There has been increasing disciplinarian insecurity as a result of the fragmenty divides of a hyper-turn to interpretive intellectual communities. As a counter-measure, inter-disciplinarian collaboration has become a 'must' - to deal with this process of academic insularization on the depertmental/discipline level (and, for 'survival' of research, to secure eager funding). Yet the inherited equation for 'collaboration' has practically resulted in further specializations within subject areas, tenuously teathered to mutual specialists in 'collaborating' disciplines. Akin to fish staring out at eachother through the distorting and invisibly well-, and increasingly multiplying, bounded glass bowls, embedded collaboration, I argue, is anathema to the good intention of slowing fragmentation. Instead, the proposal of re-formating such interest (and need) in an non-embedded collaboration. Such a model would insist on the greater investment of participants in areas of research and literature normally outside of their 'specialized' niches. The original banner of collaboration, such an activity would lead specialists out of their 'bowls' to invest themselves in ideas and work of other disciplines; as opposed to remaining within the exposure-level of their disciplines while bringing-on specialists of other disciplines to participate in projects. Simply put, a call for generalist specialists who may, for example, inflect a study of the procedures for thermoluminesence dating of SW U.S. 'sacaton ware' (arch. methodology) with a theoretical discussion of the tendency towards 'Cultural-Historical classification' approaches in the SW and how this may artificially drive development of such methods (history of discipline/history of science and technology). 'Collaborators' would then already be contained within distinct departments, and the resultant potential for more deep-delving interaction amongst disciplines would be greatly enhanced. Non-embedded collaborators would not be betroth to solely arcane or circumscribed research and ideas for professional standing, but might more easily integrate operations of other fields of practice into their 'niche'. Of course, pedagogy and institutional standards/accreditation would have to be modified; yet, these are the self-same sources insisting upon 'collaborate or perish!'

Such an approach has been come from some Philosophy/History of Science and Science Studies who counterpoise Multi-disciplinary approaches and Interdisciplinary attempts at research (see Selinger 2003:164-5). The difference mantained is: multi-disciplinary describes the amalgam of researchers from different fields working tandemly upon a similar problem; but each researcher operates within their specific framework of identifying problems, drawing upon specialized literature, and identifying evidence and solutions. These are amalgamated into an overall research directive which can be described as fragmented and still operates distinclty from other collaborators from disparate fields. Interdisciplinary tactics attempt to more fully integrate collaboration by infiltrating each specialized field which is brought to bear on a collective problem by incorporating literature, research design and goals, etc. from the associated relevant fields. Such a strategy in research approximates a non-embedded collaboration by forcing specialized researchers to multi-task and be more critical of their inherited frameworks by engaging with the results and arguments of other disciplines. On the extreme, a model of anti-disciplinary synthesis (Pickering 1995:216) has been (idealistically) advanced to obtain a unified vision of science.

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