resident ethnographers are brought in for shorter, targeted visits, often to sharpen the focus on a specific issue the resident team has identified. In some projects, local schoolteachers or community members are also folded into the team, adding perspectives that outside researchers would otherwise miss.

Within this structure, one lead researcher usually takes responsibility for the overall direction of the study and for balancing the sometimes competing needs of research sponsors and the community being studied. Another team member is often tasked specifically with making sure the project’s methodology stays consistent, since different researchers working across sites can easily drift into inconsistent data collection habits if nobody is watching for that.

None of this works, though, without clear role demarcation. If two team members are unsure who owns a particular relationship, dataset, or writing task, friction builds quickly. Austin’s central insight is that well-defined boundaries between researchers are not bureaucratic overhead; they are what allows a team to actually benefit from having multiple perspectives instead of drowning in them. When roles are clear, team members can compare notes, challenge each other’s interpretations, and arrive at a richer, more holistic account of the community or issue under study than any one person could produce alone.

Collaborative ethnography and the rise of the research participant 🔗

The second form of team ethnography, where the community itself joins the research process, has reshaped some basic vocabulary in the discipline. People who once would have been called informants, a term that implies a one-way flow of information toward the researcher, are now generally called research participants. The word change reflects a real change in role: participants are increasingly involved not just in providing information but in interpreting it.

Anthropologist Luke Eric Lassiter has been among the most influential voices pushing this shift forward. His widely used handbook on the subject, published by the University of Chicago Press, argues that community collaborators should be treated less as passive subjects and more as co-authors of the final ethnographic account, involved in reading, editing, and even co-writing the text alongside the researcher. This makes collaboration a deliberate, planned part of the research design from the very start, rather than something that happens informally once fieldwork is already underway.

This shift also changes how ethnographic writing gets done. Instead of a researcher retreating to write up findings in isolation, drafts may be shared with community collaborators for feedback, corrected where interpretations differ, and sometimes co-signed. The final text becomes a joint product rather than a one-sided report about a community.

Weighing the advantages against the challenges 🔗

Team ethnography, in either of its forms, brings real benefits, but it also introduces problems that a lone researcher never has to face.

What team ethnography does well 🔗

The most obvious advantage is speed and scope: a team can gather focused, high-quality data across several settings within a short time span, something a single researcher working sequentially could never match. Beyond efficiency, having multiple people interpret the same phenomenon from different angles tends to produce a more well-rounded, holistic picture of the research topic, since no single researcher’s blind spots go unchecked.

Where it gets difficult 🔗

The same diversity that strengthens a team can also destabilise it. Researchers trained in different disciplines often disagree on basic questions of method and evidence, and these epistemological differences can turn into unproductive arguments if not managed carefully. When collaborative ethnography brings in many community voices, representing all of them fairly can leave a final text feeling scattered or poorly constructed if the writing process is not tightly organised. There is also the awkward matter of researchers sometimes needing to act as both sympathetic collaborators and critical evaluators of the same community or project, a dual role that is genuinely hard to hold at once without one side compromising the other.

Deep historical roots: Boas and Hunt 🔗

It is tempting to think of collaborative fieldwork as a recent, progressive correction to old-fashioned anthropology. In reality, some of the discipline’s founding texts were themselves collaborative, even if that collaboration went largely uncredited for decades.

The clearest example is the partnership between Franz Boas, often considered a founding figure of American anthropology, and George Hunt, a Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) man from Fort Rupert, British Columbia. Their working relationship began in the 1880s and continued for decades, producing what became one of anthropology’s most influential early ethnographies, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897). Hunt did not simply translate or guide; he recorded songs, ceremonies, and social structures in his own hand, and much of the raw material behind Boas’s published work came directly from Hunt’s own extensive fieldwork and writing.

Hunt’s contribution went well beyond the role of a hired assistant. He is now widely regarded as one of the first Indigenous ethnographers, and later publications, including Ethnology of the Kwakiutl, explicitly credited him as co-author for data he had personally collected over years of work. His position as both an insider to Kwakwaka’wakw society and a trained observer working alongside Boas made him uniquely positioned to document language, rituals, and customs in a way that neither man could have achieved alone. Their partnership is a reminder that collaborative, team-based fieldwork is not a modern invention layered onto a purer, solitary tradition. It was there from the beginning; it simply took the discipline a long time to name it, credit it properly, and turn it into a deliberate method rather than an unacknowledged practice.

Bringing it together 🔗

Team ethnography, whether it means a coordinated group of researchers splitting roles across multiple sites, or a community becoming an active partner in producing its own ethnographic record, reflects a broader recognition that fieldwork does not need to be a solitary act to be rigorous. Clear role definition, as Austin’s framework shows, is what turns a group of researchers into an actual team rather than a set of people working past each other. And treating research participants as co-interpreters, as Lassiter argues, changes not just who holds the pen but who gets to decide what the final story means.

What do you think? If you were designing a team ethnography project today, would you lean toward the multi-researcher model with strict role division, or the fully collaborative model where the community co-writes the findings? And given how much epistemological friction can arise between researchers from different disciplines, how might a team build in safeguards against exactly the kind of disagreements this approach makes more likely?

References

1. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000523
2. https://experts.arizona.edu/en/publications/community-based-collaborative-team-ethnography-a-community-univer/
3. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3632872.html
4. https://anthropology.columbia.edu/news/franz-boas-george-hunt-and-making-anthropology
5. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/george-hunt