More on AAA ethics (and HTS)

Inside Higher Ed is running a piece updating the latest news on “attempts to revise the AAA’s ethics code”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/13/anthro to ban secret research such as that conducted by Human Terrain System employees. The article focuses on how they can word the code to allow contract archaeology and other ‘applied’ work while forbidding the sort of work that gives Hugh Gusterson the heebe jeebes. The debate over HTS temporarily stole away the ‘relevance’ meme from another never-ending debate in anthropology — that of ‘application’ and ‘jobs outside the academy’. Sounds like that issue is now re-emerging as people try to figure out how to produce formal language that will specify exactly which forms of ‘application’ are unethical.

Meanwhile, the ASA is doing a good job of continuing to blog about anthropologists at war over at “the ASA globalog”:http://blog.theasa.org/.

Alex Golub is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He studies mining and petroleum development in Papua New Guinea, as well as American culture in to the online game World of Warcraft. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org