Ethics Chapter

LEDERMAN CHAPTER HANDBOOK 36 JANUARY 2012 LAST EDIT ACCEPT ALL FOR MECARRIER, GEWERTZ EDS, BERG) 1

RENA LEDERMAN

ETHICS: PRACTICES, PRINCIPLES, AND

COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES

INTRODUCTION: DISCIPLINE MATTERS

In June, 2008, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

began a program to support the development of courses addressing

“Enduring Questions” (e.g. “What is evil?”). According to the competition

description, “enduring questions”

are questions to which no discipline or field or profession can

lay an exclusive claim. In many cases they predate the

formation of the academic disciplines themselves. Enduring

questions can be tackled by reflective individuals regardless of

their chosen vocations, areas of expertise, or personal

backgrounds. (NEH 2009)

The following year’s competition announcement was met by frustrated, not

to say infuriated, commentary by philosophers on PEA Soup (a philosophy,

ethics, and academia blog). Commentators construed questions like these to

be “philosophical”, not in a contingent historical sense but essentially so,

and therefore treated the competition as evidence of the NEH’s profound

ignorance of their discipline.

Against the “predisciplinary” tag, Ben Bradley argued that the

philosophical field of

ethics has been devoted to answering these questions for

centuries. I think this gives us, if not an “exclusive claim”

(whatever they mean by this), at least some reason to think

that we have special expertise in teaching courses on these

subjects. (This and the following commentaries are in Bradley

2009.)

Agreeing that the program description reflected a popular misconception,

another asked, “After all, how can ethics be a serious academic discipline if


no special skill is required to do it well?” A third commentator observed:

One might, for instance, study how ethical attitudes were

expressed through fiction in a Literature course .... And so on.

However, to ask these enduring questions directly and attempt

to answer them oneself is to begin to do philosophy, and

expertise in philosophy is required to effectively teach a

course directly addressing an enduring question.

Boundary worries are common among professional disciplinary

communities. These philosophers’ identification with “enduring questions”

should remind anthropological readers of their own field’s anxiety over

English professors playing fast and loose with “culture” or market

researchers, say, playing faster and looser with “ethnography”. Worries of

this sort can be overplayed: disciplinary borders, like cultural ones, are

normal sites of cultural, social, and material exchanges; scholarly creativity

often takes the form of inadvertent trespassing, playful exploration, or

strategic cross‐border raids, alliances, and migrations; and disciplinary

regeneration relies on the transformative effects of these maneuvers. And of

course intellectual work takes place all the time in (academically)

undisciplined spaces (see Mills infra).

While the philosophy–anthropology border is not as trafficked as

some others, it is hardly a wasteland. With respect specifically to ethical

questions, philosophers have been provoked by anthropological work (e.g.

Hacking 1998); philosophers and anthropologists have collaborated (e.g.

Edel and Edel 1968); and several generations of anthropologists have

adopted, adapted, and engaged with a variety philosophical traditions (e.g.

Read 1955; Geertz 1968; Rappaport 1999; Faubion 2001, 2011; Laidlaw 2002;

Lambek 2010b). Nevertheless, the acknowledgment of disciplinary

distinctions can also be a critical move, a point to which this chapter will

return in its final sections; and for sociocultural anthropology particularly,

attentiveness to boundaries is itself part of the disciplinary project. In that

way, this chapter’s approach is anthropological and without philosophical

designs (and see especially Lambek 2010a: p. 7ff).


ETHICS IN PRACTICE

Among anthropologists, “ethics” tends to refer to sociable practices

and culturally‐legible frames for assessing and indexing the “goodness” or

“rightness” of human conduct: that is, it refers to the quality of human selves

vis‐à‐vis other persons (see Keane 2010; Rumsey 2010; compare, e.g.,

Silverstein 1976; Foucault 1984). Anthropological ethics‐talk tends to situate

ethics and politics in an internal relation (e.g. Ackeroyd 1984; Armbruster

and Laerke 2008; Price 2009a): that is, an ethics, in the sense of moral

evaluations worth arguing about, implies a politics, in the sense of

alignments giving those arguments socio‐material form and impact.1

Michael Lambek (2010a, 2010c: 61) construes ethics as “a property of

speech and action” rather than “a discrete object” (and see Rumsey 2010,

who demonstrates that point and maps its bio‐psychological dimensions).

From this perspective, the ethical is woven into the human insofar as human

being is irreducibly sociable and ethical assessments index the relations in

terms of which persons act.

Because social relationality is both the medium and object of their

research, anthropologists have found morality/ethics a challenging topic to

delimit. Durkheim’s influence has been blamed for this difficulty (Laidlaw

2002; Zigon 2008), although there are other ways of reading his work and

Lambek (above) points to a more profound and interesting obstacle blocking

projects of delimitation.

In any case, this chapter’s references to the social and the moral

ordering of relations are not meant narrowly to connote obligation or

collective forms: they are not meant to foreclose creativity, ambiguity,

inconsistency, and the open indeterminacy of human experience and its

ethical challenges (see Lambek 2010a: 9–13). Nevertheless, ethical judgment

and choice – the spaces of personal “freedom” (e.g. Laidlaw 2001; and see

Faubion 2001 re: Foucault) – become significant both for selves and others

1 This chapter follows the common anthropological practice of using “ethical” and “moral” more or less interchangeably (e.g. Edel and Edel 1968; Lambek 2010a: 8–9). Faubion (e.g. 2011: 20–4) has proposed freshly sharpened distinctions in response to the inconsistencies built up in cross‐disciplinary writing on ethics/morality (but compare, e.g., Howell 1997 or Zigon 2008, who reaffirm one or another familiar mode of distinguishing ethics from morality).


insofar as they come to be situated in, and have implications for, socio‐

historical contexts that oftentimes re‐position intentional values (see Sahlins

1981; Fernandez and Huber 2001).

ETHICAL PROMISES AND PREDICAMENTS OF FIELDWORK

For over a century, cultural translation has been at the heart of social

anthropology’s project, both intellectually and ethically (e.g. Beidelman

1971; Boon 1982, 1999: Chap. 4; Asad 1986; Fox 2000). Its foundational

condition of possibility has been fieldwork‐‐the immersive social

engagement and disciplined, close listening to vernacular “native points of

view”‐‐ in unfamiliar social fields. Anthropological fieldwork has informed

and been informed by a distinctive comparativist sensibility, attentive to

contextualized practices and beliefs and, over its history, progressively

skeptical of the universalizing, naturalizing, and normalizing of Western

folk categories and practices (e.g. Sahlins 1972, 2000, 2004; Strathern 1990;

Lederman 2005). Its intended effect “was to ‘displace’ or remove readers

from their home cultural beliefs” enabling them to develop “a critical

consciousness of [their] own culture from the account of another” (Fox 2000:

4–5).

“Cultural relativism”, commonly associated with Boasian cultural

anthropology, is similarly characterized (e.g. M. Wax 1987; Kelly 2008; see

Boas 1896; Boon 1982, 1998; Vann infra). Insofar as anthropologists have

typically studied non‐Western cultures and construed their students and

readers to be Euro‐Americans, cultural relativism offered a critical challenge

specifically to Western values and beliefs (e.g. Engle 2002). Unfortunately,

Boasian relativism has also been caricatured, by anthropologists and others,

as a global injunction against researchers having their own values and even

a prescription for embracing those of their hosts. Contradictorily, relativism

is also caricatured as an assertion of the insularity, ineffability, and

untranslatability of unfamiliar world views (for one ambivalent example, see

Hatch 1981; compare Geertz 1984). But anthropologists do not “go native” to

do credible work; and if they are “native”, their disciplinary sensibility

makes them something else again.

Either way, immersive involvement in with some others’ ways of


being in the world has, over the past century, enabled social and cultural

anthropologists to raise novel questions not only about Western folk

understandings but also about the categorical foundations of academic

philosophy and social theory. Concepts of personhood, community, and the

sacred, intentionality, responsibility, and reciprocity, shame, guilt, and

justice, and other elements of Euro‐American ethical and moral discourse

are unpacked and decomposed during long‐term fieldwork, then

recontextualized in ethnographic depictions, and examined comparatively

for what is lost and gained in translation. This work is explicit both in

classical ethnographic arguments and their renovations (e.g., concerning

witchcraft, sorcery, and gossip, or concerning forms of exchange and

implications for social personhood, see Mauss [1925] 1990; Evans‐Pritchard

1976; Lindenbaum 1979; Parry and Bloch 1989; Stewart and Strathern 2004;

Pietilä 2007) and in more recent literatures (on, e.g., the cultural politics of

new medical technologies and imaginaries, see Sharpe 2006 and see below).

Ironically, the conditions enabling the ethical promise of critical

comparativism also present an ethical predicament. G.N. Appell, whose 1978

ethics case‐book is worth (re)reading both for evidence of historical shifts in

the discipline’s assumptions and of continuities among the dilemmas that

anthropologists have faced, put the point this way:

By its very nature, cross‐cultural inquiry takes place at an

interface of ethical systems. As a result, the anthropologist is

frequently forced to make a choice or select a plan of action in

an environment of conflict between different customs,

principles, and values that normally shape action [within

which] no obvious or immediate solution may exist.

Furthermore, the investigator usually has to make a decision

without adequate information or sufficient time ....

Complicating the problem ... is the fact that the

anthropologist occupies multiple roles [all of which] include

moral expectations which can conflict and may be

unreconcilable. As a result, an anthropologist characteristically

must be able to tolerate a certain degree of moral ambiguity. In


fact the best field workers may well be those who can

acknowledge and live with these moral ambiguities. (Appell

1978: 3)

Ethical practice in anthropological fieldwork, thus, balances

deliberately at the point of conjuncture between inevitably‐multiple and

potentially‐dissonant reference frames: including the anthropologist’s

disciplined stance, his or her culturally‐informed personal values and

commitments, and a welter of partially‐understood values, aims, and

commitments informing the actions of everyone (hosts, sponsors,

gatekeepers, ordinary people, etc.) with whom the anthropologist is socially

entangled within his or her scenes of research. The case studies Appell

assembled over thirty years ago, together with others published before (e.g.

Rynkiewich and Spradley 1976) and since (e.g. Cassell and Jacobs 1987;

Caplan 2003; Meskell and Pels 2005) illustrate and reflect on the moral

predicaments of anthropological fieldwork as instances of the more general

negotiation of cross‐cultural encounter, translation, and understanding.

ETHICS EVERYWHERE

In recent years, paralleling a wider “ethical turn” across the

humanities and social studies (e.g. Garber et al. 2000; Davis and Womack

2001), attempts have been made to delimit an “anthropology of” ethics or

morality as a focus for ethnographic description and analysis (e.g. Howell

1997; Faubion 2001; Laidlaw 2002; Fassin 2008; Zigon 2008). These projects

agree about the value of bringing ethnographic accounts of ethical judgment

into the foreground in order to sharpen anthropological contributions (see

particularly Laidlaw 2002). To this end, they have sought intellectual

resources from outside anthropology, especially in philosophy and social

theory (notably Aristotle, Kant, Foucault, Heidegger, Alisdair MacIntyre,

and Bernard Williams).

Over the past couple of generations, anthropologists have renovated

their discipline on several fronts by turning the contexts and means of

disciplinary practice into its substantive contents. Recent advocacy for an

“anthropology of” morality/ethics recalls earlier advocacy for an

“anthropology of” colonialism or gender, for example, each of which


asserted that foregrounding new ethnographic objects was necessary to

advance understanding, however much we had been studying these things

all along as dimensions of kinship, politics, and other already‐marked

topical domains.

These arguments are compelling but are not universally joined by

those who promote more focused, explicit, and philosophically‐informed

anthropological attention to the ethical/moral. Notably, several contributors

to Lambek (2010b) argue persuasively on philosophical and broadly‐

disciplinary (that is, evolutionary/developmental, linguistic, and socio‐

cultural) grounds that the ethical is so thoroughly implicated in the sociable

nature of human being as to resist delimitation as an ethnographic object in

its own right. Oddly, the emergent “anthropology of” ethics/morality is

limited in another way. While proponents have asserted the importance of

representing anthropological observers as ethical actors in their scenes of

research (e.g. Fassin 2008), this literature tends not to engage explicitly with

anthropological writings on the “ethics of” anthropology.

If instead we treat research ethics not as an externality but as an

ethnographically substantive dimension of anthropological reflexivity, there

is no question that reflections on ethical practice have long constituted both

a focused literature and a much wider field of ethnographic description and

debate. A survey of this wider discourse is in order; after which, this chapter

will consider how an “anthropology of” ethics might treat research practice

as a properly ethnographic object, as a basis for forging linkages among

these literatures.

ETHICS IN TRANSFORMATION

During the 1960s and 1970s, when articles, monographs, and case

books explicitly devoted to anthropological ethics, like Appell’s, began to

appear, ethical issues – like choices concerning self‐representations (e.g.

class or sexual identities) in light of their implications for the power

dimensions of research relationships – were also evident throughout a new

and expanding corpus of first‐person narratives with diverse thematic and

analytical emphases (e.g. Golde [1970] 1986; Spindler 1970; R. Wax 1971;

Rabinow 1977; Kulick and Wilson 1995; Lewin and Leap 1996; Armbruster


and Laerke 2008).

They have also been present, over the past three decades, in

politically‐charged critical reflection on anthropology’s lineages and present

configurations written in light of the multifarious effects of post‐World War

II decolonization, including the US Civil Rights movement, opposition in

Europe and the US to the war in Southeast Asia, activist and academic

feminisms, and widespread concern with global inequalities evident amidst

resurgent globalization (e.g. Hymes 1972; Asad 1973; Rosaldo and Lamphere

1974; Reiter 1975; Fabian 1983; Marcus and Fischer 1986; Fox 1991; Harrison

1991, 2008; Sahlins 1992, 2000; Carrier 1995; Baker 1997; Cooper and Stoler

1997; Amit 2000; Moore 2000). Ethical motives have been prominent as well

in critical commentary on the discipline’s forms of representation (e.g.

Clifford and Marcus 1986; Behar and Gordon 1996) and other dimensions of

professional practice, including pedagogy and mentoring (e.g. Cerwonka

and Malkki 2007; Faubion and Marcus 2009).

Pat Caplan (2003: 5, following Appell 1978 and, after a fashion,

anticipating Zigon 2008 re: “moral breakdown”) offered one way of making

sense of the pervasiveness of ethics‐talk:

it is precisely at the moment when the boundaries of a

discipline are redefined that ethical discourse increases .... In

other words, debates around the topic of ethics are part of the

way in which anthropologists seek to constitute themselves as

a moral community.

These varied writings cohere as a sustained moral argument over the form

and content of sociocultural anthropology in a post‐colonial era

characterized by global interconnections, conflicts, and inequalities. Calls for

making “practical ethical engagement” a priority and for “embedding

ethics” in methodological reflection and practice (Meskell and Pels 2005: 1,

21–25) are being answered in multiple quarters; and worries that

anthropologists do not actively read, discuss, or use ethical resources

(Fluehr‐Lobban 2009) can surely be laid to rest.

A number of themes recur throughout this teeming landscape. They

directly reference (a) the changing circumstances for enacting ethical


fieldwork in a decolonized Third World and for revaluing fieldwork in

metropolitan centers, (b) a pervasive interest in inequality, oppression, and

contestation within and affecting the communities where anthropologists

work.

Thus, Laura Nader’s (1969) influential argument about “studying up”

inspired many to do fieldwork among elites. They matched studies of

colonized subjects with studies of colonials in Third World countries and

back in Europe; and they extended attention to a wider array of

metropolitan actors including, for example, doctors, scientists, and bankers.

Relatedly, they extended topics and venues for fieldwork in Europe and the

US and argued for its theoretical importance. Simultaneously, they brought

fieldwork in archetypal out‐of‐the‐way places, like Papua New Guinea and

Kalimantan, to bear on these trends (e.g. Lederman 1998).

Insofar as anthropology’s moral principles and most ethics writing

still presume the discipline’s classic subjects – marginalized people with

whom researchers hope to collaborate and make common cause (e.g. Lassiter

2005) or for whom they seek to advocate (e.g. Fluehr‐Lobban 2008) – they are

not a neat fit for anthropologists’ shifting orientations, including a sharper

focus on metropolitan actors and technical and political‐economic elites (see

especially Meskell and Pels 2005), on social fields encompassing mutual

antagonists among whom the fieldworker was never neutral (e.g. Martin

1995), and on social actors whom the anthropologist finds problematic or

offensive (Handler 1988; Holmes 2000; Harding 2001). Nevertheless, the

discipline’s methodological commitment to an ethics of intimacy is

surprisingly durable, in the sense that even a “militant” anthropology

entails disclosure of the researcher’s identity and interests in backstage

spaces (Scheper‐Hughes 2000, 2004).

These same changes have had implications for the concepts of

“culture” (especially in the US) and “society” (especially in the UK) that

long oriented anthropological work. In an earlier era, cultures and societies

were commonly represented as if bounded, internally homogeneous, and

timeless. In contrast, greater explicitness in contemporary writing about the

socially embedded character of ethnographic understanding – as a project of


“understanding relations by means of relations” (Strathern 2004) – more

readily suggests the open‐endedness, reflexivity, and indeterminacy of field

practice while construing cultures and societies as unbounded, internally

heterogeneous (not “shared”), and historically contingent.

For all these reasons, it has also become increasingly unpersuasive to

approach cultural translation, including its critical impact, as a movement

between interlocutors “in the field” and readers and audiences “at home”,

because the two are likely one and the same (Brettell 1996). Not only do

anthropologists work in already‐familiar settings among literate people, but

accelerated global movement and new communication media have enabled

our classic interlocutors, literate or not, to engage us when they choose,

rather than at our pleasure. The distinctions between “research work” and

“personal life”, always blurred during fieldwork, weakened further, forcing

us to become more conscious of “everyday ethics” (Silverman 2003) in

descriptions of field encounters (e.g. Ackeroyd 1984; Lederman 2006a;

McLean and Leibing 2007; see also Geertz 1968).

ETHICS IN PRINCIPLE

In contrast to accounts of quotidian ethical dilemmas, when public

controversies mobilize professional communities they are constrained to

move from messy, multi‐perspectival, and polarizing particulars to an

outcome of some sort: a critical analysis, definitive (even if mutually

inconsistent) summations, another revision of professional principles and

codes, an official (however contested) report, a policy statement. Especially

after World War II, professional bodies like the American Anthropological

Association (AAA) drafted position papers and ethics codes articulating

principles that members could use in explaining their work to their publics,

including funders, government regulators, and non‐academic employers.2

PUBLIC CONTROVERSY

Sociocultural anthropology’s best‐known writing on professional

ethics has focused on high‐profile cases and long arcs of crisis‐driven

2 As this chapter was being completed, the most recent overhaul of the AAA ethics code was entering a final phase of membership vetting.


controversy that engaged national and cross‐national anthropological

communities and professional associations (e.g. Fluehr‐Lobban 2003; Mills

2003; Nugent 2003). These burst into view publicly outside of professional

circles with consequential effects on public perceptions of the discipline (e.g.

Gledhill 2000) prompting formal policy statements (e.g. AAA 1947, 1999,

2007) and ethics codes (e.g. AAA 1971, 2009; Association of Social

Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth 2011; May 2005; and

generally Stoerger 2005).

These crises have notably concerned the involvement of

anthropologists in government‐ and military‐sponsored counter‐insurgency

research: Franz Boas’s 1919 public denunciation, in The Nation, of

“anthropologists as spies” and his professional community’s critical

response; revelations during the 1960s concerning the abortive Project

Camelot in Latin America (Horowitz 1967) and counter‐insurgency research

in Southeast Asia (Wakin 1992) that originally prompted the AAA to form an

ethics committee and adopt a principled stance in 1971. More recently, on‐

going investigations, publications, and organizing by sociocultural

anthropologists, within and outside of the AAA and the Association of Social

Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, responded to intensified

interest in social scientific and, particularly, cultural knowledge by the US

military and national security establishment after the attacks on New York

and Washington in 2001 (e.g. CEAUSSIC 2009; Price 2009b; Gledhill 2006;

Moos n.d.; see also Albro 2010). These present‐oriented involvements have

been complemented by retrospective investigations into the activities of

anthropologists during World War II and the Cold War (e.g. Price 2008).

Major controversies with ethical resonance and public impact were

also prompted by revelations about prominent disciplinary figures,

particularly concerning their variously compromised field relationships.

These include the posthumous publication of Bronislaw Malinowski’s

Trobriand Islands field diary (Malinowski 1967; M. Wax 1972), controversy

over the accuracy and social competence of Margaret Mead’s Samoan

research and of Derek Freeman’s critique (Freeman 1983; Shankman 2009),

and extended critical discussion of Napoleon Chagnon’s research with the


Yanomami (Nugent 2003; see Stoerger 2005 for links to a wider array of

controversies, and below).3

PROTECTING AND PROBLEMATIZING PROFESSION

There is an emphasis on “profession” in American ethics writing (e.g.

Fluehr‐Lobban 2003; see Meskell and Pels 2005: 1–26); British and European

perspectives on major disciplinary crises are more attentive to post‐colonial

anthropological responsibilities (e.g. Caplan 2003). All, however, consider

ethical entailments of the movement of many anthropologists out of the

academy to work for non‐governmental organizations, corporations, and

governments, where their research and products are governed by

conventions different from those of academia. The regulatory formalization

of professional ethics emphasized in Fluehr‐Lobban’s (2003) collection has

met with suspicion, not to say hostility (e.g. Caplan 2003), including

denunciations of ethics codes as screens protecting anthropologists rather

than the people they study (Nugent 2003; see also Pels 1999).

These incongruent stances may reflect the different climates of

academic work in the US and UK. Suspicions concerning the rationalizing

impacts of bureaucratic oversight make sense in the fraught financial

circumstance of British universities suffering the administrative surveillance

of “audit culture”. The imposition of only‐apparently neutral accounting

standards evaluating “excellence”, in the form of standards blind to

disciplinary variation and which have inhibited critical scholarship (e.g. Van

den Hoonaard 2011), bears down heavily on the notoriously if necessarily

slow pace of fieldwork (Strathern 2000; see also Marcus and Okely 2008).

In any case, Caplan (2003), Meskell and Pels (2005), and other recent

works reinforce the caution concerning “moral ambiguity” that Appell

articulated decades ago. Insofar as they represent the profession’s core

principles succinctly as rationalized abstractions, codes and formal policy

statements can be helpful to anthropologists in some of their

communications with non‐anthropologists, including college students (our

3 While Malinowski and Mead are disciplinary icons, Chagnon’s prominence derives from the reliance of introductory courses on publications and films associated with his research, which has come to represent anthropology to generations of students.


future publics), members of ethics review panels, journalists, and employers

in the public and private sectors. However, they are inadequate within the

discipline for preparing students for fieldwork. The AAA has explicitly

considered its accumulated ethics cases and its code as “educational”

devices, both before and especially after ending the adjudicatory functions

of its Committee on Ethics in the middle of the 1990s. But unlike case

materials, the necessarily abstract principles articulated in a code (e.g. “do

no harm”) sidestep all the key questions of practice. Anthropological ethics

must be taught and learned experientially in situations that simulate

fieldwork’s varied and unpredictable, therefore unroutinizable, conditions.4

For all their abstraction, disciplinary codes of ethics have also proved

inadequate as means for squaring the realities of research practice with

abstractly‐framed ethical strictures written into legal codes governing

research in the US and elsewhere. In the US since the 1970s, academic,

medical, and other institutions that accept federal government funding are

expected to comply with rules governing “human subject research” (see

Lederman 2006a and references therein). Compliance is overseen by local

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs: also referred to as “human subject

committees”, similar to research ethics boards or committees in Canada, the

UK, and the EU). IRBs are composed of researchers with biomedical,

behavioral, and social science expertise, and community members

representing research‐subject interests. While it had other motivations too,

over the past generation ethics‐talk in anthropology and neighboring fields

responded to the expansion of regulatory oversight. Notably, since the 1990s

regulatory language (e.g. “informed consent”) has been incorporated into

professional ethics codes.5

The regulations administered by IRBs enact philosophically‐

abstracted ethical universals – “justice”, “beneficence”, and “respect for

4 Indeed, this is true of practice in the professions more generally, For example, Gardner and Shulman (2005) argue that a key measure of “professional” competence is the capacity for ethical judgment amid uncertainty and doubt.

5 Because terms like “informed consent” can have divergent meanings in neighboring disciplines, apparent similarities among ethics codes using this language can be misleading: see Lederman (2009) for a comparison of sociocultural anthropology and experimental psychology, focusing on contrasting stances regarding the use of deception.


persons” – articulated in the Belmont Report (National Commission 1979),

which drew on international agreements like the Nuremberg Code

(Nuremberg 1949: 181–2) and the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical

Association 1964). IRB work is also guided by an ethic of fairness

operationalized around the bureaucratic value of “consistency”: one set of

rules for research in biomedicine, behavioral science, and social science.

The problem with all this is that research practice is not generic, and

neither are research ethics, however much their codified representations

appear the same in the abstract across the disciplines (Lederman 2007, 2009;

cf. Fluehr‐Lobban 2009). The difficulties anthropologists and other scholars

have had in translating accurate depictions of their research conduct into

regulatory language are notorious. These difficulties testify to the

consequentiality of differences among the research styles and ethical

infrastructures of disciplinary cultures. The challenge is to find ways of

locating this diversity comparatively in this ethico‐epistemological

landscape.

One way of addressing that challenge is to incorporate an

understanding of anthropological ethics (field practices and professional

principles) into a comparative anthropology of ethics expansive enough to

include ethical discourses and practices across the disciplines.6

So far, recent calls for an anthropology of ethics/morality (referred to

above) have advocated renewing anthropology’s dialogue with philosophy

while paying more focused attention to the ethical orientations and

moralities of field communities. But while they have problematized “ethics”

in various ways, proponents have taken the disciplinary practices and values

of “anthropology” – along with those of other epistemic cultures,

philosophy included – largely for granted.

The following necessarily‐brief discussion is meant to advance the

project of a more inclusive comparative anthropology of ethics, capable of

incorporating academic practices and values among its ethnographic objects

6 A comparative anthropology of (disciplinary) ethics might juxtapose academic philosophy’s professional ethics codes and practices with that of neighboring fields, the better to understand their respective social‐relational conditions of possibility.


(but see Meskell and Pels 2005).

A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON THE ETHICS OF

RESEARCH

What might an “anthropology of” ethics look like that included

anthropological and other research practices and professional discourses as

objects of ethnographic attention? At the least, it would need to develop

comparative understandings of the ethical underpinnings of disciplinary

knowledges: treating disciplinary cultures critically as historically‐

contingent moral orders (e.g. following Sahlins 1981). Without a

comparative framing, close attention to ones own discipline’s research

practice can only offer primary data concerning “native points of view” that

risks either over‐ or under‐estimating the uniqueness of disciplinary

practices and principles, and reifying their distinctive features.

RELATIONALITY AND CONTROL IN BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Malinowski’s foundational move “off the verandah” pointed the

discipline in a direction that other social or behavioral sciences have rarely

traveled. To adapt the anthropological trope, when sociologists and

psychologists moved off the verandah, they took their work indoors. Most

dramatically, psychologists adopted an experimental method modeled on

physical science; in the same spirit, if less dramatically, sociologists adopted

the interview as a privileged tool for controlling interactions between the

researcher and researched so that the resulting data would be amenable to

quantitative analysis.

Anthropologists’ social proximity to their sources, their method of

opening themselves to being socially defined by the folks they aim to

understand, appears to them as self‐evidently edifying despite its ethical

risks. But open‐ended intimacy as a scholarly knowledge practice appears as

uncontrolled, sloppy, and even perverse from the perspective of mainstream

sociology and social psychology (Lederman 2006b, 2009). Practitioners in

these fields have worked to limit and control the relational character of

research encounters in the interest of objectivity, even when they are

investigating human sociality.


What is more, both scientific (positivist) and interpretive

anthropologists understand the epistemological value of personal

engagement with others in social spaces they do not themselves control. In

contrast, objectivist social science is committed to an apparently endless

battle to socially decontamination the space of research. Its key device to this

end is the researcher’s control over the information available to research

participants.

Consider social psychology. Since the 1920s, when experiments

expanded beyond testing the workings of memory and perception to tackle

social problems of public concern, deception has been a central research tool.

Incomplete or actively misleading communications, “technical illusions” in

Stanley Milgram’s terms, were developed into elaborately staged scripts in

the 1950s and 1960s. Milgram himself was an exemplar, famous and

notorious for a series of literally shocking experiments concerning obedience

to authority. These experiments have a direct bearing on the socio‐historical

understanding of everyday ethics. Inspired by events of the Holocaust, they

explored how psychologically “normal” people could be induced to perform

reprehensible acts. Milgram construed his experiments to support Hannah

Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann as an “uninspired bureaucrat”:

After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority

in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendtʹs conception of

the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare

imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a

sense of obligation – a conception of his duties as a subject – and not

from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies. (Milgram 1974: 6, original

emphasis; see Arendt 1963)

Disciplined uses of deception made social psychology scientific in the same

way as clinical trials involving placebo control groups, also ethically

controversial, are the “gold standard” in biomedicine (Morawski 1988; Korn

1997; McQuay and Moore 2005). Despite five decades of controversy over its

uses, deception continues to be “an integral feature” of experimental design:

the American Psychological Association’s ethics code paragraphs on

“informed consent” allows deception when experimenters “have determined


that the use of deceptive techniques is justified by the study’s significant

prospective scientific, educational, or applied value” and that “effective

nondeceptive alternative procedures are not feasible” (American

Psychological Association 2010: §8.07a; see Lederman 2009).7

The explicit justification for experimental misdirection is the need to

control research subjects’ “reactivity”, their tendency to act as actual subjects

who cannot help but devise interpretations of the circumstances in which

they find themselves as bases for their behavioral choices. Instead,

misdirection enables subjects’ behavior to be construed as responsive only to

variables deliberately introduced. If subjects are not “naïve” concerning the

study hypotheses, then they might capriciously work either to support or to

frustrate experimental expectations. Either way, psychologists construe their

data to be invalidated by research participants’ foreknowledge of the

experimental situation and effort to enter into a relationship with the

experimenter, however one‐way.8

While it may be counter‐intuitive to anthropologists, the last thing an

experimenter wants is to be surprised by unplanned, uncontrolled stimuli

conjured into the lab by imaginative research participants. Psychological

research design aims to simulate natural behavior, not to provoke it.

Constructing convincing experimental environments enables researchers to

make secure claims about the stimuli to which subjects are responding and

generate results that are reproducible, therefore authoritative and credible

(Orne 1962: 776; Adair 1973).

Toward that end, researchers also work to excise the personal in their

7 The American Sociological Association’s (1999) ethics code also recognizes deception as “an integral feature of the design and conduct of research” and retains a place for it in its “informed consent”paragraphs (see also Lederman 2009). Whether exposing shrouded corners of society ethnographically or revealing unseen social patterns statistically, sociology is methodologically and ethically committed to the demystification of everyday personal experience. When anthropologists do this (e.g. Scheper‐Hughes 2004), their work runs counter to mainstream disciplinary sentiment.

8 In other words, prior fully‐informed consent is not technically possible in human experimentation because study validity depends on research participants’ ignorance of the study hypotheses. As the following section of this chapter will imply, prior fully‐informed consent is not possible for participants in anthropological fieldwork either, but for quite different reasons relating to the emergent and intersubjective (even if not fully “collaborative”) nature of the field research relation.


research relationships. The fundamental condition of objectivity in social

research, applying equally to psychological lab experiments and formal

survey interviewing, is that variable results should not be functions of the

idiosyncrasies of investigators and their relationships with subjects. Any

investigators following the same protocol with the same categories of

subjects ought to be able to replicate their colleagues’ results. That is, for

research purposes, neither experimenters and nor their subjects are

“persons”. A voluminous literature produced by psychology, sociology, and

related fields reports and analyzes the difficulties encountered in

approximating the ideal of non‐reactivity. “Whole subfields” (Rosenthal and

Fode 1963: 491) are devoted to devising strategies to compensate for

“experimenter bias” and related distortions. These Herculean efforts to

control the research encounter testify to the irrepressibly‐sociable character

of human sense‐making.

Refining our distinctions: like anthropology, mainstream social and

behavioral sciences study relations by means of relations; however, they do

so by constructing specialized research relations with heavily managed,

conventionalized expectations concerning contact with research participants.

They construe undesigned relationality in the research situation as noise

distorting reliable, objective results. Reversing figure and ground,

anthropologists make knowledge by tuning‐in what those others work so

hard to tune‐out.

RELATIONALITY AND CONTROL IN SOCIOCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Relative to sociology and psychology, a key distinctive feature of

anthropological research conventions has historically been a deliberate

relinquishment of control over research conditions. Moving from verandah

to village (social network, boardroom, clinic), anthropologists enter domains

controlled socially and culturally by the folks whose lives they hope to

understand. Correspondingly, their motivating themes have typically

opened outward toward unasked questions and opportunities presented by

the contingencies of fieldwork. Unlike social scientists situated as experts

with theories to test, anthropologists find culturally‐appropriate ways of

becoming their informants’ students or “apprentices” while they work to


acquire linguistic and social, and therefore ethical, competence. In that sense

they are socially “one‐down”, no matter what their structural position or

personal style might be (Agar [198x] 1996; see also Briggs 1986). This applies

both to recent fieldwork (e.g. in science labs) and to the classic kind

famously exemplified by E.E. Evans‐Pritchard’s rationale for becoming

“cattle‐minded” in Nuerland (although, certainly, methodological humility

as a professional stance needs to be distinguished from the personal or

socio‐political kind; see M. Wax 1972).

Relatedly, the discipline has long valued collaborative relationships

with research participants (Lassiter 2005: 26 ff; e.g. Majnep et al. 1977). In the

past, explicit collaborations between anthropologists and their interlocutors

appeared as relatively unique relationships (e.g. Franz Boas and George

Hunt or Marjorie Shostak and Nisa). In contrast, the past generation’s

refashioning of the disciplinary project has come closer to realizing the

ethical possibilities of true partnerships, particularly as the principle has

extended from individual relationships to whole communities (e.g. Lassiter

et al. 2004).

Nevertheless, long‐standing conventions of ethnographic writing and

authorship, in which claims concerning anthropological expertise assert

themselves over methodological humility, have qualified its ethical

implications. They invest the scholar with explanatory or interpretive

agency while filtering analogous (not to say opposed) creative forms of

those being written about. They obscured the necessarily intersubjective

character of anthropological practice: its dependence, so obvious during

fieldwork, on the quality of anthropologists’ relationships with their

interlocutors (Clifford 1983; Fabian 1983).

All that was given a sharp kick in the pants by Vine Deloria (1969),

whose scathing satirical critique of Americanist anthropologists’ neocolonial

relations was proclaimed an epochal calling‐to‐account in the AAA’s

Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology (Cassell and Jacobs 1987).

Propelled by the same world‐historical forces that made Deloria’s manifesto

possible, over the past forty years the disciplinary structure of feeling has

shifted. It is now normal (if not universally applauded) for anthropologists


to recognize the intersubjectivity of fieldwork as the enabling condition,

both ethically and epistemologically, of ethnographic production and to

write that condition into their ethnographies. Not only do contemporary

works open themselves to collaborative co‐production, but they also

acknowledge the contributions of quite untraditional interlocutors (e.g.

Scheper‐Hughes 2004; Holmes and Marcus 2008).

In the end, the thread connecting older and newer styles of

methodological humility and the past generation’s critical impact may be

anthropology’s typically self‐directed or “true” irony (e.g. Boon 2001;

Fernandez and Huber 2001; Robbins 2004; Lambek 2010b). Whether one is

studying “up” or “down”, whether aiming for apprenticeship, collaboration,

or even exposé, the ethical valence of field relationships is not under the

anthropologist’s control. Ethnographic quality may rest on how well writers

grasp those relationships both from their own socio‐material, cultural, and

ethical perspectives, and from those of their interlocutors. Acquiring ethical,

linguistic, and ethnographic competence takes time: it accounts for the

“unbearable slowness of fieldwork” (cf. Marcus and Okely 2008) and it

inevitably involves making mistakes. However, like other disciplines

anthropology distinguishes between ordinary fumbling and the scandalous

sort.

SCANDALOUS RELATIONS AND OVERBEARING CONTROL IN

ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELDWORK

Sociocultural anthropology’s public controversies have involved

instances of systematic departure from the informal principle of

relinquishing control and of serious straying from the disciplinary ideals of

competent sociable engagement, backstage intimacy, and working

collaborations. Accusations concerning the uses of deception resonate

differently in anthropology than they do in neighboring disciplines because

the discipline accords deception no conventionalized methodological

justification. We might briefly revisit two examples mentioned previously.

DARKNESS IN EL DORADO

Napoleon Chagnon’s research has been at the center of cross‐national

anthropological controversy for decades, well before the crisis went public


with the publication of Darkness in El Dorado (Tierney 2000).9

As an anthropologist committed to sociobiological theory, Chagnon

has long practiced a hypothesis‐testing style of fieldwork. To answer his

research questions, he had to gain access to kinship information that

Yanomami normally consider private. When Yanomami deflected his

questions with misleading responses, Chagnon did not adapt his project to

his hosts’ constraints and openings. Instead, he found ways of manipulating

their ethical conventions to induce individuals to reveal one another’s

secrets and he used his knowledge of inter‐group and inter‐personal

rivalries to gain access to information central to his research.

In effect, despite living in Yanomami communities during years of

field visits, his style of research had more in common with field experiments

in psychology, political science, and economics than it had with normative

ethnographic fieldwork. Initial questions about whether he and his biologist

collaborator had conducted experiments that intentionally harmed

Yanomami health provoked particularly heated debate. While those

accusations were laid to rest, their momentum was likely driven by the

goodness‐of‐fit between scandalous imputations of active experimentation

and the more passive forms of hypothesis‐testing in which Chagnon appears

to have engaged. Competent hypothesis‐testing requires the scientist to

manipulate and control research conditions. Given the nature of his

manipulations, it could not help being judged problematic by the standards

of mainstream anthropological ethics.

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AS SPIES

Several of anthropology’s most notable scandals have concerned the

uses of anthropologists, anthropological publications, and anthropological

identities as fronts for counter‐insurgency intelligence work (see Winslow

and Küyük infra). In these contexts, defending the ethico‐political value of

what is and is not “anthropology” can have practical bearing on the well‐

9 The following discussion can be read in provocative tension with D’Andrade and Scheper‐Hughes (1995): a particularly sharp rehearsal of recurrent anthropological arguments over, among other things, the ethical/moral values of “scientific” and variously “engaged” anthropologies. For a longer account of this argument and its wider disciplinary (and extra‐disciplinary) resonance, see Lederman (2005).


being of both anthropologists and those they study.

Both during the 1960s and recently, the AAA acted to distinguish

disciplinary practice from government intelligence work. In 1965, public

exposure of Project Camelot, a soon‐abandoned US government plan for

counter‐insurgency operations in Latin America, prompted the AAA to

commission a report (Beals 1967), form an ethics committee, and draw up its

first ethics code. Project Camelot did not single out anthropologists for

recruitment, but counter‐insurgency operations in Thailand a few years later

implicated their work more directly. Adopted in 1971, the Principles of

Professional Responsibility asserted that “anthropologists’ paramount

responsibility is to those they study. When there is a conflict of interest,

these individuals must come first”, a statement widely understood to

condemn deceptive interaction with field communities. As the Beals report

put it, “the international reputation of anthropology has been damaged by

the activities of individuals ... who have pretended to be engaged in

anthropological research while pursuing ... intelligence operations”. It

declared these activities “not anthropology” regardless of the credentials of

those responsible.

This position was echoed 40 years later in the final report of the

AAA’s Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US

Security and Intelligence Community (CEAUSSIC 2009). The report

reviewed the Department of Defense’s “Human Terrain System” (HTS),

originally set up to prepare teams of social scientists, including

anthropologists, to work within battalions active in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report sharply distinguished anthropological ethical precepts and

concept of culture from those in play in HTS documents. While the report

was at pains to recognize the legitimacy of anthropological work within

government security and intelligence settings, it concluded that the activities

of Team members within combat units “is not anthropology” and ought not

to trade on its intellectual or moral credibility.

CONCLUSION

Anthropology has a long history of interest in the “ordinary” or


“everyday” ethics of field communities: ethics has been a focus both of

ethnographic description (e.g. in studies of religion, law, and exchange, and

of colonial, gender, and class hierarchies) and of entwined methodological‐

reflexive concerns (e.g. in autobiographical and prescriptive discussions of

fieldwork). Some recent contributions have worked to improve our

understanding of the social embeddedness of ethics by drawing more

widely on resources from across the subfields, including sophisticated

integrations of linguistic and sociocultural anthropology. Pulling both with

and against that, other recent contributions have sought to demarcate the

anthropology of ethics/morality to intensify topically‐focused ethnographic

attention and debate; toward improving anthropology’s analytical resources,

they have also seriously reengaged moral philosophy.

This chapter has suggested that while this work has usefully

problematized “ethics”, it has tended to bracket “anthropology” and the

contemporary contexts of scholarly practice. In particular, it has distanced

itself from anthropology’s well‐developed critical discourse on its own ethics

(practices, codes, and controversies) and, more recently, both practical and

ethnographic discourse on the regulatory and other non‐academic

environments within which research across the disciplines is embedded. A

more inclusive anthropology of ethics/morality might integrate these

themes.

Among other rationales for such an integration, ethnographic and

comparative studies of the ethical structuring of disciplinary knowledges

can illuminate how researchers with different professional training evaluate

one another’s work on grant committees and Institutional Review Boards, in

promotion cases, and in other contexts (e.g. Brenneis 2004, 2005); they have

implications for collaborative research where outcomes depend on shared

expectations about research design, data sharing, authorship, and the like.

As well, a comparative understanding of the values orienting

anthropological practice, making clear both its conjunctures and

disjunctures with mainstream social science, can contribute to

anthropologists’ public engagements in classrooms, mass media, and

workplaces.


Social‐science conventions are learned in school long before students

arrive at university, and they are assimilated implicitly through a variety of

media. Teaching field‐research ethics is powerful evidence in particular of

anthropology’s anomalousness; but this cannot be appreciated if one simply

discusses codified principles or even cases with students. Every year

without fail, when my students read about the historical rationales for IRBs

and for the AAA’s ethics code, they denounce the use of deception in social

research and applaud the principle of informed consent. Nothing appears

amiss when they begin class field‐projects, unless one keeps close track of

what they are actually doing (or restricts them to conventional research

styles, like interviewing). Every year without fail, half the class spends

weeks “lurking” in their everyday identities – engaging in passive

observation, eavesdropping, and interacting with people in familiar ways –

rather than marking themselves in words and deeds as “anthropologists”.

Outing the anthropologist means articulating not just their curiosity

but also their approach. They fear that the people with whom they hope to

interact, misunderstanding themselves as research “subjects” and feeling

like “lab rats”, will reject being “put under the microscope”. And quite

reasonably: expectations concerning the objectifications of normative social

science are challenging for novice fieldworkers to overcome both in their

interlocutors and in themselves. With encouragement they find a route, from

experience and one another, past the Scylla and Charybdis of subjectivity

and objectivity, twinned conceits of researcher‐controlled work. That route is

to an intersubjective recognition made possible by the predictably

unpredictable development of real‐world relationships of varying quality

and depth that are the hallmarks of anthropological participant

observation.10

The disciplinary histories of both Boasian and Malinowskian

10 Teaching students about IRB applications tends to undermine this fragile understanding: filling out applications and getting consent forms signed feel like accomplishments, whereas ethical fieldwork is always a work‐in‐progress. Novice fieldworkers are burdened with understanding both the distinctive values of anthropological principles in practice and the otherwise principled practices on which regulatory ethics are based, while also appreciating their mutual contradictions.


anthropology are replete with conflicts and crises. However, if we

understand them as social projects rather than as congeries of individual

careers, then we are in a better position to appreciate how, over the past

century, they have created a distinctive approach. Anthropologists today are

beneficiaries and custodians of this history’s specific value, by turns

complementary and subversive relative to its epistemological neighbors.

Whether serving particular communities, employers, and sponsors with

activist or applied research, or contributing to a common human self‐

understanding with curiosity‐driven research, anthropologists will continue

to contend over the shape of disciplined intersubjectivity as a foundation for

ethical fieldwork and persuasive ethnography.

NOTES

This chapter was drafted and edited in mid‐2009. While its

bibliographic citations reflect that history, I am very grateful to the editors

for indulging my desire to update its argument and (to a much lesser extent)

its citations at the end of 2011, as this collective project finally went to press.

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