Fieldwork and the Law: New Contexts for Ethical Decision Making

Abstract

In recent years, the ethical behaviors of anthropologists and other fieldworkers in the United States have been subject to increased public scrutiny and influence. Much of this activity is the result of government regulation directed toward the protection of human subjects in all manner of scientific research. There has been considerable criticism of these regulations, accompanied by dire predictions of their negative impact on the special qualities of fieldwork. While much of this criticism is warranted in specific instances, I argue here that it has often been one-sided. Government regulation is a single aspect of a larger societal tendency to regard fieldwork along with other kinds of scientific research as a public as well as professional activity. Attention to ethical and legal problems in social scientific fieldwork is both encouraging and revealing. It is encouraging because it helps us understand that fieldwork, as any mode of discovery, is always more than a set of procedures. The way we do our work, who we work for, and the aims of our research cannot be divorced from the kinds of people we are. As much as the decision to become a social scientist is partly based on considerations of value, so is the subsequent decision to become a certain kind of social scientist based on rationales in which individuals attempt to reduce the dissonance between their experience of life and one or another school of thought regarding the proper conduct of a scientific profession. This attention to issues of ethics and law is revealing on at least two counts. First, it reminds us that the process of fieldwork is not only a means of discovery, but an end which requires the surrender and dissemination of information about people. Second, we come to realize that no person, and no profession, operates in a vacuum or apart from the influence of the times. The ethical and legal crises we face today are not limited to problems of fieldwork, or even to problems of social science research in general. Fieldworkers are never simply participants in the circumscribed cultural settings in which they do their major investigations-they are also engaged in a large public setting which, on the surface, may seem to have little to do with the intentions they carry to the field. There is distortion in every individual, and myopia plagues every profession. It is my impression, perhaps also my distortion, that the social science professions are particularly prone to one kind of myopia-that faltering scope of vision which comes from claiming to have a special and relevant perspective on all manner of human affairs. In its advanced stages, this claim for a special perspective changes to arguments for a special goodness. I do not care to dispute any of these properties, but only point out that, apart from the truly special qualities of our work, they do sometimes have the potential for blinding us to the relevance and quality of the rest of the world. This seems especially true when we begin to discuss the ethical and legal dilemmas of our profession--which are, after all, the guidelines by which we relate to outsiders. Here specialness and goodness melt together into a response which tends to be patronizing toward half the world and either ignorant of or antagonistic toward the other half. As Tarrou did in Camus' The Plague, we quickly divide the world into victims, pestilences, and the few healers who are truly capable of responding to the suffering of others. We find it difficult to acknowledge that, as a rule, everyone is a victim sometimes, a pestilence other times, and that the rare occupation of healer must be evaluated solely on the basis of what one does rather than on what one professes to do. My regard for the social sciences is not altogether different from the caricature I have just offered. But that does not save me, or any of us, from continuing to reassess our values in light of