Collaboration is inherent to all fieldwork practice.  Collaborative ethnography both highlights and focuses this collaboration -- specifically that between ethnographers and research participants/interlocutors -- and moves it to center stage.  It seeks to make collaboration an explicit and deliberate part of not only fieldwork but also part of the writing process itself.  Community collaborators thus become a central part of the construction of ethnographic texts, which shifts their role from "informants" (who merely inform the knowledge on which ethnographies are based) to "consultants" (who co-interpret knowledege and its representation along with the ethnographer).

Collaborative ethnography is not always germane to every ethnographic project, but it is especially appropriate when individuals and communities wish to use ethnography to address community-centered questions and issues.  Such an approach shifts the role of  ethnographers: they often work as facilitatars, collaboratively addressing community-centered questions and issues through more equitable research partnerships.

Collaborative ethnography is similar to participatory action research; but focuses specifically on the textual production of ethnography (in whatever form it might take).

In The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, I argue that such practice -- as ethically motivated -- can increase ethnography's potential to matter to those beyond the academy.  It is, in many ways, an applied practice with its own politicized histories, limitations, agendas, and consequences.  In the end, though, I believe it is among the most powerful ways to advance a more relevant and public scholarship.

For some of my most recent reflections on collaborative ethnography, see:

"When We Disagree: On Engaging the Force of Difference in Collaborative, Reciprocal, and Participatory Researches." Paper presented at the 107th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, California (2008).

"Moving Past Public Anthropology and Doing Collaborative Research," NAPA Bulletin 29:70-86 (2008).

"Collaborative Ethnography Matters," Dialogue with Anthropology News 47 (5):20-21 (2006).

Chapter 2, "Defining a Collaborative Ethnography" in The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (2005).

"Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology," Current Anthropology 46 (1):83-106 (2005).

Introduction, "The Story of a Collaborative Project," in The Other Side of Middletown (2004).

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If you're interested in these issues, you might also be interested in Collaborative Anthropologies, an annual I edit for the University of Nebraska Press. My Introduction to the inaugural issue is posted here.