Anthropological Research, Ethics of

Abstract

Anthropology's relationship to ethics in research has been driven by periodic disciplinary controversies, often in close association with the involvement of anthropologists in successive war efforts, primarily in the U.S. Over time disciplinary ethics have increasingly focused on the unique exigencies of ethnography, as a disciplinary-specific method. While professional anthropological organizations developed codes of ethics beginning in the Vietnam era, historically, disciplinary ethical language has been used in two ways: as a basis for internal disciplinary self-policing and as a means to claim public professional standing as a social science. These uses continue to be prevalent today. But anthropology's relationship to its ethics also has been historically dynamic, changing with changes in disciplinary identity, values, and priorities. Less recognized are the ways that disciplinary ethics have been regularly reconstituted in close proximity to the frontiers of the identity of anthropology as a changing project. Anthropology's ethics reflect the discipline's specific history and identity debates, and they are one key index of these changing frontiers. This is most evident with respect to anthropology's ambivalent relationship to: science, the nation-state, and encompassing normative structures.