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Fortunately, I was not in fact responsible for IRB approvals for all these different projects. Nonetheless, it is true that I filed many IRB updates and such, and these were extremely onerous. Paperwork itself is something to complain about in this regard, I humbly submit.

Generally, however, my sense is that in the multi-disciplinary context of HIV prevention studies, what happens is that ‘ethnography’ is submitted to some rather jarring lexical transformations. First among these is that ‘ethnography’ becomes something one ‘does.’ Anna can do the statistical analysis, and Tom will ‘do the ethnography.’ I remember encountering this locution first in the mid-90s and finding it nonsensical and nongrammatical. ‘Do ethnography’? Write ethnography, yes. Do it? It was weird.

But I soon learned that ‘doing ethnography’ in fact mostly seemed to mean: doing interviews. There was sort of conventional understanding that ethnography meant interviewing (as I remember). Certainly, say, ‘participant observation’ in the context of, um, public sex seeking in parking lots at 4 am on Saturday nights, was not really included.

Contrarily however it was also true that ‘doing ethnography’ might mean ‘qualitative research that is not interviews,’ which was another sort of black boxing of the topic. I recall both framings being salient.

In any case, all of these projects required very careful consent procedures. And, I think, rigorous or micromanaged ‘consent’ by its nature disallows some kinds of observational strategies. I actually think the black boxing of ethnography, or its reification, as a type of action that one simply ‘does’ is interesting. And I wonder if perhaps it is a tactic of evasion. By ‘doing ethnography,’ one avoids the actual specification of what one is doing: e.g., observing illegal acts (say).

There’s is much more to say here… but I have to prepare lecture!

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One of the studies conducted by the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living that didn’t make it into my book on Japanese consumer behavior but has always been a wonderful teaching example for all the issues it raises begins with two male researchers considering the question, “What is the most elementary form of selling?” [The marketing equivalent I noted to myself of Durkheim's famous question concerning the elementary form of religion.]

The answer they come up with clearly reflects a male perspective: “Men trying to pick up women.”

Then their planning continues with what seems to me a very Japanese approach: “In every field of endeavor, if you want to know what’s going on you ask the professionals.” But who are the professionals? “For the art of picking up women, it has to be the scouts who recruit women for the water trades (“water trades” is a Japanese euphemism for the sex industry).”

But how can you ask secrets from people who depend for their livelihood on activities that verge on the illegal? You can’t. So….

The researchers hired two good-looking college women, wired them up like informers in police thrillers, and sent them cruising up and down Center Street in Shibuya, a fashionable haunt for teenagers where scouts are known to look for new girls.

The output of the research was an issue of the internal newsletter published by HILL, with content largely composed of verbatim transcripts and the analysts’ comments in call-outs. There was also a discussion of tactics that took the form of an extended military metaphor: The opening bombardment to soften them up, the flanking maneuver, the siege, pressing home the attack, etc. The one concession to the sort of ethical issues with which IRB concern themselves was careful avoidance of names. Both scouts and girls were referred to with Japanese equivalents of A, B, C.

The result is a body of ethnographic information that could have considerable value to an anthropologist interested in the arts of persuasion in Japanese. Should it be ignored because the way in which it was gathered may leave some of us feeling squeamish?

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I’m reading your posts with great interest. Many thanks for helping to broaden debate about the increasingly troubling role of IRBs for fieldworkers.

One point at which the IRB and IPR debates cross is the so-called precautionary principle. In a general way, the precautionary principle seems like an admirable yardstick: do nothing that could conceivably harm your subjects. Unfortunately, if the principle is extended far enough, it can be paralyzing. After all, it’s impossible to predict how new technologies will affect people in the future or how ethnographic work from one era might be used (and abused) by another. Add to this a growing institutional fear of litigation–often under the rubric of “risk management”–and a therapeutic ethos focused on promoting self-esteem and preventing “trauma” of even the most ordinary sorts, and we find ourselves in our present fix.

Before I launched ethnographic work with New Agers in the 1990s, I was lucky to be briefed by a well-known writer of non-fiction, then my next door neighbor, about my legal vulnerabilities. The biggest risk in the US, he explained, is not libel but claims of invasion of privacy. If interviewees can plausibly assert that they didn’t know you planned to write about them, they can claim that their privacy was invaded. So he recommended taping all interviews and beginning them with a statement on the order of, “You do know, don’t you, that this interview may be part of a book that I’m writing?” Verbal assent to this provides modest protection. Nevertheless, most ethnographers go to considerable lengths to protect privacy by using pseudonyms, etc. Unfortunately, in our present situation, the _threat_ of litigation is often enough to create an institutional crisis or prevent a press from publishing a book.

My friend scoffed at the idea of handing release forms to interviewees for their signature. In his view, it instantly creates a combative, legalistic atmosphere that is anathema to good interviewing.

The New Age project illustrates the kind of ambiguous situation Rena’s original post discusses. When I went to public channeling events as an anonymous, fee-paying customer, what obligation did I have, if any, to reveal why I was there? Although I didn’t hide my ethnographic intent if asked about my goals directly, I felt that there was no presumption of privacy in such situations. One-on-one interviews were a different matter altogether, and there the usual ethical guidelines applied.

A final note: as a 25-year member of a joint anthropology-sociology department organized around a commitment to ethnography and qualitative work, I can attest to the robustness of the ethnographic tradition in sociology. Admittedly, qualitative/ethnographic sociology represents a far smaller subset of the discipline than it does in anthropology, but there’s still plenty of good work being done. It’s a pity that arbitrary disciplinary boundaries prevent more anthropologists from realizing this.

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