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Anthropologists are people studying people

Anthropologists are people studying people

ANTH 1001: Introduction to anthropology

Week of May 24, 2021 (Week 12)

Slides available at http://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2021/12

Learning how to ask

Ethnographic fieldworkers need to “learn how to ask,” that is, learn the genres of interaction that are appropriate to the topics they want to learn about.

Language is a part of a culture as a system, and cultural values determine the ways people learn to use language in social interaction.

People of Auhelawa have specific kinds of talk with specific roles associated with them:

• tetela, historical narrative
• tula, folktale with sung chorus
• guguya, authoritative speech by an elder, or a church sermon
• aiyauya, (lit. sharing, equal apportionment) personal talk in church about moral topics by a peer, from the English speech genre of “sharing”
• veʻita, teaching
• velabini, chat, catching up, gossiping

The roles one play in these kinds of talk are completely different from the role one plays answering questions in a survey conducted by an official.

To learn what a susu is, I needed to hear tetela, which meant I needed to play the role of a junior asking for instruction by a senior.

The anthropologist as child

To access the emic perspective on a situation, one must see the imponderable things that most people don’t see.

An outsider is best placed to do this, but an outsider can only see things in etic terms.

So how does a fieldworker acquire an emic perspective? By making mistakes, by trying and failing to fit in and be normal. Then people can see the gap in implicit knowledge and fill it in.

Two points follow from this:

• In the fieldwork situation, the fieldworker observes the hosts, but the hosts observe the fieldworker too.
• Fieldworkers have no special talent, expertise, or skill in observation. The best fieldworkers are naive, because their naivety makes them open to acquiring the perspective of their hosts.

A boundary crossed twice

“Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight.” (Malinowski 1932 [1922], 4)

The Malinowskian model of fieldwork makes the ethnographic fieldworker sound like an explorer who leaves home and crosses the threshold between one cultural world and another.

But all fieldworkers rely on partners who facilitate their work. It is common for fieldworkers and other people with the same experience of culture shock to find each other, because they both have learned to see their own societies in relative terms.

• Example: Mari, a friend of John Layard, who had recently returned from plantation work.

The ethics of research on human subjects

A basic ethical principle: We should not treat people like things.

Any research on people thus needs to be conducted differently than research on plants, animals, chemicals, etc.

Research on human subjects should

• Take care to minimize the risk of harm to the subjects.
• Inform the research subjects what the risks and the benefits are.
• Only allow voluntary participation with informed consent

The ethical standards of the profession of anthropology

As a community of fellow professional scholars, anthropology also has its own standards for ethical research practice

• People should only be subjects of research if they give their informed consent.
• Communities that host ethnographers should accept the fieldworker.

Many anthropologists believe that their research is subject to excessive and unnecessary scrutiny based on standards that apply to biomedical research.

• Participant-observation fieldwork is based mainly on learning general, public, nonconfidential information about daily life, and does not harm anyone.

Even if we accept that there is some risk to people that anthropologists study, the way we mitigate this harm by obtaining consent actually makes the situation murkier.

• Institutional bodies that regulate research have different, unequal standards for literate and nonliterate research subjects, e.g. for obtaining written documentation of consent.
• Universal, formal codes of practice cannot be applied to every situation, because every situation is different. Researchers need to be trusted to conduct themselves responsibly.

The ethics of anthropology is always in conflict with the ethics of bureacratic organizations

• Anthropology’s job is, as Ruth Benedict says, “to make the world safe for human difference.” We cannot recognize each person’s full humanity if we do not also recognize the diversity of humanity.
• Bureacratic organizations says that we must treat everyone as the same.

Auhelawa ethics and anthropological ethics

I wanted to conduct research only with the voluntary participation of the people I lived with.

Auhelawa people, individually and collectively, consented to participation, but they had conditions:

• I should live with a family, and act like a member of the family. I was not allowed to live alone, or to detach myself from relationships with people in the community.
• When I wrote about people in Auhelawa, I should make clear that Auhelawa people are Christians, and that my audience’s stereotypes about people in PNG were wrong.

From my institution’s point of view, I was giving up my independence.

This is the limit of a code of ethics, according to Bell (2014). Applying a single code of conduct grants authority to the researcher to dictate terms to the subject. Ethnographic research is based on giving up one’s authority and control, and granting authority and control to the people whom one studies.

The injustices that research ethics cannot solve

• No society exists in isolation.
  • Auhelawa people live on an island, but they are connected to everyone else in the world, although on unequal terms.
  • Someone can hold themselves to the highest possible standard of ethical behavior toward research subjects, but none of their conduct would do anything to remedy or ameliorate their unequal position with respect to the people they study.
• According to Pels (1999), when we talk about the fieldwork situation in terms of ethical obligations is to erase the deeper asymmetries and inequalities in the situation which can only be addressed through politics. Ethical codes make the researcher into a saint and savior.
• Rather than talk about what we shouldn’t do in research, let’s talk about ethical value of learning about each other’s differences.

References

Bell, Kirsten. 2014. “Resisting Commensurability: Against Informed Consent as an Anthropological Virtue.” American Anthropologist 116 (3): 511–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12122.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1932 (1922). Argonauts of The Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. http://archive.org/details/argonautsofthewe032976mbp.

Pels, Peter. 1999. “Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 40 (2): 101–36. https://doi.org/10.1086/200001.

Wheeler, Ryan. 2017. “Ruth Benedict and the Purpose of Anthropology.” The Peabody (blog). January 14, 2017. https://peabody.andover.edu/2017/01/14/ruth-benedict-and-the-purpose-of-anthropology/.