The Paradox of Collaboration in Anthropology

There's this weird paradox, wherein in doing multidisciplinary work, you're actually in some ways more isolated, even though you're working with collaborators. So I did my field work at Washington University in St. Louis in a microbiome lab there. All the junior scientists in the lab had no idea what I was doing there. They thought I was going to be like hiding behind tanks, like taking secret notes about them or something. And so many times when I speak to scientific audiences, people will just ask me, can you just turn this into some kind of quantitative data?