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Human Organization, Vol. 66, No. 3, 2007 Copyright 2007 by the Society for Applied Anthropology 0018-7259/07/030301-14$1.

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Public Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Participation: Participatory Action Research and Critical Ethnography in Provincial Russia
Julie Hemment
This article contributes to discussions of a public anthropology by bringing participatory action research (PAR) into dialogue with anthropology. PAR appears uniquely compatible with the goals of critical ethnography. Deeply concerned with global/structural inequality, it is also attentive to the power relations inherent within the research encounter; its point of departure is the kind of collaboration that the new (critical) ethnography proposes. However, despite these obvious affinities, few anthropologists have engaged PAR. At a time when more and more anthropologists are advocating forms of collaborative research practice, I argue that these two approaches to research can offer each other a great deal and that juxtaposing them is productive. Tracing the stages of her own fieldwork in post-Soviet Russia, the author argues that PAR offers the ethnographer a stance, or a framework to affect public anthropological engagement in the field. Further, it offers a means by which we can bring critical anthropological insights to collaborative projects for social change. Key words: participatory action research, post-Soviet Russia, power, critical ethnography

Introduction
Tver, Russia, 17 May 1998

alentina, Oktiabrina, Lena, and Lydia, four members of the womens group Zhenskii Svet (Womens Light) sat in my rented apartment, armed with flip charts and marker pens. At my request, the women had formed pairs and sat on the small sofa beds at opposite ends of the tiny one-room apartment, debating eagerly. We had gathered together that day to undertake a process of group reflection. This was a participatory workshop, the first step in a collaborative research process that we had planned for some time. Our discussion was structured around three broad questions

Julie Hemment is currently assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Research in Russia was supported by the Department of Anthropology at Cornell, the Cornell Graduate School and the Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Cornell University Peace Studies Program. Support from the European Field Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst facilitated return trips in 2004 and 2005 and a fellowship from the Lilly Center for Teaching in 2003 provided leave time for writing. The author wishes to thank a number of colleagues and friends for their engagement in this work: the faculty of the department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky where this paper was first delivered in October 2003, especially Michele Rivkin-Fish; at UMass, members of my graduate seminar, Larissa Hopkins, Deborah Keisch, Milena Marchesi, Graciela Monteagudo and Julie Skogsbergh.

designed to assist the group in clarifying its goals and aims; where did we come from? (the groups history); where do we want to go? (the ideal); how to get there? (the action plan). As the women spoke, interrupting each other in excitement, I struggled to jot down all that they said. The four made interesting pairs: Valentina, founder of the group and feminist historian, worked with Oktiabrina, a doctor committed to issues of womens health. Lena, an English language teacher,worked with Lydia, a sociologist and researcher who had recently been laid off. I had called the meeting with Valentinas blessing now because the group was at a crossroad. Until this point, their strong concern with independence had led them to avoid entering into collaborations either with local state officials, or international donor agencies. Early excitement about the potential of partnership with foundations such as Ford and the Open Society Institute had given way to concern at the changes the women saw taking place: the creation of new hierarchies and shifting priorities as mandates were set in Washington or Geneva. But times were hard in the Russian provinces; these teachers, engineers, and doctors who were secure during the Soviet period now struggled to make ends meet as wages were withheld and prices skyrocketed. Some of the Zhenskii Svet women wanted to formalize their activities and locate sources of financial support; they were beginning to make tentative moves toward formal collaboration with external agents and they had competing ideas of how to go about this. At a time of tumultuous social and political
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change, the group was unraveling and the women had begun to rethink their activism. I conceptualized the seminar as a place where members of the group could clarify their personal goals and investment in it. Indeed, I wanted to clarify my own role and commitment; 10 months into my ethnographic research, I felt I had something concrete to offer: insight into international donor priorities and acquaintance with both donor agency representatives and other Russian provincial groups. By the end of that day, we had a shared and enriched perspective of the history of the group and had reached a broad consensus: the women agreed it was time to formalize the activities of Zhenskii Svet in some way and to set up a womens center. This meant embarking on a new strategy vis--vis local and global powerbrokersmoving away from a stance of independence, to enter into strategic forms of engagement. This support would enable them to establish a real concrete, socially-oriented project, as Oktiabrina put it, which would both sustain existing projects and enable Zhenskii Svet women to devise new ones. In recent years, discussions about the scope and purpose of anthropology have animated the discipline. Whether in the name of public (Borofsky 2000), public interest (Sanday 2003), engaged (Lamphere 2003), collaborative (Lassiter 2005b), or activist anthropology (Hale 2006; Lyon-Callo and Hyatt 2003), cultural anthropologists are looking for ways to forge a more socially engaged kind of practice. In this article, I contribute to these discussions, by bringing participatory action research (PAR), a social change methodology, into dialogue with anthropology. In order to do this, I draw on my own collaborative research in provincial Russia (1997-98), which combined both approaches and enabled me to work closely with members of Zhenskii Svet, joining them in a project wherein they made crucial decisions about organizational development. At first glance, PAR appears uniquely compatible with the goals of critical ethnography, by which I mean the post-1980s trend within anthropology that is attentive to issues of culture and power. Deeply concerned with global/structural inequality, PAR is also attentive to the power relations inherent within the research encounter; its point of departure is the kind of collaboration that the new (critical) ethnography proposes.1 However, despite these obvious affinities, few anthropologists have engaged PAR.2 At a time when more and more anthropologists are advocating forms of collaborative research practice, I argue that these two approaches to research can offer each other a great deal and that juxtaposing them is productive. Indeed, in these challenging neoliberal times, I suggest that they may need each other. My goal is not to add to the already burgeoning list of designations, or to exhort colleagues to a better practicewith Douglas Foley and many others (Foley and Valenzuela 2005; Lassiter 2005b) I agree that there are many ways to be collaborative. Nor do I wish to diminish or erase the contributions of applied anthropology; as many have pointed out and mapped, applied and action anthropological approaches have a rich history within the discipline (Bennett 1996; Hale 2006;
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Singer 2000; Stocking 2000). Rather, my goal is to bring a methodological dimension to these discussions; and here, I see myself primarily addressing cultural anthropologists.3 While collaboration is (and has long been) promoted as a desirable end for ethnographic engagement, I have found little dialogue about what constitutes it, or how to go about it. In the context of this discussion, PAR has two things going for it. First, it offers a methodological dimension to discussions of collaboration as we embark on anthropology as cultural critique. Second, while PAR is not central to graduate training in anthropology, more and more anthropologists are likely to come into contact with it as the field changes. PAR is a method that is widely embraced by international and non-governmental agencies. As an increasing number of anthropologists find themselves drawn in to NGO work as consultants, evaluators, or to undertake qualitative research, they are likely to find themselves forced to engage with PAR. 4 In this article, I argue that PAR offers a means of reconceptualizing the ethnographic encounter to allow for some of the collaborations critical anthropologists advocate. PAR offers a framework through which we can bring critical anthropological insights to collaborative projects with research participants in the field. As Vincent Lyon-Callo and Susan Brin Hyatt suggest, Through long-term collaborations with community-based activists, engaged ethnographers can contribute to creating a space for the realization of new policies, new subject positions, and the emergence of new political possibilities beyond what the global economy and its neoliberal rationalizations have set for us (2003:177). 5 In order to make the case for this synthesis, I turn to a discussion of my own fieldwork in post-Soviet Russia. Committed to the potential of ethnography and its power to yield insights into what Paul Willis and Matt Trondhem call lived-outness, the nitty gritty of every day life (2000:12), I came to PAR in my search for a good enough methodology. Detailing the different phases of my fieldwork with Russian women activists, I show how PAR offered a framework to affect public anthropological engagement in the field. Combining PAR with ethnographic research enabled a two-fold project, or what I call critique plus: the combined commitment to rethinking and problematizing international aid and cross-cultural feminist interventions, and engaging in an activist project with members of Zhenskii Svet. In the weeks and months that followed, our project gained momentum, eventually resulting in the decision to set up a womens crisis center for victims of sexual and domestic violence in the city. Before turning to this discussion, I review some of the debates that have stimulated me in this endeavor. As anthropologists debate the perimeters and terms of their discipline, scholars who engage in PAR are also rethinking their practice.

Toward an Engaged, Public, or Public Interest Anthropology?


Since the late 1960s, there have been persistent (if marginal) calls from within cultural anthropology to achieve a
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more socially engaged, politically oriented practicefrom Dell Hymes call to reinvent anthropology (Hymes 1972), to Faye Harrisons call to decolonize it (Harrison 1991). These challenges emerged as the discipline of anthropology was buffeted by postcolonial, subaltern and womens studies. As the former objects of analysis spoke back, holding unflattering mirrors to the discipline, it was impossible to continue with business as usual. The classic paradigm, itself an artifact of the post World War II era, was usurped and the critical paradigm took its place.6 Centrally related to this reconceptualization was a consideration of power; anthropologists were forced to recognize the connections between cultures and peoples, connections of power, history, political economy, and colonial and neo-colonial relations (Wolf 1982). On another level, these shifts pushed us to think about power in the research encounter, too. Critical anthropology includes a reflexive imperativerequiring that the analyst undertake a double move, revealing the self in the process of studying the other. Initially prompted by feminist and subaltern epistemological challenges, the critical paradigm is now broadly accepted (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). We can no longer conceptualize the world in terms of culturesseparate, distinct, hermetically sealed entities, existing outside of global relations of power. Neither can we get away with writing ourselves out of our ethnographic accounts; the new ethnography requires that we position ourselves as we write about fieldwork interactions and allow for relations of power in the field. However, despite this, one element of the classical paradigm persists: the split between theoretical and applied. Anthropology programs tend to be clearly demarcated; while some clearly identify as ap plied, many departments of cultural anthropology shy from the designation and offer only sketchy methodological training. Meanwhile, many cultural anthropologists are uneasy about the implications of social engagement. Indeed, scholars working within the critical paradigm can be hostile to activist type research (Hale 2006:101). It is presumably this situation that prompted Peggy Sanday to refer to the existence of a generalized academic taboo against social action (2003:5). As I have noted, calls to rethink and reevaluate anthropologys role, purpose, and relevance have become even more urgent in recent years, prompted by concerns emanating from both inside and outside the academy.7 This has to do in part with recent high profile issues such as the Yanomami controversy, which raised serious questions about the discipline;8 it is also connected to shifts within the field itself. In the last decades, the job market has changed significantly. A majority of anthropology Ph.D.s find themselves employed outside the academy; in this environment, graduate training may be at odds with the expectations and needs of graduate students. But I attribute this new vogue for thinking public to something even more fundamental. Many of us who came of age in the post-Writing Culture period were drawn to the discipline by the power of the critique of anthropological
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practice. We were compelled by the critical insights this entailed, yet we want more, particularly in these times, where the inequities and violence caused by neoliberal economic policies grow daily. Our ethnographic work places us in intimate proximity to those who feel neoliberalisms affects most sharply. As we document these and grapple to make sense of them, the appetite grows for what I call critique plus; the desire to affect a mode of engagement that holds on to the important insights of critical ethnography and the goals of cultural critique, but which enables us to push beyond the deconstructive moment to engage in collaborative projects for social change.9 The concerns emanating from the participatory action research literature have a different basis.10 These calls for change are not stimulated by anxiety about its perceived irrelevance, or its lack of applicability, but rather concern about its new popularity. PAR is explicitly appliedit is a social change methodology that has its roots in popular struggles in the global South to make research a more egalitarian and collaborative effort. Variously described as a method, a style, or a philosophy (Fals Borda and Rahman 1991b:16), participatory action research emerged as a direct challenge both to the logic of conventional social science and top-down development initiatives (Freire 1970). Rather than assuming that the right and expertise to design and conduct research reside with the expert researcher, PAR recasts research as a collaborative endeavor between outside researcher and community group. In an ideal typical PAR project, the community group invites a researcher to work with them on a project that meets local needs (Greenwood and Levin 1998).11 Although largely overlooked by anthropologists, PAR is a methodology that has percolated far and wide. Freirian inspired methods have been widely used by progressive social movements from rural Appalachia, to Latin America. Practitioners and scholars working in fields traditionally seen as applied have used the methodology to devise diverse community-based projects in education, development studies, and human service studies. But in recent years this profile underwent a qualitative shift and PAR has seen its fortunes soar. Once a methodology of the margins, to use Steven Jordans terms, it is now mainstreamed, integrated into the agendas of international development agencies and NGOs (Jordan 2003:186). Indeed, the World Bank now asserts participation as a core value and advocates the use of participatory methodologies in its programs. It is this new prominence that gives its practitioners pause. Bill Cooke and Uma Kotharis book, Participation: The New Tyranny? offers a trenchant critique of participation discourse in development circles and shows the gulf between the rhetoric of participation and actual practice (Cooke and Kothari 2001). The authors argue that agencies such as the World Bank merely pay lip service to these new values whilst they continue their old practices of top-down economic development (2001). Steven Jordan makes a similar critique. In his view, the new vogue for participation marks the commodification and cooptation of participatory methods
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(2003). I share these concerns. When concepts that originate in the progressive campaigns of the left are mainstreamed, they become unmoored from the struggles in which they were rooted, in Ann Snitows terms. In this context, concepts like gender, participation and civil society have been successful precisely because they are emptied of their radical content (Snitow 1999:35-42). Their redeployment can be dangerous and powerful. Recent feminist scholarship has traced the ways notions of empowerment and womens rights have become linked to some decidedly illiberal projects; they have been deployed in ways that enhance and facilitate the advance of neoliberal state and its restructuring processes (Cruikshank 1999; Hyatt 1997; Lyon-Callo 2004; Snitow 1999).12 The same is true of the rhetoric of participation. Participatory methods are potentially riskier than conventional ones, insofar as they bring us into close, often intimate proximity with research participants (Stacey 1988). In an institutional setting, problems that beset the methodology may be magnified. Claims to empowerment are hard to challenge, and practitioners need to be doubly critical. However sincere the desire of individual agency representatives to effect positive social change, their activities are constrained by the circumstances they work withingrant deadlines, management issues, and the broader logic within which interventions take place. These circumstances mean there are issues they do not see and cannot afford to look for (Rivkin-Fish 2005).13 With Steven Jordan, I argue that in these times, PAR may need the tools of critical ethnography as much as critical ethnography needs PAR. Before I turn to discuss my own fieldwork, a brief word about the context within my research took place.

The Postsocialist Context


Doing research in the formerly socialist states of Central Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union differs from what George Stocking has called the archetypal anthropological encounter (2000). The encounter is not structured by colonial histories and postcolonial trajectories, but it is arguably, equally fraught. In postsocialist states, the anthropological encounter is structured by the Cold War and its legacy. This is particularly true in Russia, President Ronald Reagans evil empire. In the immediate aftermath of Communisms collapse there was a lot of public rhetoric about the end of history and idealism about the potential for global harmony, expressed by actors in Western Europe, the US, and the former East bloc. During this period, a new global apparatus for activism set up, sustained by UN conferences and new budgets for foundations and donor agencies. This was the age of the non-state actor, the NGO. New master concepts that seemed to mark the triumph of the people over states percolated freely and gave articulation to development agendascivil society, womens rights/human rights, participation. This apparatus extended into virgin territory of the formerly second world. The Central European velvet revolutions
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of 1989 took place in the name of civil societypeople rising up against tyrannous states. This authorized a slew of international democratizing interventions in postsocialist states, bankrolled by the US and West European governments. During the early 1990s, international agencies such as the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Open Society Institute arrived in Russia and other formerly socialist states with a mandate to assist civil society development. Their representatives eagerly sought out non-governmental groupshuman rights, womens rights activists, and environmentalistsand encouraged them to apply for newly available grants and funding.14 Russian activists viewed these potential collaborations with a mix of intrigue and excitementthey were initially excited to make the acquaintance of foreigners and to enter into the partnerships that were promised. This initial optimism soon gave way as liberal triumphalism set inthe conviction that the West had won, while Communism had lost. The lively discussions of reform and socialist revitalizationthe third way discussed by manyshort-circuited, displaced by the project of marketization (Borneman 1992; Ost 1990).15 Despite the public rhetoric of partnerships and participation put out by these agencies, these early East-West exchanges were unidirectional. The North American and western European advisors and experts who brought know-how to Russia (such as accounting, management, organizational technologies, and skills) and who directed this flow of aid frequently had very little base or background in the culture, history, or politics of the region and were reluctant to consult their Soviet peers (Bruno 1997; Sampson 1996; Wedel 1998). In the immediate post Cold War period, these interventions were driven by a missionary zeal that was blind to local knowledge. Indeed, here local knowledge was specifically discounted as a communist legacy (Abramson 1999; RivkinFish 2005; Sampson 1996; Wedel 1998). Post-Soviet Russia was considered a blank slate and the project was seen to be one of re-education (Wedel 1998). The collapse of the socialist alternative gave rise to a new political environment, which feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser has characterized as the postsocialist condition. In her formulation, the postsocialist conditionwhich is not restricted to formerly socialist states, but manifest in Western Europe and the US, tooplaces limits on our political imagination. In this new environment, rights talkthe politics of recognitiondisplaces struggles over material issues and social justicethe politics of redistribution (Fraser 1997). During my research in Russia during the mid to late 1990s, I saw this logic amply illustrated. This was a time of intense economic dislocation. Shock-therapy, the economic policy that was endorsed and aggressively promoted by North American and western European advisors and embraced by Russias so-called young reformers, called for state-run factories, enterprises, and bureaucracies to be shut down and privatized, resulting in massive lay-offs. During the 1990s, social indicators plummetedrates of infection increased, male
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mortality rose dramatically and a majority of the population found themselves to be impoverished. However, discussions of human rights or womens rights initiated by foundations and donor agencies tended to ignore these structural issues and to focus narrowly on issues of organizational development.16 Meanwhile, Russian actors who were impolitic enough to publicly refer to the economic fallout of transition (unemployment, cuts in social services, etc.) were frequently dismissed as communists. This then was the contradictory and challenging terrain where my research was situated. In this next section, I turn to discuss three phases of my research and consider the ways critical ethnography and PAR were intertwined through each of them.

Ethnographic PAR in three stages: Phase One Defining the Project


Unlike many who undertake participatory forms of research, I was not a practitioner seeking a site for an intervention, but an ethnographer. My topic was to examine the cultural processes of transition in Russia; that is, I sought to examine the development encounter that was unfurling in the worlds former superpower by analyzing its reception by Russian activists. I was particularly interested in the encounter between international aid agencies and womens groups, and how Russian women made sense of the Western feminist discourses and models that these agencies brought with them. As I contemplated my field site from the dual vantage points that my training had encouraged, I realized that democratizing interventions, such as programs that promoted womens rights, were bound up in a troubling political economy. NGOs, civil society, community empowerment, womens rights, and social capital were promoted at the same time as a violent economic restructuring was taking place. The economic shock therapy that was prescribed by IMF advisors and international lenders led to the downsizing of state industries, the dismantling of the social security system and sharp cutbacks in the health care system, leaving populations struggling to deal with unemployment, hyperinflation, and health costs without a safety net. To make matters more vexed, these draconian steps were promoted by some of the same agencies that promoted womens empowerment projects. Russian womens groups thus became particularly interesting to me for a number of reasons. They interested me firstly because they were starting to make one of the most audible critiques of democratization. Many groups were set up out of concern about the gendered aspects of transitionthe steady decline of womens political participation, their economic disenfranchisement and the mounting public rhetoric about womens role (Gal and Kligman 2000; Posadskaya 1994; Watson 1993). Secondly, womens groups interested me because I understood them to be one of the most fraught sites of international interventions, where the cultural collisions and mismatch were most apparent. For complex reasons
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concerning Russias state socialist history, western feminist insights didnt add up or make sense to most Russian women. There is no commonly held perception of gender discrimination in Russia and the notion of women organizing as women is greeted with suspicion. This is not because the issue is in any way newon the contrary, gender equality was a prominent goal of Bolshevik era social engineering; however, in the 70 years of state socialism, some deeply unpopular policies were enacted in its name. As a result, by the 1980s there was a commonly held perception that socialism had emasculated men and over-emancipated women and both men and women yearned for these policies to be reversed.17 My preliminary ethnographic work made me aware of the frustration of Russian people who were on the receiving end of these interventions. Despite rhetorical commitment to working collaboratively with Russian partner organizations, agendas were set outsidein Geneva or Washingtonand often had little local salience. Many of the women activists I spoke with in the mid to late 1990s were dissatisfied with the international seminars and training programs they attended. Concepts were deployed from other contexts, frequently from the global south. As one of my woman activist friends once memorably put it, I have a Masters degree and I know two foreign languages, but I live in a two room apartment with my two sons, husband, and mother-in-law and have no hot water. Am I a grassroots woman? This term, which she associated with rural, third world contexts, did not seem appropriate to Russia or to her life. Here, the objection in part is being positioned as less developed. Thus as I prepared for fieldwork, my project began to take shape as a critical investigation of democratization. With other scholars of postsocialism working during the 1990s, my goal was to problematize the concepts and technologies that undergirded international interventions in postsocialist states, and to draw attention to moments of ill fit and disjuncture at the point of reception, to highlight the gulf between public rhetoric and actual outcomes.18 That is, I was committed to the project of cultural critique. But I had another concern too that was prompted by the reflexive imperative of the critical ethnographic project: as I contemplated my research design, the how question grew louder. When the object of inquiry is western or international intervention, how should I position myself as a British, US trained and based anthropologist? How could I avoid replicating these same patterns through my own research practice? I came to PAR in my search for a good-enough methodology.

PAR
I had been trained, or perhaps it is more accurate to say socialized, into the methods of cultural anthropology.19 The critical discussions that excited and shaped me, and which had so much to say about deconstructing western hegemonies and the importance of self-reflexivity and positioning in ethnographic writing, had relatively little to say about ethnographic practice (Enslin 1994).
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The PAR literature addressed these concerns. As I began to survey the vast literature on PAR, or AR, I was drawn to what some have called southern PARMarxist influenced participatory approaches, as in the popular education work of Paolo Freire. There was much here in common with critical ethnographya concern with global connections and relations of power, and attention to issues of power within the fieldwork encounter. PAR conceptualizes the research process as dialogical, collaborativethis answered the calls of critical anthropologists since the 1980s, who have advocated new relations of research where informants and anthropologists work together at the level of writing, recording, or in action projects.20 The PAR literature contained specific models, sample questions, case studies and tools I could draw on and adapt. As the diversity of participatory approaches I discovered attests, it was not rigid but quite elastic. I was inspired by the work of some anthropologists and feminist researchers, who have turned to PAR to achieve a more socially responsible, activist oriented form of scholarship.21 I was particularly drawn by the work of scholars who have drawn on feminist and post-structuralist theory to creatively reformulate PAR; these approaches did not assume a unified identity (women) or a unified form of oppression (patriarchy), but instead used participatory action research methodologies to achieve contingent, strategic forms of alliance and collaboration with research participants (Gibson-Graham 1994; Gibson-Graham 2006; Paley 2001). My goal in short was not to do PAR, or to embrace it wholesale; as I set out for the field, my idea of PAR was that it could be a discursive space wherein anthropologist and informants could discuss, identify, and work out ways to resolve local problems. In the end, the PAR literature gave me a framework through which to conceptualize my fieldwork. It helped me to locate a fieldsite and a womens group to work, to negotiate my role and the terms of our relationship and it became a means of initiating a productive conversation (Gibson-Graham 1994:220) with Zhenskii Svet participants. Explicit in my research proposal was a concern to work through PAR, to bring it to ethnography and to see what it could enable. I embraced it not merely as method, but as a framework for conceptualizing collaboration and for keeping critical anthropological concerns within my sights.

Phase 2: The Selection of a Fieldsite


Archetypal accounts of fieldwork within cultural anthropology emphasize the serendipity of the site selection. The rite of passage that is participant observation presumes a lone fieldworker, an autonomous individual who stumbles across, or chances upon, people or places that capture their imagination. As Gupta and Ferguson have pointed out, this serendipity is overdetermined and these accidental selections take place in a field structured by power, guided by Federal Funding patterns and the strategic objectives of sponsoring governments (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).
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My selection of Russia as fieldsite was, of course, made possible by the unraveling of the Cold War and new possibilities for travel this offered, andalthough as a non-US citizen I was not eligible to apply for itby the federal money directed towards social scientists to encourage them to do this. But what about my selection of a specific field siteTver and Zhenskii Svet? Neither solely participant observer, nor PAR practitioner, my selection of field site came about through a synthesis of both. As Ive explained, critical ethnography led me to select womens groups as a general site, but talking about PAR helped me negotiate access and an invitation to one in particular. The PAR literature prompted me to think very seriously about the politics of negotiating access to a community group, issues of reciprocity and the terms upon which this research relationship would take place. In the summer of 1995 when I traveled to Russia, I had a list of provincial groups to visit. One was Zhenskii Svet a womens group located in Tver, a provincial city located 170 km outside Moscow. This small, university-based feminist oriented group dedicated to womens education and consciousness-raising was founded in 1991, long before the arrival of international foundations, in the first wave of independent organizing in Russia. I was drawn to it for a number of reasons. First, its feminist identification was unusual, as I have explained; I wished to understand what this meant to its participants. Second, it was located in a provincial city, and I was specifically interested in exploring the experience of groups outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. Third, although it had recently gone online, it was outside the loop of international funding. The online announcement I received listed a number of interesting educational and socially oriented projectsa womens Oral history project, annual womens week, and a crisis center for women victims of sexual and domestic violence (as a former-crisis center counselor, I had a particular interest in the work of the new crisis center network that was appearing in Russia). But what caused this to gel was that across our different locations, the groups founder, Valentina, and I shared similar interests and concerns. As I laid out my goals and objectives and interest in collaboration (negotiating collaborative research relations), Valentina told me she was struggling with similar issues. Prompted partly by her engagement with feminist literature and her own organizing strategies, but also by the changes she saw taking place within the Russian womens movement, she was critical of the policies of international agencies. As she put it in a joint presentation we subsequently gave to the PAR Network at Cornell University in 1999,
We began to dream about the possibility for western feminists to come not only to organize round tables, or to tell something about fundraising, but to participate in our activity. Without money. You have no money, I have no money, but we have skills. We are very resourceful people. We decided, what can we do together? To find a possibility to come to us, and work with us, live with us, eat with us! HumaN OrganizatioN

For sure, we were differently positioned and we had a very different interest and level of engagement in these issues. I was a graduate student undertaking dissertation research; the questions that interested me were matters of personal and organizational survival to members of Zhenskii Svet. While my critique stemmed from my positionality as a US-based anthropologist, concerned with culture and power and the analytic of neoliberalism, Valentinas critique emerged from her positionality as a highly educated member of the intelligentsia who had been opposed to the Soviet regime and was deeply interested in democratic projects for social renewal. Although critical of the processes she saw unfolding, she was not unreflexively critical of grant making bodies or their representatives; she was interested in the use and applicability of western concepts and remained deeply convinced of the potential for good in the East-West encounter. Like most of the women activists I encountered in my research, she insisted that she would much rather trust an American or European partner organization than nasha vlast (our authorities)! Unlike some of the critical recipients of democratization aid whose accounts I had read, she did not speak in terms of colonization, or neocolonialism. Valentinas critique was not of aid per se, but of what she viewed as its unintended effects. Still, our preliminary discussions persuaded us that we could work together and forge a contingent alliance across difference for the duration of my research. Thus, it was that in Zhenskii Svet as a fieldsite, the two threads of my project promised to come together: to rethink and problematize international aid and cross-cultural feminist interventions, and to enact this, by affecting a different kind of gendered intervention through collaborative research.

Phase 3: The Research Process


I returned to Tver in 1997 and spent one year with the women of Zhenskii Svet, attending group meetings and getting to know the women participants. Despite the fact that we had broadly shared values (an identification with feminism and a critical perspective on the effects of international aid on the Russian womens movement) and both expressed the desire to collaborate, it wasnt at all clear what this collaboration would look like or how it would take place. It wasnt even clear with whom it would take place. Once again, I was not a practitioner with an already defined question or intervention to make; I wasnt seeking to work toward an already defined goal such as a public health issue like HIV prevention, as in some of the cases I had read about. Although a self-identified feminist, I was not working to promote a pre-existing notion of womens empowerment. My point of departure was that Russian women had a perfectly good grasp of their issues and needs; I specifically sought to work against the universalizing strategies and solutionsthe institutional feminism if you likethat were asserted by international agencies. Finally, the group didnt have a clearly defined question or issue or project either. In fact, it didnt look like a group at all. It defied even my culturally
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relativistic expectations of what a non-governmental group should look like. Like many Russian obshchestvennyi organizatsii (societal organizations), Zhenskii Svet formed out of already existing networks of acquaintancesin this case, Valentinas students, former students, and colleagues. Unlike most Russian groups, however, it was open to the public. It had no clear membership base and participation was fluid; between 6 to 20 people showed up to the approximately 20 meetings I attended between 1997-98. The group had no fixed premises, hence no address and no telephone. During the year I was in the city, it met weekly or bi-weekly in a room in the municipal library, which it was granted for a couple of hours. Zhenskii Svet had no staff and no budget. And although it had a founder in Valentina, she insisted that she was not its leader. Valentina was ideologically opposed to the idea of hierarchy, formalization. In response to decades of top-down hierarchical party controlled organizations, she was determined that Zhenskii Svet would be independent and fluid. She preferred to call it a club not a group; on occasion, she referred to it as a corridor, through which women would pass to undertake their own social projects. While I embraced this fluidity intellectually, I found it methodologically challenging. How would a democratic group oriented project actually play out? Could my method allow for this? Clearly this called for a shift of stance. Feeling somewhat undone, I retreated from my participatory intent. Therein began a new phase of my research wherein I devoted myself to the standard practices of participant observation. I attended meetings of Zhenskii Svet and other local groups; I got involved in the stuff of life that took place between meetings. I began to form friendships with the women, who invited me to their homes and into the rhythms of their family lives. Over time, a sense of shared purpose grew. My friends introduced me to other local associations and groups, and to friends who were engaged in other forms of societal work they thought I would be interested in. I attended local meetings and seminars with them. At the same time, I traveled to other citiesbringing back information and brochures. Sometimes I was an envoy, carrying letters and passing greetings to friends in other cities. Other times I made connections of my own, returning with stories about other crisis centers, other womens projects, other forms of activism. My westernness enabled me easy access where it was difficult for most of my provincial colleagues to treadI visited the offices of international foundations and agencies (the Ford Foundation, the American Bar Association, IREX) and became acquainted with their representatives. We discussed these findings during Zhenskii Svet meetings, which were transformed for me. No longer the observer, I joined them in their discussions and plans. Gradually, around this personal intimacy and trust a new partial but shared, externally related identity formed (Gibson-Graham 1994:218). This became the basis for a collaborative research project. The women activists I knew had always asked questions of methey frequently appealed to me, the westernidentified outsider, to help them interpret the technologies and
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concepts that by 1997 percolated in the Russian provinces, disseminated by international donor agencies. What did civil society look like in Britain and the US? as it right that nongovernmental groups should provide social services? What then was the role of the state? As I came to better understand the fragility of their lives, I realized that these were not just abstract discussions. The Zhenskii Svet women were all struggling with the economic dislocations of the immediate postSoviet periodunemployment, unpaid or withheld wages, or cramped and unsatisfactory living space without amenities. Most group participants were employed in the crumbling state sector as teachers, doctors, engineers; while I lived in the city, their wages, already absurdly low, were routinely withheld for months at a time, forcing them to taken on additional jobs or engage in elaborate forms of barter. As a result of these changed circumstances the Zhenskii Svet women were moving away from an ideal of independence, to what Valentina called a strategy of involvement with local and international power brokers. As our sense of shared understandings grew, the questions changed and became more urgent. What could we do to gain support? How could we formalize these activities? And it was here that attitudes changed towards me. Their questions, which had been largely philosophical, became more direct: what can you do to help?

Our Collaborative Project and the Decision to Set Up a Crisis Center in Tver
It was at this point that I called the first group seminar I described in the opening section of this article. Our PAR projector our seminars as my friends recall itbecame a collaborative process wherein we considered issues of organizational development and how to relate to, gain, and manage international aid. Over the course of four meetings, we pooled our perspectives and resources. Through our discussions, we all came to better understand the history of the group and the contemporary needs and interests of its participants. I brought insights derived from ethnographic fieldwork: information about donor priorities and grants and funding. Together, we discussed the pros and cons of engaging with foundations, the likely costs and possible benefits. One of the outcomes of this process was the decision to set up a crisis center for women victims of sexual and domestic violence.22 As our collaborative project got underway, the Zhenskii Svet women pushed me to assume a more active role, lobbying and making calls both to the representatives of donor agencies and to local powerbrokers (the head of the municipal social services, the presidents representative to the oblast, the mayor): Their doors will open for a western visitor, Valentina told me, but never for me. As I contemplate it now, I see how our collaborative project combined insights from PAR and critical ethnography. Our decision to set up a crisis center was strategicit wasnt a process of discovery according to which the women recognized a set of objectively existing needs (Fraser 1990; Gal 1994), or had their consciousness raised to understand
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a feminist issue (gender violence). Rather, we decided to set up a crisis center because we knew this was the project agencies were most likely to support. By 1997, the campaigns against gendered violence were supported by most of the agencies that funded womens groups in Russia. Foundations provided startup grants for fledgling crisis centers and training programs for their staff. For activists, the crisis center model, based on rape crisis center in the US and Western Europe offered a blueprint and a framework. Foundation support financed the production of easy-to-use materialsbrochures, posters, and handbooks, many of which were translated from English or German. Neat, easy to learn, the crisis center had become a kind of do-it-yourself NGO kit. Initially, the Zhenskii Svet women had their doubts about making gendered violence the main issue. They recognized points of disconnect and ill fit between the transnational feminist campaign and local constructions. The gendered violence campaigns that agencies endorsed exhibited many of the troubling characteristics I outlined above. In making gender the explanatory variable and in focusing on interpersonal relationships between spouses, they served to deflect attention from structural issues in the postsocialist period, namely the liberalizing structural adjustment processes that exacerbated all forms of violence, including domestic violence (Hemment 2004). The Zhenskii Svet women perceived the material crises that beset local womenthe crisis of living space, unemployment, alcoholism and military serviceto be far more pressing. In the course of our seminars, we debated these issues. Our discussions were not uncomplicated or without conflict; one of the group participants felt strongly that it was a mistake to accept the campaigns focus on interpersonal violence and preferred to conceptualize the project as a crisis center for victims of economic violence. However, a crisis center for women victims of sexual violence represented their best hope to establish a formal womens center in the city. Indeed, we eventually won the support not only of international agencies (the American Bar Association, IREX, the Open Society Institute), but the local mayors office, too.23 Through our PAR process, we made the decision to engage the international campaign against violence against women strategically; we entered into partnership with international agencies and local state officials with our eyes wide open. I want to stress that this was not a cynical move. Rather, the women saw the crisis center model as a resource we could negotiate and adapt and draw on as we made sense of local issues. The Zhenskii Svet women conceptualized a crisis center as a site from which they could address a wide variety of local concerns, including womens anxieties about the crisis of living space, alcoholism and the draft. Beyond the dialectic of professed idealism and cynical engagement Id seen elsewherethat anthropologist Janine Wedel describes as you pretend to help, and we pretend to be grateful(Wedel 1998)we retained conviction in what we were doing and were committed to using these resources locally. In practice, the women hoped to be able to address these wider issues and saw the crisis center as a kind of diagnostic. As Oktiabrina, the
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doctor who emerged to be the director of the crisis center put it, We dont yet know the extent to which domestic violence is the most important issue facing women. After reading the foundation-sponsored book, How to Start and Manage a Womens Crisis Center,24 Oktiabrina said that she had a lot of respect for the crisis center model, but that she had a lot of questions about it too, 70 percent of all problems now in Tver have a material basis. Im not sure what crisis centers can do to resolve that. She conceptualized the crisis center as a pilot project through which we could learn more about womens real and most pressing needs and a new site from which to continue the educational and enlightenment work of Zhenskii Svet: When women come for assistance and consultations in connection with real problems in their lives, then we can tell them about their rights. Then its not abstract, but has some real basis. Indeed, until it was forced to shut down in 2003, the crisis center served as an exemplary womens center in the spirit we had intended. It acted as a kind of support center, providing a sense of community and practical training for local women (both clients and those who volunteered or worked there), at the same time as it provided services to women victims of sexual and domestic violence.25

Conclusions: Participatory Ethnography or Ethnographic PAR


Discussions of a socially engaged, activist, or public anthropology have animated the discipline in recent years. In these discussions, many have advocated the desirability of collaboration with research participants; however, beyond broad endorsements, there has been relatively little discussion either of what constitutes collaboration or how to go about it. In this article, Ive sought to intervene by bringing a methodological dimension to these discussions. Through revisiting my own fieldwork, I have suggested that PAR and critical ethnography can be combined in productive synthesis. Further, I have suggested that the synthesis of these approaches offers a framework through which we can fruitfully engage in what Ive called critique plus the combined commitment to anthropology as cultural critique, and to engaging in collaborative projects for social change. Like ethnography, PAR is committed to local knowledge. It involves different stakeholders in a group research process, yielding rich ethnographic knowledge about lives and sensemaking processes. It is deeply aware of power, designed to uncover the structural causes of problems through collective discussion and interaction. It is reflexive, insofar as it forces one to confront the self that observes. Despite this, it has been relatively seldom engaged by anthropologists. Through tracing the phases of my own fieldwork, I have shown how the two approaches were interwoven in my research. Participant observation allowed PAR to happen. 10 months of participant observation was a necessary precondition for the collaboration to take place; it was the basis of my familiarity with the group and facilitated my understanding of their own problems, needs and interests.
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It enabled intimacy and trust to build between us. Our collaborative research was dialogically negotiated. Rather than a static method that I brought in, it emerged organically, in interaction with members of the group. Indeed, the eventual shift as Ive described was summoned forth by Valentina and members of Zhenskii Svet. PAR as a rubric, or a philosophy, enabled me to take this next step. Participant observation typically stops there; ethnographers come to their own private solutions that may or may not involve action. Indeed, anthropologists frequently advocate for their friends/informants and this activity may make up the bulk of research time. However, this dimension of ethnographic work often remains on the periphery of anthropological texts; commentary is often relegated to footnotes. PAR allowed this involvement to take center stage. What I call PAR and what my friends call our seminars enabled us to undertake a mutual learning process, a project of samoobrazovanie (self education) as Valentina and Oktiabrina describe it. It has proved to be transformative for all of us. Together, we traveled (united briefly in this temporary, contingent alliance) from a critical stance as outsiders, to enter into the partnerships and collaborations with international agencies that the Zhenskii Svet women had held back from. We made the decision to work in this contradictory environment in the pursuit of collectivist goals and projects and in an attempt to make gender matter. How do we evaluate its outcomes? As Charles Hale notes, activist research has dual loyaltiesto academia and to the political struggles with which it is affiliated (2006:100). As far as the Zhenskii Svet women were concerned, ours is a story of subtle and ambivalent gains As I detail elsewhere, the decision to formalize their activities and work with donor agencies led to some major, often uncomfortable, reconfigurations for the Zhenskii Svet women, and the transition to professionalized NGO work was neither smooth nor unambiguous (2007). Finally, as I have explained, the crisis center was forced to shut down, subject to the shifting winds of donor state priorities and to local politics, also. But while it existed, the crisis center flourished and was the source of great pride and inspiration. I am denied the complacency of closure that predominates in social science analysis (Mertz 2002:362), since this is an ongoing story that has no end; at the time of going to press, Valentina, Oktiabrina, other Zhenskii Svet participants, and I continue to devise projects across different fields.26 As far as social science is concerned, this participatory ethnography, or ethnographic PAR yielded rich ethnographic knowledge, aha effects that have greatly influenced the way I write about international aid. Via our collaborative project, I learned about how people do activism, the problems they face, the differences between the civil society imagined by international foundations, and what actually materialized in Russia. Through my involvement in Oktiabrinas sustained attempts to establish the crisis center, I learned a great deal about the continued importance of social networks and systems patronage in Russia. Ultimately, engaging in this
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project has caused me to change my view of international aid. I came to see it as a zone of contestation; I thus write with and against the current vogue to critique NGOs. My relationship with group members acts as a check at each moment of representation; it has made me more aware than ever of the strategic and contingent nature of knowledge and our choices as we figure out what to foreground. Let me be clear; I do not grant PAR uncritical endorsement; I depart from those who would advocate PAR as a one-size-fits-all solution. In the power-laden field within which research takes place, no methodology is perfect. PAR, like any method or conceptsuch as gender or social capitalis prone to cooptation (Jordan 2003), and can easily be deployed to other ends (Cruikshank 1999; Hyatt 1997); perhaps, because of the bold claims it makes, PAR is perhaps particularly vulnerable to these forms of cooptation. One of my arguments has been that in these times, PAR desperately needs the insights of critical ethnography. Critical anthropology insists that we keep both local and global in view. This means comprehending the local and conducting our place-based investigations whilst always being concerned with the broader political geography (Gal and Kligman 2000:4), the relations of power within which places, people, and practices are situated. At a time when womens rights are asserted as a justification for military interventions (as they were in Afghanistan and Iraq), it is all the more important to hold onto these insights and keep up the project of cultural critiqueproblematizing and questioning this knowledge, these categories, and their deployment. Critical ethnographys commitment to local knowledge, to lived-out ness, the nitty gritty, and its insistence that we keep political economy within our sights, is valuable to participatory projects, particularly in these unmoored times of mainstreaming. Neither do I wish to suggest that PAR is suitable for all research contexts. It may be particularly well suited to activist research, where researchers work closely with an already formed organization, group, or social movement (Hales 2006; Lyon-Callo and Hyatt 2003). Indeed, it may be that our social movement-based informants already embrace participatory methodologies and approaches in their organizing strategies (Paley 2001). It is less easy to imagine that this methodology could work in contexts where researcher and community members do not share certain core values, or where power differentials are greater.27 In sum, I offer this discussion to those, who like me, value the importance and formulation of cultural critique, but who feel that alone it is insufficient. I felt strongly that my fieldwork demanded more of me. The critique of international aid is important, yet alone it does injustice to those who work in NGOs, many of whom are aware of the contradictions I have described yet cannot afford the luxury of disengagement.
Notes
1 With Lassiter, I have chosen to place feminist and postmodernist approaches within the same critical paradigm. While plenty of ink has

been spilled on the points of divergence between feminist and postmodernist approaches, my sense too is that these boundaries are increasingly hard to maintain. As Lassiter puts it, feminist ethnographys central focus on voice, power and representation is now, perhaps more than ever, converging with the same central focus of ethnography in postmodernist anthropology (Lassiter 2005a:51).
2 There have been a few notable exceptions. Anthropologist Davydd Greenwood has long engaged PAR in his own practice, and founded the interdisciplinary network PARNET at Cornell. 3 I understand public anthropology to be primarily a project of the academy. That is to say, it is the project of those who are primarily employed within universities, but who seek to affect greater community engagement in their research and teaching lives. 4 In a recent article, Louise Lamphere refers to some of these trends and argues that the discipline is moving towards a convergence between cultural and applied anthropology (2004). As the Hackenbergs have noted, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the new agents of the new order, may soon be the largest employer of anthropologists (Hackenberg and Hackenberg 2004). 5 My project has much in common with the ethnography from below these authors propose. 6 As many scholars have reminded us, the split between applied and academic anthropology is an artifact of the Cold War (Sanday 2003; Stocking, 2000). 7 I should add that there is no consensus around this, as evidenced by resistance expressed both by those who have long engaged in applied work (Singer 2000) and by those who cannot countenance the idea of anthropology becoming socially engaged. In a recent article in Anthropology News, Daniel Goss and Stuart Plattner (2006) argue that this would represent a slippery slope into social work. 8 The Yanomami controversy was stimulated by the publication of journalist Patrick Tierneys Darkness in El Dorado, which accused well-known anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of complicity in serious human rights abuses involving the Yanomami Indians. For a detailed discussion of the issue and its fallout within the discipline, see Borofsky (2005). 9 Charles Hale makes a similar argument in his recent article (2006). In this piece he addresses the question of social engagement in anthropological research, calling for greater dialogue between cultural critique and activist research. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this piece. 10 It would be problematic to try to speak of PAR as a unified object in the same way one can address anthropology. PAR is not a field, or a discipline, and it has no unifying professional association. Rather, it is an approachwhether construed as method, or as philosophythat unites individuals across academic departments (Greenwood and Levin 1998). Further, the PAR community is wide and differentiated; those who do it, dont always agree with or recognize each other; the PAR community is characterized by big splits and fissures along ideological lines. 11 PAR breaks the binary of researcher and researched by involving community members in research design. A typical PAR project invites and involves different stakeholders in a group research process, during which questions will first be discussed and collectively agreed upon. It is designed to be an educational process for both researcher and participants, who analyze the structural causes of problems that they identify through collective discussion and interaction (Greenwood and Levin 1998).

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12 For example, Barbara Cruikshank (1999) and Vincent Lyon-Callo and Susan Brin Hyatt (2003) have traced the ways the rhetoric of empowerment is deployed in such a way as to legitimate the retrenchment of social services, placing a greater burden on the poor. 13 The question of the extent to which individuals working within such structures have agency, or can make a difference has been explored in the burgeoning literature on democracy assistance. Some analysts, adopting a Foucauldian approach, have shown how development projects in postsocialist states as well as in the so-called developing world, are constrained by the logic of governmentality. This logic deflects attention from structural issues (poverty, the role of the state), to emphasize technical issues (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1990; Rivkin-Fish 2005). Here, individuals working within these systems have little possibility to reshape them. 14 For extended anthropological discussions of the democratization project, see ( Hann and Dunn 1996; Hemment 2004; Sampson 1996; Wedel 1998). 15 Though commonly, especially retrospectively, read as a desire to join the capitalist west, this civil society was an imagined third way between communism and capitalism. As David Ost describes it, these East European advocates saw civil society as a sphere of expansive civic participation, a permanently open democracy, in which civic activity is based neither in the state nor in the marketplace, but in a vibrant political public sphere itself (Ost 1990:30-31). 16 Within these projects, international foundations defined womens issues in narrow and selective ways. For example, while there has been ample funding for projects that focus on computer networking, information technology and self-help oriented support groups, few grants support activists to combat the structural forms of dislocation women may be experiencing. To the consternation of many Russian women activists, this excludes things such as free day care and maternity leave rights, entitlements they came to take for granted under state socialism (Gapova 2004). 17 For detailed discussions of state socialist gender arrangements and the resulting resistance to western feminism, see Funk and Mueller (1993) and Gal and Kligman (2000).

use to achieve democratic change within organizations (Greenwood et al. 1992). Anthropologist Julia Paley learned Freirian inspired techniques of popular education from her colleagues in the shantytown-based Chilean womens health group Llareta. This group has used critical education as a tool to empower participants and to challenge systems of oppression. At their prompting, Paley learns these techniques to run a history workshop (Paley 2001). Patricia Maguire is an early pioneer of this feminist appropriation, retooling PAR methodologies as feminist PAR in her work with former battered women and in subsequent community-based work in Gallup, New Mexico (1987). J. K. Gibson-Graham (1994) synthesized what they call a feminist poststructuralist participatory action research, in their work amongst Australian mine workers wives, and in their work on community economics (Gibson-Graham 2006).
22 Our original goalto found a womens centermorphed into two main projects, or directions as the women called them: the crisis center, led by Oktiabrina, and a Center for Womens History and Gender Studies, led by Valentina, which built on the educational work of Zhenskii Svet. Both projects involved making outside alliances, taking steps toward some kind of formalization and seeking support from both international foundations and the local administration. For a more detailed discussion, see Hemment 2007. 23 Crisis center had entered the lexicon of government officials and social services personnel and was on the books as a service local authorities were mandated to provide. Ultimately, we won the support of two key political figures in the citythe mayor (who was preparing for reelection) and the presidents representative to the oblast (a woman journalist with an insecure political base who had begun to dabble in the womens movement in order to generate support for herself in the city). They were only too happy to make the acquaintance of a community group willing to undertake such an endeavor. 24 The book was edited by Russian scholars and crisis center activists Tatiana Zabelina and Yevgenia Israelyan, and put together by the Youth Institutes Center for Women, Family, and Gender Studies. The Canadian Embassy funded its publication. According to one of its authors, 5000 copies were distributed to nascent crisis centers and womens NGOs (Zabelina 1996). 25 The most immediate reason for the closure was the loss of mayoral support. The mayor who supported the project died in 2003; his successor was far less persuaded of the importance of societal groups. This mirrors trends throughout the Russian federation, since the Putin administration has begun to cast suspicion on NGOs, particularly those receiving foreign funding. The project was also affected by cuts in international funding. The issue of gendered violence was a central policy issue for international donor agencies through the 1990s; by 2001, support for this issue had been substantially cut back. The Center for Womens History and Gender Studies fared much better and is still operating at the time of going to press. For more discussion of the differential histories of these two projects, see Hemment (2007). 26 Since 2004, I have been working with my Russian colleagues in a new project that investigates the promotion of youth voluntarism in Russia. 27 There are other obstacles, too. Embracing participatory methodologies at the doctoral level is challenging; funding agencies require precision and privilege certainty over open-endedness. I should come clean and explain that the initial phase of my research was not funded. It is not altogether clear how to interpret this, as there were other factors that came into play (my citizenship status, for example). The other side of the coin is that once fieldwork was completed, my fortunes changed. It was suggested to me that this path was professionally risky beyond the dissertation; the opposite has proven to be true. I was hired at UMass due to my interest in activist anthropology and because of my engagement with PAR.

Anthropologists were swift to intervene in discussions about democratization and transition. They have posed critical questions about these processes and interrogated both the assumptions that drove them, and the often-unintended effects of their implementation (Borneman 1998; Gal and Kligman 2000; Sampson 1996; Verdery 1996; Wedel 1998). Many of us chose to focus on NGOs, the creatures that had been brought into being by international agenciesin what Steven Sampson later dubbed NGO-graphy, or a critical anthropology of NGOs and civil society.
18 19 I dont mean to discount methods training and the large literature on qualitative methodology. However, despite this, methods training within programs of cultural anthropology is notoriously sketchy. Here the divide Ive referred to is most apparent. While applied programs teach method, academic ones tend to rely upon the immersion technique, by which I mean they provide only limited methodological preparation and expect students to learn as they go. While this may not be true of all graduate programs, certainly it was true of my own and I have met the same lament from many peers and colleagues. 20 Some wrote of collaboration(Clifford 1988; Mascia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen 1989), others of conversation (Haraway 1991), speaking with (Alcoff 1994), and coalition (Grewal and Kaplan 1994). 21 Anthropologist Davydd Greenwoods action research in the industrial labor-managed cooperatives of Mondragon is an example of PARs

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