Boundary objects and collaboration in a planetary health project in Boruca Indigenous Territory, Costa Rica

Developed in science and technology studies, the boundary objects concept is a tool to "analyze the nature of cooperative work in the absence of consensus" (Star, 2010, 604).It does not describe a particular type of entity but rather can be applied to any entity.The boundary objects concept is part of a theory about the role of particular entities in managing relationships among groups in collaborative work.Specifically, it theorizes how an entity's semiotic indeterminacy allows it to reside simultaneously in multiple social worlds while also being shared as a common resource across collaborating groups of those distinct social worlds.For instance, a study of the creation of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley reveals that specimens, fieldnotes, and maps became boundary objects for collaboration among scientists, collectors, trappers, and university administrators (Star & Griesemer, 1989).Boundary objects facilitate communication across groups and can support the convergence of some goals while allowing for the coexistence of other distinct goals in particular groups.In this piece, after exploring the boundary objects concept in terms of the semiotic processes through which collaborative ethnographic research is conducted, we turn to a specific example in which a particular boundary object-a photograph of a local lagoon that had become a "dead zone" inhospitable to most plants and animals-became a way to start a dialogue and learn more about dissenting views about deforestation, pesticides, national politics, and transnational NGOs.In this piece, we suggest that a theoretically informed conceptualization of boundary objects is particularly useful for the study of planetary health, a topic that is inherently multisited, multilateral, transdisciplinary, and collaborative.The word collaboration is often used to point toward ethical and engaged research in anthropology, global health, and numerous other fields.Collaboration is a complex communicative process that involves the partial/interactive alignment of goals, objectives, and audiences-ideally while being attentive to the significance of socioeconomic inequities and power dynamics that shape and are shaped by culturally specific conceptualizations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, and nationality.This process unfolds among researchers, community leaders, (sometimes) community activists, and research participants over an extended period of time (Avineri & Perley, 2019;Marcelin et al., 2021;Okwaro & Geissler, 2015;Rosenberg et al., 2010).Drawing upon our collaborative transdisciplinary project on cultural sustainability, ecotourism, and planetary health in Boruca Indigenous Territory, Costa Rica, here we discuss the semiotics of boundary objects as an additional key idea for theorization of collaboration (Star & Griesemer, 1989; see also Briggs, 2021, 70).While we expect this project to generate scholarly products that will be useful for furthering work in planetary health, we also hope that the research process itself will benefit the community with whom we are working and, in so doing, will contribute to the health of people and ecosystems.Here, we focus on this research process, examining how the multimodality of audio-video recordings in a boundary object collection provides common ground for project stakeholders, including research team members, research participants, community leaders, and community members, who are orienting around shared boundary objects.We also discuss how the multimodal collection has revealed