Doing Collaboration Otherwise

The 2014–2016 West African Ebola outbreak brought together new constellations of people, ways of knowing, and evidence-making practices that did not otherwise often interact. As the crisis unfolded, anthropologists, clinicians, civil society activists, and healers had to find ways to collaborate, navigating difference and contestations over the authority of evidence. In the aftermath of Ebola, this generated novel experiments in integrating different ways of knowing during emergencies. This field offers a window into contemporary questions in anthropology and beyond—for how we understand, represent, and engage with epistemological and ontological divergence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sierra Leone and in global policy and practice forums, this article offers an empirical account of integrative experiments, tracing discourses, everyday encounters, and imaginations. Through two examples—anthropologists’ struggles to integrate ethnographic evidence in epidemic response and healers’ fraught role in crisis landscapes—I illustrate how integration has remained primarily absorptive, assimilating “other” knowledge into dominant biomedical paradigms. At the same time, taking seriously existing aspirations for working together and confronting the political economy of knowledge that underpins integration also reveals immanent potentialities for doing collaboration otherwise.