Participant Advocacy and Research with Prostitutes in Costa Rica Available to Purchase

In 1992-3, I conducted research with 53 street prostitutes in San José Costa Rica. The goal of this research, as I describe below, was to determine how these women use biomedical concepts of contagion to explain the healthrelated conditions that posed the greatest threat to their daily lives. Although I always intended the results of this study to be relevant to the participants, I never expected that these women would embrace the research as fervently as they did. What resulted was a research project that was very much participant-driven and advocacy-based. Much of the advocacy associated with anthropological fieldwork is reasonably formal, well-planned, and focused. However, in doing research with a community that is highly stigmatized and located on the legal margins of society (where many activities are illegal), research-related advocacy tends to be more informal and spontaneous. In this article, I outline the tenets of the project and reflect on the kind of advocacy that was forged through the participants' efforts. The focus here is not so much the research results per se (as those have been published elsewhere), but rather it is the research process and the collaboration with participants. The issues raised throughout this discussion will not be new to applied anthropologists but they will hopefully contribute to our understandings of ongoing debates about anthropological advocacy, collaboration, and authority.