The latest issue of Anthropology News is out and features an op-ed by yours truly on open access publishing and the AAA (you can read the full text of the piece here). Actually that is not quite true. The piece is not really about open access anthropology—it is about closed-access anthropology, the “reader-pays” model that the AAA currently to fund its publication program. At the last AAAs it became clear to me that the biggest problem that sectional publications (think American Ethnologist and Medical Anthropology Quarterly) were having was staying in the black. In an atmosphere were the costs of publication threatened the existence of journals themselves, no one was interested in talking about open access because “giving it away for free” was perceived as an even worse situation than the one that journals were currently in.

So in fact the focus of the piece is not on open access, but reader-pays business models and the unspoken assumption that many at the AAA that they are a tried and true method of keeping journals afloat when compared to the utopian but supposedly ultimately suicidal open access option. The goal of the piece is simply to point out something that everyone already knows but conveniently forgets when they begin talking about open access—namely, that the current reader-pays model for funding AAA publications is broken and has been broken for a long time.

The key, I claim, is that an ethical commitment to open access has prompted an entire community to develop what I clunkily call “open access-inspired business models”. That is to say, the open access community has developed methods to radically lower the cost of publishing and that these methods are what make some sort of open access a realistic option. The second half of the piece then focuses on what would have to happen for the AAA to attempt to incorporate some of these OA-inspired models in their own publishing program. Personally, I’m not holding my breath. But it is important for people to realize that it is the open access model (and all that it entails), not the reader-pays model, that is financially ‘realistic’. Check it out.

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Many of you already know about the bomb STS wiki at UVA but I recently came across another bomb wiki—the UC STS Wiki. It has a terrifying number of facinating syllabi including one on the work of Marilyn Strathern by Cori Hayden which is—wait for it—the bomb.

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I was saddened—and disappointed—to learn recently that Jean-Pierre Vernant passed away in January. Saddened at the passing of such a remarkable scholar, and disappointed to learn of it second hand through personal connections. I am not, to be fair, a francophone classicist, so perhaps it is not surprising that I didn’t hear anything. But at the same time there appears to be little in the English-language press about his passing—as far as I can tell the New York Times didn’t even have an obituary.

As the obituary I linked to above indicated, Vernant was an extraordinary person. I think of him as someone who occupied—indeed, created—the space where anthropology, structuralism, and classics meet. Anthropology has always had a connection with classics stretching back to Moses Finley and, I suppose, Henry Sumner Maine. But Vernant, Detienne, Vidal-Naquet and others demonstrate to me how one can undertake a truly rigorous and truly humanistic social science—comparative, imaginative, and saturated with a theoretical sophistication derived from those great French 20th century schools of thought that have been unfairly eclipsed in the popular imagination by poststructuralism: the annee sociologique, the annales, and structuralism (francophones will excuse my lack of accents—my computer is set up to handle Chinese these days, not French).

People who have read of his exploits in the resistance will recognize that Vernant was extraordinary for more than just his scholarship. I had the chance to see him speak once, and I remember him as an extraordinarily powerful speaker—someone with a personal charisma that was more reminiscent of a movie star than a merely interesting professor. I suppose that this is because, as a superstar academic, he was a sort of a celebrity to me. But even setting aside the tendencies of an impressionable graduate student, Vernant had a charisma that couldn’t be denied.

It is interesting to compare Vernant’s passing with that of Baudrillard. Baudrillard became a sort of pop icon in the US while Vernant climbed to the pinnacle of the French academy. Baudrillard became a foundational (is that too strong a word?) figure in the new post-70s disciplines (cultural studies etc.) while Vernant worked in quite literally the oldest disciplines (classics, history). In an earlier post I asked whether anthropologists cared about Baudrillard’s passing—I feel like I already know what people’s answer will be about Vernant. Maybe readers whose curioisty is piqued—or would like to revisit Vernant—will pick up a copy of Mortals and Immortals and take a look at some of his essays. Is this kind of work relevant today? Does it mark the ‘path not taken’ in sociocultural anthropology’s march towards a ‘theory-heavy’ approach?

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From the Savage Minds mailbag:

Ethnographic Database Project launched!

The Ethnographic Database Project (EDP) is a web-based tool for the collection of comparative ethnographic data. The EDP enables anthropologists to enter information about their field research using a set of standard codes developed for cross-cultural application; the codes relate to a society’s organization, kinship and marriage practices, subsistence economy, and pattern of sexual division of labor. The EDP is in the form of a web-based questionnaire, which can be accessed from any computer connected to the internet.

The EDP aims to complement widely-used comparative ethnographic datasets such as the Ethnographic Atlas and the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample by: (i) obtaining data directly from anthropologists who conducted field research in the societies of interest, (ii) using standard codes developed for cross-cultural application for all societies, (iii) expanding the range of societies for which coded ethnographic data are available.

The first stage of the EDP includes societies speaking Indo-European languages, which are underrepresented in the existing ethnographic databases. We welcome contributions from researchers who have conducted fieldwork in societies speaking these languages.

Visit the EDP website at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucsalfo/EDP to read more about this project, to view a sample version of the EDP, and to find out how to contribute. Please forward this link to anyone who may be interested in this project!

It seems like an ambitious project, but my advice for anyone doing something like this is to get some sample data up on your site before going public. I find it very hard, looking at the site, to imagine how it will work.

Also, I’ve never been a big fan of coded ethnographic data, being more of a full-text search type myself. Why not just have people blog their fieldnotes and code it with Technorati tags of their own design?

I’m curious what our readers think. Do you use coded data? Would something like this be useful to you?

UPDATE: Although there isn’t sample data, there is a sample form where you can see what it would be like to enter data. It seems totally inappropriate to my own research. There are questions about “animal husbandry” but nothing about income, educational attainment, or anything appropriate to the 21st century.

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As many of you may know by now, Citizendium is now live. The site aims to be like Wikipedia but with ‘quality control’—it uses a quasi-hierarchical role structure and asks its authors provide CVs and other proof of their expertise. So if you have been interested in writing open access encyclopedia articles about anthropology but have found the politicking of Wikipedia distracting, then Citizendium may be for you.

I personally am somewhat ambivalent about Citizendium. I’ve written many Wikipedia articles myself, and have been lurking on the Citizendium mailing lists since they were started. I know that many Wikipedians think that the Wikipedia’s social and editorial policies simply don’t do the job they should. At the same time, many also think that Citizendium is an elitist program destined to fail. Personally, I think: the more pedias, the more better.

At the moment the anthropology offerings on Citizendium are pretty sparse—check out the entry on anthropology itself if you don’t believe me—and they could use some more help. So consider signing up and helping make our work as anthropologists more open to the public.

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Another BBC video about an anthropologist discovered on YouTube. (See previous post on BBC & Youtube here.) This one, narrated by Sir. David Attenbourgh, is about Tom Harrisson, a rather eccentric figure in the history of anthropology:

He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he neglected his studies in favour of drinking, fighting and walking the streets barefoot with red-painted toenails. Although he left in 1931 without obtaining a degree, he served as ornithologist on Oxford Society expeditions to St Kilda (1930), Norwegian Lapland (1931), Sarawak, (1932), and the New Hebrides (1934), where, rather than returning with the rest of the party, he went on alone to Malekula to spend time with its cannibal inhabitants and write the book Savage Civilisation defending their way of life. Harrisson was now more interested in watching people than birds, and attempted to apply similar ethnological methods to observing the inhabitants of Bolton, working in a mill and asking them questions about their daily lives. Along with Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, Harrisson founded Mass Observation, an organisation that attempted to use ethnological methods to study British society – an “anthropology of ourselves”. Soon, a network of volunteer ‘Mass Observers’ was reporting back on ordinary people’s experience of everything from sport and leisure to housing, the Police Force and the 1937 Coronation.

As the film says, Mass-Observation developed many of the techniques used in all market research today. Interestingly, we learn that at the age of 19 he organized a huge team of volunteer observers to study a single species of bird, skills that served him well with the nation-wide polling network he set up in the period before England joined the war. I’m sure Harrison would have loved YouTube.

Harrison is also interesting with regard to another theme we have discussed extensively on Savage Minds, the role of anthropology in wartime:

In 1942, Harrisson joined the Army. By 1945, he was working with the Special Operations Executive, and was parachuted behind Japanese lines into Borneo, where he recruited 1,000 native soldiers armed with blowpipes. This unique army gathered behind-the-lines intelligence, disrupted enemy supply lines and killed or captured some 1,500 Japanese troops in what must stand as one of the most unusual campaigns of World War II.

(Some of those “Japanese troops” were likely Taiwanese Aborigines.) Harrison was also a museum curator, amateur archaeologist, and filmmaker. He seems to have been somewhat patronizing towards those he worked with, both in Borneo and in England, but was nonetheless quite a fascinating character and a good subject for a film. A 1998 biography, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life, which formed the basis for this documentary, seems like a fun read.

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Better than Wikipedia, More Fun than a Speeding Textbook, Able to make puzzling and intriguing connections in a single click… it’s an eyeball, it’s a bodyplan, it’s a rocket ship… no it’s The Real Evolution Debate. This is actually a fantastic article (if somewhat confusing in some of the genealogical details) because of the way it imposes organization on a field that is actually best evoked, recursively, by that tangled bank at the end of Darwin’s Book. Nonetheless, this What is Enlightenment Magazine (!) article has very clear descriptions of some of the fault lines in the existing debate over evolution, from the hardest hard-core Dawkinsonians to the kookiest of the ID camp, with a whole bunch of interesting stuff I’d never heard of in the middle. Just a theory, Indeed!

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The most recent number of American Ethnologist has a review of Susan McKinnon’s book Neo-Liberal genetics written by Henry Harpending which is, frankly, libelous. I’ve blogged about Neo-Liberal genetics before and have used it in my class to great effect, and I suppose that since I pretty much agree with McKinnon I am probably not the perfect person to write a review of the review. Nevertheless, Henry Harpending’s review is so confused and unfair that I simply can’t let it go unanswered.

In his review Harpending characterizes Neo-Liberal Genetics as “rambling screed criticizing the field of evolutionary psychology,” a field which “McKinnon dislikes [because of its] implied constraints on her political fantasies.” I get the feeling that Harpending imagines McKinnon to be ‘one of those postmodern feminists’—indeed, he claims that McKinnon “does not complain that evolutionary psychology is bad science according to standard criteria for evaluating science: Instead she dislikes the ‘rhetorical structures and strategies of the texts.’”

Reading passages like this make me doubt whether Harpending has actually read the book—or at least has not read it very carefully. How can anyone argue (as Harpending does) that McKinnon “does not complain that evolutionary psychology is bad science according to standard criteria for evaulating science” when in plain English on page eleven of her book she writes: “I will make the argument that evolutionary psychology is bad science… this is the case because evolutionary psychologists have not been willing to put their fundamental premises and analytic categories at risk in an encounter with contrary evidence.”? Indeed, McKinnon is not arguing against science as a method of inquiry—she is arguing in the name of science against those who claim to act, but do not in fact act, with the rigor that science demands.

(more…)

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       Following up my previous post, I’d like to open another kind of discussion.  Concerning IRBs, we have a wealth of information about the problems researchers of all sorts face (and more on the way in the form, for example, of ethnographic research on IRB process); there have also recently been a number of important critical interventions in the form, for example, of conferences and professional association position papers, with more to come (in the wake, for example, of the recent NY Times article).   

       Complementing all that, for the immediate short term we also need to build up a stock of creative coping strategies.  I suspect that it would be useful to share what we’ve come up with rather than keeping our innovations local. 

       I am most definitely not suggesting that we devote our attention solely to coping: the November American Ethnologist Forum as a whole —and Katz’s contribution in particular—ought to make that clear.  I’m suggesting that institutional isolation makes everyone weak, whereas cross-institutional sharing of productive interventions enables both students and practitioners of field research, oral history interviewing, and other marginalized research styles to continue doing ethical, critical research even as other efforts are under way to protect and expand those possibilities. 

       Some examples of the creative coping were offered in the November American Ethnologist Forum in Dan Bradburd’s article (on an individual level) and Rick Shweder’s (on an institutional level).  Please write in with your local achievements: whether individual, departmental, or college/university-wide.  In my next post, I’ll describe a local experiment  in what—following my last post—I think of as cross-disciplinary “translation”.     

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1. Consent and preserving the rights of research participants:

About Chris Kelty’s (03/15/07 this site) suggestive comparisons between copyright and informed consent, and particularly the notion that both “actually diminish rights of subjects regarding the control of information, rather than protecting them”: remember that, even though the IRB system is federal (with a central Office of Human Research Protections apparently coordinating the application of regulations), IRBs are local and control their own procedures. As far as I know, IRB researchers agree that local IRB practice “varies”. The point here is that there is no standard IRB consent form.

My institution’s IRB takes a minimalist approach. Our “Standard Adult Consent” form (which, like many other universities’ IRB materials, is available online) is two pages long, the second page devoted simply to contact information. The main page has a place in which the researcher needs to insert a straightforward (non-jargon) description of the project. Apart from this researcher-generated text, the consent form asserts that the signer affirms only that s/he has been informed about what s/he will do as a research participant. The form includes the mandated language (http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/assurance/consentckls.htm) that participation is voluntary and that consent can be withdrawn and participation discontinued at any time without penalty. But it adds that “By signing this agreement, I do not waive any legal rights or release Princeton University, its agents, or you from liability for negligence”.

This minimalist approach lives up to regulatory requirements and also affirms a best-case interpretation of what the regulations aimed for: it is clearly aimed to avoid creating an institutional shelter.

In contrast, for example—just to use Chris’s institution—the Rice “Consent to Participate” form simply provides the required assurances about the voluntary nature of participation and rights to withdraw without penalties.

It might be interesting to compare other university forms: so folks, what rights does your local IRB consent form protect or not protect?

2. Disciplinary diversity in the ‘researcher relation’ and its ethics:

I agree completely with Tom Strong’s (03/17/07 this site) sense of the contradiction between naming or authorship (associated with IPR claims and their related local values, like the Papua New Guinean ones he mentions) and confidentiality (associated with both ethnographic ethics and IRB emphases). IRBs presume one kind of researcher/researched relation derived from medical research, in which confidentiality makes sense since participants are vulnerable “subjects”. They are brought into lab settings within which—for the resulting data to be usable—information cannot be shared but must be carefully controlled by the reseacher.

But IRBs these days regulate a very wide variety of fields whose methodologies involve diverse research relations. Fields whose reseach relations tend to be collaborative—involving, for example, the sharing of information and other colleague-like assumptions about intellectual and social agency—are closer to the model that Papua New Guineans—and lmichael’ (03/17/07 this site) Amazonian field communities—prefer. They’re quite different from the medical model of the research relation.

Oral History ethics are perhaps the most elaborate in treating “narrators” as the authors of their narratives: going way beyond even recent anthropological practice. The OH convention is for narrators to hold copyright to their own words and to specify who (if anyone) may have access to the transcripts and recordings.

In this consent discussion, John McCreery (03/18/07 this site) invokes “the spirit of free choice”—and the journalist’s allowing on- or off-record commentary. This position appears consistent with the Belmont principle of “respect” (foundational to the regulations that IRBs enforce). Is it? Why does such a stance tend not to make sense to your average IRB?

My answer is that we’re dealing with incommensurable perspectives on the research relation. John’s (or Tom’s or Michael’s or my, etc.) interlocutors are construed (and construe themselves) as autonomous agents, whereas—following the medical model and its frightening worst cases—IRBs are responsible for “human subjects”: persons construed as “vulnerable” and in need of protection. What is more, bureaucratic rationality demands a disinterested consistency. From that central(izing) vantage, our divergent ethical positions don’t sound principled (they are not heard as issuing from different ethical stances) but simply self-interested (unenlightened, irrational).

Very like audit culture (using Marilyn Strathern’s sense of this term), bureaucratic ethics culture defines the dominant language of best practices. It demands that diverse disciplinary research relations be translated, so to speak, into one ethics language. The burden of translation is, as things presently stand, entirely ours.

As Michael Brown’s story suggests, that doesn’t necessarily mean a surrender of our principles…

[UPDATE: Added links for comments, and gave LMichael credit for a comment previously attributed to Michael Brown. – Ed.]

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A brief public service announcement:

The New York Times is opening up access permanently to TimesSelect to all students and faculty who have .edu e-mail addresses beginning on March 13.

Not true open access, but still good news for anyone at an educational institution. It works for international .edu domains as well (i.e. .edu.tw).

To register for your free account, go here.

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In my earlier post (“Responses to comments…”), part of my responses somehow disappeared. Here’s the missing bit (and sorry for my post-incompetence!):

#3 on inconsistencies and a sneaky plan to heighten the contradictions: John McCreery raises an excellent question. It would be nice if consistency ruled: all researchers should face the same constraints, but they don’t. The irony here is that consistency is one of the core values of bureaucratic ethics management. Consistency is a recurrent refrain on many local IRBs (“…well, if we allow you guys to do away with written informed consent, then we’d have to allow everyone to…”) and it is a key theme at the national level as well.

Ironies aside, as I understand it, there’s an important, fatal flaw in your deliciously sneaky consistency argument: market researchers don’t depend on federal funds to do their work.

Strictly speaking, IRB oversight is only required for institutions (like most universities and colleges) that accept federal research funds. The federal human subject protections regulations (45 Code of Federal Regulations, Pt. 46) were nicknamed “the Common Rule” in 1991 when 17 federal agencies (like NIH) that fund human subjects research all signed on. Rick Shweder’s contribution to our November 2006 American Ethnologist Forum explains that universities and other institutions that accept federal research funds cannot get those funds unless they sign an “assurance” with the relevant funding agencies, or a general Federal Wide Assurance (FWA): documents that obligate them to have one or more local IRBs to review their employees’ research proposals.

Now, as Shweder’s article also explains, university and college IRBs only need to promise to review federally funded research. However, it seems that most of our institutions have gone beyond this minimum requirement and have checked a box on the FWA form that obligates them to review all research, not just federally funded research! (Folks all over the place are looking in to this situation at their institutions: I recommend that you make friends with someone in your institution’s counsel’s office and look in to it too!) In any case, over the past five or six years of IRB “hypervigilance” (the situation that prompted the AE Forum) boards have been jittery and have tended to review all research regardless of how it is funded, regardless of whether their FWA obligates them to do so or not.

Responding to John’s question about the existence of guidelines parallel to those on which IRBs are founded: I can think of one that, while still being at least partially academic, is interesting nonetheless. Check out the National Academy of Sciences “On Being a Scientist” booklet (available online at http://bob.nap.edu/readingroom/books/obas/ ), which concerns science research ethics very generally. This is another example of the inconsistencies mentioned above: unlike the IRB oversight of research with human participants, these general (mostly non-human participant research) guidelines are completely voluntary even tho the research is very likely to be federally funded!

#4 on the roots of the IRB problems in disciplinary ‘cultures of research’: Another terrific question! My responses to other folks’ questions contain bits and pieces of an answer to this one (as does my AE Forum paper). But a fuller response would be the paper I mention in my comment on #5 (below). My contribution to the Cornell conference was a paper entitled “Comparative ‘Research’: A Modest Proposal Concerning the Regulatory Object” (which I’ll be ready to make available in a few weeks). In my view, the problems go way, way beyond the IRB context and derive exactly from the “cultures of research” of which IRB members and the rest of us are part. My own long-term research has been all about disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity—that is, engagements like those cross-disciplinary discussions concerning methodology you mention. As I explained in my AE paper, IRB discourse is just one of my “fieldsites” (which include other places in which disciplinary practitioners bump up against one another, as well as fractious intra-disciplinary moments of ethical crisis). But it’s a fieldsite in which everyone is implicated and consequently of great interest. My AE paper unpacks the Common Rule “definition of research” a bit; and it also begins to address exactly the issues you identify concerning how ethnographic fieldwork is understood by folks from other disciplines (and vice versa). Check it out.

#5 on the relationship between IRB and intellectual property issues: If Michael Brown is still out there, what do you think about the relationship between IRB surveillance and the management of intellectual property contradictions?

Different institutional mechanisms are at play with respect to intellectual property and IRB controversies. For one thing, the IRB system exists outside of (or prior to) legal mechanisms for dealing with accusations about misrepresentation (libel laws), privacy, and the like. This is a huge issue: several of us refer to it in the AE Forum (and anyone interested in following this might also check outhttp://irbinfo.blogspot.com/ and follow references to Hamburger’s Supreme Court Review paper). In a paper that I wrote for a Cornell Law School-hosted conference on “Bureaucracies of Virtue”, I suggested that we’d be better off (and our informants no worse off) if our work were held to account in the same ways that the work of journalists and other writers are. As I understand the current situation, IRB reviews do not protect us or our institutions from lawsuits (that is, whether or not consent forms are involved, IRB reviews don’t prevent our interlocutors from suing us). As things stand, many critics see IRB reviews as constituting censorship-like prior review (arguably a kind of “prior restraint”, something that the First Amendment protects against).

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In his comment on my earlier post, Kerim wrote that it would be interesting to see how IRB regulations work for “examples which are supposed to be paradigmatic” (medical research). I agree. Doing so really exposes the fundamental impotence of the rules (despite mighty efforts by droves of well-intentioned, clever rule-writers). While ethnographers and biomedical experimenters do face analogous disconnections between regulatory prescriptions and the inevitable surprises of actual research practice, exploring the problems that medical folks in particular face brings us back to the regulatory system’s “origin place”. It brings us back to the problem that the rules were meant to solve but never did.
I’ll summarize the argument—part of the forthcoming PoLAR article, “Comparative ‘Research’” (mentioned in earlier posts)—versions of which also appear less centrally in my 2006 AE paper.
I begin with the observation that there is no such thing as Research-in-general: there is no suite of ideals or traits shared by all the practices to which the term “research” usually refers. Instead, there are diverse, historically specific, socially organized ways of knowing the world, in shifting partial relations with one another, as well as ambivalent relations with particular non- and quasi-research activities (from journalism or travel writing to stage magic or, as we will see below, therapy).
Bureaucratic regulation cannot tolerate such incoherence. To control human-subjects research, variation must be bracketed so as to create a stable object with clear boundaries. Criteria must be found for deciding when instances of “research” begin and end, and for deciding what is and is not “research”.
However, research involving human beings persistently resists reductive objectification in the interest of consistency. This is true not just among the ornery humanistic social studies but also in biomedicine and other unambivalently science-identified fields whose research models fit the Common Rule definition.
So why bother? Why did “research” with human participants come to be viewed as in need of regulation (and therefore agonizing definition)?
The IRB definition of research was designed originally to provide a means of eradicating a potentially lethal ambiguity, specific to medical practice, concerning when “therapy” ends and “research” begins. This danger, publicized in the 1960s and early 1970s, is central to the history of the US federal regulations (for lots of bibliographic leads, see that November AE again).
But the design was flawed: the original ambiguity is still with us.
Human-subjects research regulations (45 CFR, Pt. 46, known as the Common Rule: see Chris Kelty’s Savage Mind 2/8/06, on which I hope to comment soon!)—formally set in place in the late 1970s/early 1980s—derive from earlier NIH guidelines that reflect specifically biomedical background assumptions. These assumptions go something like this:
1. Since it concerns directly improving the wellbeing of particular individuals, medical therapy is appropriately evaluated in terms of individual patient interests.
2. In contrast, since medical research concerns the production of knowledge “generalizable” beyond individual cases, it is appropriately evaluated in terms of the interests of science and society at large.
3. It follows that—since a concern for individuals isn’t inherent to the definition of “research” the way it is to the definition of “therapy”—even though physical risks to persons are associated with both medical therapy and research, the risks to individuals are qualitatively more serious in research
4. Consequently, “research” (in this sense) needs special oversight.
These specific background assumptions are evident in regulatory provisions that, firstly, limit risk/benefit calculi to research “emas distinguished from risks and benefits of therapies/em” and that, secondly, exclude from consideration the “long range effects of applying knowledge” (45 CFR 46.111[a][2]). “Research” is not “therapy”: not the emapplication/em of medical knowledge to individual persons (applications normally enabled when research results are published and made available to practicing physicians). The medical rationale of regulatory distinctions is just as evident in the definition of “human subject”, but I won’t discuss that here.
Now, while Common Rule regulations were applied widely to federally-financed non-biomedical research from the start, the idea of research-as-not-therapy does not translate readily outside of biomedicine. For example, cancer patients participating in clinical trials of new cancer therapies can compare the likelihood of a direct personal benefit from new knowledge against the risk of harm in the research process itself. In contrast, social research rarely promises practical payoffs to its participants. Its benefits tend to be indirect and its harms are located less in the research process than in its products.
Not only is research-as-not-therapy untranslatable across fields, but the regulatory definition did not even do away with the ambiguities within medical practice. Heroic efforts of clarification can be found in works that interpret the Common Rule for IRBs, like the IRB Guidebook (www.hhs.gov/ohrp/irb/irb_guidebook.htm). Nevertheless, to this day it continues to be a frequent topic of debate in IRB circles.
I’ll stop here for now. In the full length treatment of this argument, I offer an extended example of problem solving discussions among experienced biomedical IRB insiders concerning how the medical therapy/research distinction might be operationalized in particular cases. Such discussions—which happen all the time—demonstrate very clearly that it is effectively impossible in practice to distinguish clearly between when “therapy” ends and “research” begins: when innovations in the care of a particular patient with an unusual condition ought to be treated as research (worth publishing, in need of an IRB review). The regulations offer no solution to this problem.
More soon.

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We’ve had a fair bit of discussion, here at Savage Minds, about the role of anthropologists during wartime, an issue which has troubled American anthropologists as far back as Boas. There has also been a lot of discussion as of late about the shortage of Arab speakers in the US military and intelligence community. (The policy on gays in the military makes it unlikely that there will be an American T.E. Lawrence.) So, within this context I’ve been meaning to link to Mark Liberman’s Language Log post on Mary Haas, who had studied with Edward Sapir and gone on to head the Linguistic Society of America.

For Haas, as for most of the other linguists of her generation, the watershed of her career was the onset of the Second World War. In 1940-41, as the United States moved toward entering the war, a cadre of field linguists was recruited to learn and teach the lesser-known languages of the European and Pacific theatres. ... Recruited to study Far Eastern languages—and ordered to produce practical handbooks, teaching grammars and vocabularies—were such scholars as William S. Cornyn, who was assigned Burmese; Murray Emeneau, who was channeled into the study of Vietnamese; and Haas, who got Thai. Given the near total lack of teaching materials on Thai in those days, Haas, like Cornyn and Emeneau, had to learn her language from scratch, through direct elicitation from native speakers…

Haas spent 1941-43 at the University of Michigan acquiring a knowledge of Thai phonology and syntax through intensive fieldwork with Thai speakers, one of whom, Heng R. Subhanka, became her second husband. ... in 1943 she went to Berkeley where the Army Specialized Training Program had been set up, under the direction of A. L. Kroeber, to teach strategic languages to servicemen.

Liberman, noting without comment the contrast between the eagerness to help with the war effort back then, and the greater suspicion that exists now, wonders whether it was Kroeber himself who organized this effort? (Mark also notes that Kroeber was Ursula K. Le Guin’s father, but fails to mention that he is also from my hometown, Hoboken NJ!)

UPDATE: More here and here.

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This is a response to the first five comments on my last post. These concerned a series of interconnected issues relating to the cross-disciplinary dimensions of IRB engagement:(please disregard the strange font size changes below, which aren’t intentional…) [I’ve removed some of the cruftier html to remove the weirdo fonts -Rex]:

#1 on sociocultural anthropology and ethnographic sociology: I strongly recommend Rosalie Wax’s book Doing Fieldwork (U Chicago 1971, reissued around 1986, and still available on Amazon or your college library). It’s a memoir of fieldwork, and contains a wonderful capsule history that moves between conventional anthropological and sociological sources. Park is an important part of the story, but before that (among other folks) Beatrice and Stanley Webb were working in London, contemporary with Boas and part of Malinowski’s environment. Just in U.S. anthropology, it’s my sense that the various subfields and theoretical styles are unevenly aware of ethnographic sociology (that is, we’re not all equally ignorant!).

I agree that there is a lack of reference to qualitative sociology in the recent generation’s revaluation of work “at home”. But anthropologists have always worked at home; indeed, working at home is cheaper (it doesn’t necessitate securing a research fellowship or grant) and was therefore always common. What has happened over the past generation is that working at home has become not only expedient but also sexy. So one question is: what was the relationship between ethnographic sociology and the long tradition of home style anthropology? Lots of other questions certainly (e.g., for example, how is the anthropology/sociology relationship managed in joint departments?)!

#2 on multidisciplinary projects and IRBs: How IRBs handle multidisciplinary projects is an interesting question. I haven’t seen much commentary in the gargantuan IRB literature on this: so, any stories folks? Tom—do you want to describe the HIV study with respect to IRB approval?

In any case, I very much agree that it’s important to improve our understanding of disciplinary differences: much of my work has focused on this (as my own AE paper suggests). I’ve been particularly interested in the partial connections—the reticulum of similarities and differences—among closely related disciplines like those I sketched (e.g., p 483, 484-5, and esp. 485-6) in that essay.

For example, the IRB literature—definitely including that written by folks who are critical of IRB “mission creep”—is full of generalized references to the problems “qualitative” researchers face when their work is evaluated by IRBs. While it is true that there are significant differences between qualitative and quantitative researchers, this distinction doesn’t begin to address the problems of cross-disciplinary communication between researchers and IRBs (and among IRB members). Consider that thoroughly quantitative survey researchers and thoroughly qualitative, interpretive anthropologists both approach potential informants on the latter’s home ground (where consent forms aren’t the most effective ways to ensure informant consent, where informants have considerable power to stop participating); in contrast, oral historians and interpretive anthropologists—both qualitative—have very different conventions with respect to confidentiality!

#3 on inconsistencies and a sneaky plan to heighten the contradictions:  John McCreery raises an excellent question.  It would be nice if consistency ruled: all researchers should face the same constraints, but they don’t. The irony here is that consistency is one of the core values of bureaucratic ethics management.  Consistency is a recurrent refrain on many local IRBs (“…well, if we allow you guys to do away with written informed consent, then we’d have to allow everyone to…”) and it is a key theme at the national level as well.
 

Ironies aside, as I understand it, there’s an important, fatal flaw in your deliciously sneaky consistency argument:  market researchers don’t depend on federal funds to do their work.
 

Strictly speaking, IRB oversight is only required for institutions (like most universities and colleges) that accept federal research funds.  The federal human subject protections regulations (45 Code of Federal Regulations, Pt. 46) were nicknamed “the Common Rule” in 1991 when 17 federal agencies (like NIH) that fund human subjects research all signed on.  Rick Shweder’s contribution to our November 2006 American Ethnologist Forum explains that universities and other institutions that accept federal research funds cannot get those funds unless they sign an “assurance” with the relevant funding agencies, or a general Federal Wide Assurance (FWA): documents that obligate them to have one or more local IRBs to review their employees’ research proposals.    
 

Now, as Shweder’s article also explains, university and college IRBs only need to promise to review federally funded research.  However, it seems that most of our institutions have gone beyond this minimum requirement and have checked a box on the FWA form that obligates them to review all research, not just federally funded research!  (Folks all over the place are looking in to this situation at their institutions: I recommend that you make friends with someone in your institution’s counsel’s office and look in to it too!)  In any case, over the past five or six years of IRB “hypervigilance” (the situation that prompted the AE Forum) boards have been jittery and have tended to review all research regardless of how it is funded, regardless of whether their FWA obligates them to do so or not.    
 

Responding to John’s question about the existence of guidelines parallel to those on which IRBs are founded: I can think of one that, while still being at least partially academic, is interesting nonetheless.  Check out the National Academy of Sciences “On Being a Scientist” booklet (available online at http://bob.nap.edu/readingroom/books/obas/ ), which concerns science research ethics very generally.  This is another example of the inconsistencies mentioned above:  unlike the IRB oversight of research with human participants, these general (mostly non-human participant research) guidelines are completely voluntary even tho the research is very likely to be federally funded!
      
#4  on the roots of the IRB problems in disciplinary ‘cultures of research’:  Another terrific question!  My responses to other folks’ questions contain bits and pieces of an answer to this one (as does my AE Forum paper).  But a fuller response would be the paper I mention in my comment on #5 (below).  My contribution to the Cornell conference was a paper entitled “Comparative ‘Research’: A Modest Proposal Concerning the Regulatory Object” (which I’ll be ready to make available in a few weeks).  In my view, the problems go way, way beyond the IRB context and derive exactly from the “cultures of research” of which IRB members and the rest of us are part.  My own long-term research has been all about disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity—that is, engagements like those cross-disciplinary discussions concerning methodology you mention.  As I explained in my AE paper, IRB discourse is just one of my “fieldsites” (which include other places in which disciplinary practitioners bump up against one another, as well as fractious intra-disciplinary moments of ethical crisis).  But it’s a fieldsite in which everyone is implicated and consequently of great interest.  My AE paper unpacks the Common Rule “definition of research” a bit; and it also begins to address exactly the issues you identify concerning how ethnographic fieldwork is understood by folks from other disciplines (and vice versa).  Check it out.  
  
#5 on the relationship between IRB and intellectual property issues:  If Michael Brown is still out there, what do you think about the relationship between IRB surveillance and the management of intellectual property contradictions? 
 

Different institutional mechanisms are at play with respect to intellectual property and IRB controversies.  For one thing, the IRB system exists outside of (or prior to) legal mechanisms for dealing with accusations about misrepresentation (libel laws), privacy, and the like.  This is a huge issue: several of us refer to it in the AE Forum (and anyone interested in following this might also check out http://irbinfo.blogspot.com/ and follow references to Hamburger’s Supreme Court Review paper).  In a paper that I wrote for a Cornell Law School-hosted conference on “Bureaucracies of Virtue”, I suggested that we’d be better off (and our informants no worse off) if our work were held to account in the same ways that the work of journalists and other writers are.  As I understand the current situation, IRB reviews do not protect us or our institutions from lawsuits (that is, whether or not consent forms are involved, IRB reviews don’t prevent our interlocutors from suing us).  As things stand, many critics see IRB reviews as constituting censorship-like prior review (arguably a kind of “prior restraint”, something that the First Amendment protects against).                
 

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