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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

Family trees

What is a susu? It has something to do with the groups of relatives that people live with, so I thought I would ask people who they were related to and how.

When I asked for people’s genealogical relatives, they say they “did not want to trick me.”

To learn about someone’s susu, you have to ask for their tetela.

Learning how to ask

How to ask in Auhelawa

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

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:

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.

The fieldworker is a double being

Lots of people collect qualitative observations and use interviews as methods, but anthropologists are different because their position is always dual.

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

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

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

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.

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

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:

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 fix

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.

Briggs, Charles L. 1984. “Learning How to Ask: Native Metacommunicative Competence and the Incompetence of Fieldworkers.” Language in Society 13 (1): 1–28.

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/.