The AAA has taken the lastest steps in revising its ethics code. Although there doesn’t seem to be anything on the website (they might be too busy “migrating AnthroSource content out of AnthroSource and back into AnthroSource”:http://www.aaanet.org/publications/anthrosource/February-2009-AnthroSource-Migration-Update.cfm again, this month) there is coverage at “The Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=pqhfrfj6Xm6rjk2qxRqcmqvV5jFQxmwK and “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/19/anthro. In related news, the Washington Post has a long article on the already well-covered “death of Paula Loyd”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/17/AR2009021703382.html?referrer=emailarticle and there is a longish op-ed on “The Hows and Whys of HTS”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/19/humanterrain running on Inside Higher Ed today.
22 thoughts on “Latest AAA Ethics and Human Terrain Roundup”
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I hope Montgomery McFate gets the credit she deserves for these serious changes to the AAA ethics code (I wouldn’t want to be her at a SFAA meeting). Heck of a job Montgomery, heck of a job!
As an applied anthropologist I’m mighty pissed at her because she’s screwed things up so bad that now when I produce private reports on consumers for corporate sponsors, I stand to be accused of unethical practice. Couldn’t the ethics committee just come up with a list of bad organizations like the CIA, Pentagon, or NSA and just say that anthropologists cannot ethically work for them? It would seem better than this approach.
I assume your list of “bad organisations” is a tongue in cheek suggestion? As many would say that (at least some) corporate clients are “bad organisations”. For example, I would not find it ethically acceptible for myself to work in marketing, because I don’t think that convincing people to buy things that they don’t need is a good thing to do (and that is what a lot of marketing – after a couple of pints I would probably argue all marketing – does). But I wouldn’t like to see a professional organisation list corporations as “no-nos” because I think that people need to be free to make those ethical decisions themselves. So all a professional organisation can do is try and find guidelines that keep anthropologists accountable for their actions. Whether these guidelines do that or not is another matter…
Thanks to G.A. and to Richard for raising these issues. From my perspective, as someone who works in advertising, G.A. brings up an entirely legitimate concern. Corporate clients commission research because they are looking for new angles, for something that will give them a competitive edge. When they pay for the research, they own the results and control the use made of them. This is standard business practice, and any rule that requires that all research results be made public will result in either the destruction of applied anthropology in business or the professional ostracizing of its practitioners. But Richard is also right. Any attempt to develop a blacklist of corporations or other organizations will, in practice, be equally prejudicial.
There may, however, be a way out of this bind. I observe first that, considered as a competitive edge, most research has only a limited lifespan. Once developed into new products or advertising, any insights produced by research become, of necessity, public. I also note that corporate clients are familiar with contractual limitations on the use of intellectual property. The use of an image or piece of music may, for example, be restricted in terms of media, geography, dates, etc.
The first of these observations suggests a scheme that I proposed last year at a conference in Taipei. It seems to me that it would be a win-win proposition for advertising agencies and other corporations to archive research and make it available for scholarly purposes once it has ceased to be of competitive value. There would be an immediate PR benefit for corporate data donors, coupled with the potential of scholarly reanalysis to suggest new approaches for future research projects. On the anthropologist’s (or other scholar’s side) there would be access to results of research conducted on a scale that academic grants, at least in the social sciences and humanities, can rarely, if ever, match.
Coming, then, to the second observation: Negotiating the usage conditions for the data and the results produced by it will, I expect, be a tricky and protracted business, especially in areas where data may retain value over long periods of time (for example, personal transaction histories used in data mining; think Amazon book recommendations). Still, if anthropology could find its own Lawrence Lessig, some progress might be made toward developing standard contracts involving confidential use for limited periods and purposes followed by public disclosure.
This clears things up.
Anthropologists seem to mostly have four basic choices.
1. The McFate Solution (do whatever we want without regard to ethics, all secrecy is fine, “THIS IS WAR!” etc.).
2. The Bad Organizations Solution (identify bad organizations that anthropologists should not work for, CIA, NSA, IBM, Human Terrain etc.).
3. The Time Release Proprietary Solution (reports made for CIA & Ad Agencies are made available to public after the public have been “impacted” AKA damaged by these studies).
4. Open Anthropology (not keeping reports secret from those being reported on).
All of these make things convenient for some, but not others, but only Open Anthropology does anything to look out for those being subjected to anthropological study. Choice 4 is the only one that primarily looks out for the interests of people being studied, so it would seem to be the only one doing what research ethics are supposed to do.
“Choice 4 is the only one that primarily looks out for the interests of people being studied, so it would seem to be the only one doing what research ethics are supposed to do.”
Agreed. I am less concerned with the bottom line of corporations than I am with how “data” about “subjects” are being put to use. It makes sense to me that people can have access to research that is about them.
In the best of all possible worlds, the pure as driven snow anthropologist could do nothing but utterly harmless research with collaborators who are fully cognizant of what the anthropologist is up to and what is being said about them. Heaven it would be. But in this all-too-real world of ours?
A growing number of anthropologists, unable to find academic employment or unwilling to spend their lives in the academic proletariat called adjunct positions, are finding employment with corporations or government agencies. Shall we ban them from the discipline? Should we treat them as pariahs?
Alternatively, should we recognize that, while people who pay for research expect to own the results, they may be amenable to discussing limitations on the rights that ownership entails? Some may try to insist on the neoliberal wet dream of absolute, eternal and irrevocable property rights. Some may wish to keep confidential or to retain exclusive rights in results in which they see a competitive edge for a specified amount of time, on the model of copyrights and patents. Others may recognize that what, borrowing the language of IT, I will call “open source” research is a good idea. Individuals will choose who they work for and be judged accordingly. Anthropology as a whole will reserve judgment, as we already do in the case of headhunters who take real heads or other folk whose customs or habits may strike us, from our personal moral perspectives as beastly. And who knows? Anthropology may not decline into a jumble of obscure hobbies that, except for a small fandom, the world finds mainly irrelevant.
John: I honestly don’t see how you continue to hold onto this idea that ethics concerns on the part of anthropology necessarily limit anthropology’s relevance. Yes, some balance does need to be struck between practical concerns and idealistic desires, but I don’t think we must abandon all ethics — and a “situational” ethics like you’re basically advocating here is not really an ethics — in order to be relevant.
I also wonder where this world of non-judgmental anthropologists is. Relativism demands withholding judgment, not abandoning it. I’d say the work of someone like David Price provides more than enough data to start to make effective judgments without worrying about losing our relativistic street cred.
Dustin,
Ethics are a relevant concern in every area of life. Where we may disagree is in the attempt to define absolute boundaries for ethical behavior in a world of many colors besides black and white.
On the whole, I agree with Richard Rorty that, speaking as a pragmatist, I feel an obligation to maximize opportunity and minimize suffering. I do not engage in research that threatens physical or other material harm to the people whose lives I study.
Neither, however, do I base my judgments on crude stereotypes of corporate activities. In the case at hand, I believe that organizations that engage researchers to perform proprietary research are entitled to what they pay for. I also know that, at least as far as advertising and marketing are concerned, the value paid for normally declines to zero within a year or two–far more quickly, in fact, than most academic research is published and that, if asked politely by people they trust, market researchers are not averse to having scholars use their results for purposes other than selling soap or cars or whatever.
What I strenuously object to is the casual conflation of anthropologists participating in things like the Phoenix program in Vietnam, where people got killed, with, say, the work of Rita Denny and Patricia Sunderland, on differences in expression of emotion in ads produced in the U.K, Australia, and New Zealand. The former is clearly evil, but not, to me because the individuals involved were anthropologists. It is evil because the act was betrayal and being an accessory to murder. The latter is harmless, as well as to me very interesting, from several work-related and other professional perspectives.
I recall the wisdom of John Wager, a philosopher and ex-Marine, I believe, who hangs out on lit-ideas. There are, he notes, no moral decisions without ambiguity. If everything is black and white, there are no decisions to be made.
@GA: I agree Mcfate has done us all a favor. Thanks be to Mcfate!
@Richard: If corporate clients are “bad organizations”, then lets add them to our list of bad organizations we shouldn’t work for.
@Dick Wadd: You are correct, 4 is the only ethical stance, the rest line the pockets of anthropologists at the expense of others.
@McCreery: Whatever it is that you are doing, it may or may not be anthropology (it sounds like business being performed by someone who once studied anthropology; that doesn’t make it anthropology), but it certainly isn’t ethical anthropology if you read the latest version of the AAA Code of Ethics.
Well, let’s see, articles in Ethnology and American ethnologist, several book chapters, two in anthropology readers that target undergraduates, a book on Japanese consumer behavior. Current project combines social network analysis with desk research, depth interviews and a bit over two decades of observer-participant experience in the industry, in an effort to understand the world of the top creators whose ads win prizes in a major advertising contest in Japan. Not too shabby for an independent scholar, and I challenge you to find even one violation of the AAA Code of Ethics.
Please do note rule 1 of effective fieldwork; good anthropologists do not jump to conclusions.
That last reply, to Brickmeiser, was a bit on the snarky side. For those who may wonder what kind of research an anthropologist who makes his living as a translator and copywriter in the fringes of the Japanese ad industry can do, I offer the following thoughts from the conclusion of a presentation I gave last year to the Anthropology of Japan in Japan (AJJ) spring workshop.
bq. On Anthro-L an argument has once again erupted, pitting those who defend science against postmodern critique with those, like me who believe the critique should be taken seriously — without abandoning the methods that have made science the most powerful knowledge-generating tool in human history.
bq. In my own case, I believe strongly that the proper response to the postmodern critique is to embrace it and think about how to do something approximating science in an intensely personal way. So I try to do research that both (1) systematically collects data and constantly questions hypotheses and (2) shows a proper respect for the individuality of the people who collaborate with me and the circumstances in which our lives intersect.
bq. So, for example, in my current project I take advantage of data collected for other purposes that allow me to identify precisely [using the tools of Social Network Analysis] the people with whom a copywriter named Maki Jun worked on winning ads in 2001 and situate them on a map of relationships that tie the top of an industry together. But I don’t want to leave Maki as nothing more than a labeled node in a network analysis diagram. I want people to know that, like me, he grew up beside the sea and played the trombone in a high school band. They should also know that he has recently published a book suggesting that advertising copy, with its business suit removed, is a new form in a long tradition of one-line poetry that includes haiku, tanka, and senryu, all traditional forms of poetry for which Japanese literature is justly renowned. He is a man addicted, as I am, to wordplay and a genuine master of the art.
bq. Maki’s latest book is prefaced with the line _kotoba no happa wa, itsuka ki ni naru mori ni naru_ (the leaves on words sometimes become a forest), which pivots on his substitution of the Chinese character for “tree” for the usual character for “breath” in the phrase ki ni naru, turning “notice and are concerned about” into “become trees, become a forest” (a more literal way to translate the way the line ends). The whole thing is set off because the ba in kotoba (word) is written with the Chinese character for “leaf.” So the whole thing might have been rendered “The leaves in “spoken-leaves” (words) sometimes become trees, become forests.”
bq. Today, I use Maki as an example because I had the privilege of meeting with him a few days ago and am in a glow because he has agreed to lend a hand with my project. But, returning to our starting point, what I love about this research is that the way it uses both the numerate and literate sides of my brain and produces both the elegance of the structural diagrams and insight into the thoughts and lives of some truly extraordinary people. That’s anthropology to me.
@McCreery: When I wrote that ‘Whatever it is that you are doing, it may or may not be anthropology…but it certainly isn’t ethical anthropology if you read the latest version of the AAA Code of Ethics.’ I wasn’t asking you to summarize your CV. I was observing the fact that if you are writing secret reports for your advertising bosses that research participants can’t see then you are doing unethical work that does not conform to the current AAA code of ethics that says: “Anthropologists should not withhold research results from research participants when those results are shared with others. There are specific and limited circumstances…”
This argument seems to be about how much like a priesthood anthropology should be. If the answer is ‘a lot’, then the presbyters get to decide if John qualifies as a lay brother or not.
Brickmeister, you sound like a religious fundamentalist railing against a guy who grins at the fundamentalist’s rant and mixes himself another drink. But that doesn’t bother me as much as the thought that if the the AAA’s Code of Ethics is properly construed in the way that you have done, anthropology is done as a discipline. Other folks will take the useful bits and do with them what they will. The exotic hobbies of those left behind will cease to be funded. Have you read Kerim’s latest post on what’s happening in Florida?
Not saying mind you that trumpeting anthro participation in HTS is a great sales pitch. My judgment is that it’s pretty feeble. What I am saying is that people who try to be holier than thou generally wind up sounding like hypocrites. Consider, for example, Luke Lassiter’s recommendation in _The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography_ that anthropologists should get their collaborators agreement to what the anthropologist writes about them. Sound nice, doesn’t it, if you start from the assumption that the people you work with are helpless victims otherwise taken advantage of. Apply the same rule to a journalist writing about a politician or business leader—the phrase is “selling out.”
Seems to me that the better rule is the one that Dan Sperber advocates. Be clear in your writing that (1) this is what they said and (2) this is what I think about it. Don’t attribute your views to them.
But this is wandering away from the topic, the status of confidential research. It can be evil; no question about it, trying out drugs on patients who don’t know what might happen to them is bad. But what about the people who take placebos? Do they have to be told the results of the study?
In my experience, and as the cv indicates I’ve had a lot of it, most marketing research is harmless — exploring people’s preferences for different brands of beer or testing possible headlines or visual concepts doesn’t hurt anybody. Plus, if anything useful comes of it, everyone gets to see the result. It isn’t hidden away in obscure academic journals of whose very existence participants in focus groups or surveys are 99 and 44/100% unaware.
What galls me is wondering how it is that anthropologists, supposed to be the most non-judgmental and forgiving folks on the face of the planet, have become afraid of their own shadows, given to appealing to extreme cases (yes, the Phoenix program stank and the participants should have been drawn and quartered) to write rules that MAKE NO EXCEPTIONS, forgetting the lawyer’s maxim that hard cases make bad law and the common law insistence on ameliorating judgment with consideration of circumstances.
And then these innocents abroad pretend to be able to school the rest of us on how the world works? Ridiculous.
i dont understands why carl thinks only a priesthood should have ethics. ethics protect the interests of people studied by anthropologists. the aaa ethics code clearly states that all “anthropologists should not withhold research results from research participants when those results are shared with others,” this isn’t for a priesthood, it is for all of us.
the aaa’s membership just voted in a landslide vote to make judgments against the work of military and commercial anthropologists not making their work public. i don’t know if mccreery’s work includes writing reports that research subjects cannot read, but if he does his work is outside the bounds of the aaa’s ethics code. read the code, if it doesnt meet your understanding of ethical work, best to join the society for applied anthropology, or a madison avenue interest group.
@Brickmeiser et al. Actually, if you read the code of ethics (at least according to the Inside Higher Ed. link) it has qualifiers for intellectual property… Since pretty much anything can be made intellectual property nowadays, the code of ethics doesn’t mean that much, does it? In fact, the new wording is much vaguer then is being implied here, and ends on “3. Anthropologists must weigh the intended and potential uses of their work and the impact of its distribution in determining whether limited availability of results is warranted and ethical in any given instance.” Which seems to be a roundabout way of saying “decide for yourself”
bq.that doesn’t bother me as much as the thought that if the the AAA’s Code of Ethics is properly construed in the way that you have done, anthropology is done as a discipline. Other folks will take the useful bits and do with them what they will. The exotic hobbies of those left behind will cease to be funded. Have you read Kerim’s latest post on what’s happening in Florida?
Doom and Gloom! Far out, what a lot of rubbish. I conduct research that many ‘utility’ oriented anthropologists would consider an ‘exotic hobby’ and yet I keep securing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of (usually government) funding. A condition of that funding is often that I share the results with locals (who for the most part are only politely interested). I have colleagues who are doing research in exotic locales that fulfils academic interest, but also actually benefits local people through the ethical sharing of results, and is funded to the tune of millions of dollars over decades.
Strict ethics is not why the Florida dept is under threat: that is because of free market capitalist models of education.
bq.In my experience,… most marketing research is harmless—exploring people’s preferences for different brands of beer or testing possible headlines or visual concepts doesn’t hurt anybody. Plus, if anything useful comes of it, everyone gets to see the result.
As checksum notes the issue is not whether you consider the research harmless, but whether the results are withheld from participants as in the case of proprietary research. ‘Seeing the result’ in the form of a glossy advertising campaign is not quite the same thing.
Personally I do not find marketing research unethical, as long as the informants/participants are aware of how the information they give will be used. This is standard practice. But in the ‘priesthood’ model it is not really Anthropology.
Tim,
Congratulations. My only niggle is that I was imagining the consequences if the strict construction asserted by Brickmeiser were valid, not making an assertion about how we do muddle through with our varying degrees of success.
Also, I wasn’t asserting that strict ethics were the source of Florida’s problems, which has a lot to do with yahoos in the state legislature. Whether those legislators are simply local embodiments of “free market capitalist models of education” is a plausible-sounding but debatable proposition. Be that as it may, it still seems to me that the strict-constructionist, anti-government, anti-corporatist view of anthropological ethics would leave the department in an even weaker position vis-a-vis its political opponents and competitors for survival. Again, however, a hypothetical scenario, not an assertion about the current state of the world.
Maniaku,
It is interesting that you note that “pretty much anything can be made intellectual property nowadays.” Here, I believe, we come to a serious concern. The debate that led to The Code of Ethics may have originated in the notion that anthropologists should not only do no harm and been colored by the idea that anthropologists should be ashamed for ripping off local cultures and building careers through what may be interpreted as rampant exploitation. There is no denying, however, that the debate takes on increased urgency as, for example, Native Americans assert intellectual property rights to songs, rituals, dances, therapies, recipes, etc., in a way that converges with the claims of lawyers representing Disney, which wants to assert an eternal and inviolable right to control all uses of, for example, Mickey Mouse. It isn’t just that anthropologists want to be the nice guys; increasingly they are likely to be caught in the middle, not just on real battlefields but legal ones as well.
Finally, to Checksum.
I don’t do market research. I make a living translating and, more rarely, helping to formulate marketing strategies or write advertising copy based on market research. The people I study and write about qua independent scholar include both market researchers and advertising creatives, who are, in every sense of the term, professional peers (some much smarter and far more successful than I am). I make a regular practice of showing them what I write about them–as a matter of professional courtesy and, more importantly, to make sure that I am not misinterpreting what they have told me. They are fully aware that I may write things about them that surprise or annoy them; but in this respect I am no different from the critics who pan or praise their work in the trade press or mass media.
This situation does shape a perspective that is bound to be different from, for example, Nancy Schlepper-Hughes writing about poor people who lead quite ghastly lives in Northeast Brazil or Robert Dejarlais writing about the residents of a Boston homeless shelter. Were I in their shoes, I would be deeply concerned about my ability or lack thereof to do something for the individuals who have shared their lives with me. I might even, like Ruth Behar in _Translated Woman_ publicly reflect on the moral ambiguity of the relationship between a poor Mexican woman and a professor at the University of Michigan. But, no, I write from my own experience, which tells me that Frank Cancian was right, all those years ago: Play straight with people, show a genuine interest in them and what they do; do no harm. You will learn a lot and behave in an ethical manner as well.
@ checksum, I’ll not presume to tell a bunch of anthropologists how priesthoods work, or anyone interested here who presumably has read Geertz’ “Religion as a Cultural System.” (As we all know, this was one of the famous series of “X as a Cultural System” articles by Geertz, including “Ideology as a Cultural System,” “Laundry as a Cultural System,” and “My Left Nut as a Cultural System,” culminating in the magnificent “Culture as a Cultural System.”)
We historians also tell other people’s stories for a living, only ours are all dead. So we don’t worry about checking in with them about it, but we do still think it’s important to get the story straight. “Be clear in your writing that (1) this is what they said and (2) this is what I think about it. Don’t attribute your views to them” is pretty good as a functional ethic in our world.
bq. I conduct research that many ‘utility’ oriented anthropologists would consider an ‘exotic hobby’ and yet I keep securing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of (usually government) funding. A condition of that funding is often that I share the results with locals (who for the most part are only politely interested). I have colleagues who are doing research in exotic locales that fulfils academic interest, but also actually benefits local people through the ethical sharing of results, and is funded to the tune of millions of dollars over decades.
Tim, please tell us more. Success story details can be ever so much more useful in this kind of discussion than Punch and Judy battles conducted with hypotheticals that are too often, I freely admit, what plastic models are to real weapons.
An invitation to toot my horn on someone else’s blog? Pass. But for fun I quickly googled ‘anthropology cv funding’ and immediately came across the cv and home page of one Ralph A. Litzinger (sorry Ralph) at Duke, whose work seems to epitomise what I referred to: ethically engaged research that fulfils academic curiosity and has ‘utility’, and brings in the research bucks. The balance between those things will vary for different individuals (my own work is more heavily weighted to curiosity and brings in less $$ for example) but overall I don’t think the picture Litzinger’s cv paints is all that uncommon for mid and late career academics.
“The McFate Solution (do whatever we want without regard to ethics, all secrecy is fine, “THIS IS WAR!” etc.). ”
I can’t believe no one called this out yet. This is such a gross misrepresentation of any form of official HTS guidelines, that it needs to be called out.
That statement literally means that HTS members have no ethical grounding in their professional behavior. Please educate yourself.
Also, it is assumed that the HTS is fully accepted by the military, but that is a wrong assumption. A military argument, which makes more sense than anything I’ve read from the AAA can be read here: http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC2/MilitaryReview/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20090430_art010.pdf
As a former army PSYOP soldier, which was mentioned in that article many times, and an anthropologist, I have to agree with it. Our military’s organic resources to create what they like to call “cultural warriors,” needs to be built up and give more authority, rather than having HTT’s. However, in my experience, I don’t have a lot of faith that a lack of HTS would prompt the army to do that.
Also, the other assumption that marketing=advertising, is also wrong. Marketing is a very wide field that encompasses everything from what a company should provide, to how much it should sell it for, where to sell it, and how to ensure customer satisfaction. All very necessary social needs. If it wasn’t for advertising, you would have no way to know what goods and services that you want are available, unless everything you have ever bought can be classified as “useless shit.”