Abstract
Everyone who has anything to do with fieldwork should read this book. To my knowledge there is no other work, which so clearly demonstrates the kinds of ethical dilemmas that occur routinely in the field, in all their everyday, messiness. The volume consists of a series of essays and reflections on the ways in which the authors, the fieldworkers, have influenced the lives of the ‘fieldworked’. The editors, who themselves are eminent scholars, have attracted some highly acclaimed researchers of long experience who variously work within the disciplines of primatology, social anthropology and biological anthropology. This book constitutes their lived experience and it is a credit to them that they should present their own ethical journeys with such candour.
MacClancy and Fuentes begin with the stated aim of creating cross talk between fieldwork disciplines, of facilitating trans-disciplinary comparisons and of highlighting the commonalities and differences in the kinds of moral dilemma that practitioners are faced with at their particular coal faces. Despite the fact that the array of examples is dizzyingly disparate, there are some fascinating comparisons to be made. Primatologists worry about leaving the field because their presence may have inadvertently protected study animals from predation, human or otherwise, such that the study group may have expanded in size and range. When the safeguard goes, will the study group adjust and survive? Anthropologists worry about the effects their probing might have on the emotional wellbeing of their subjects, particularly when investigating sensitive areas like contested illnesses, mental health and sexual orientation. They become involved in the suffering of their informants and may raise awareness of traumas past and present. So they too worry about when they can say goodbye to participants without leaving them emotionally vulnerable. These researchers have in vastly different ways become the unintentional carers of the fieldworked.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, ‘leaving the field’ is not an aspect of fieldwork that gets much attention from the UK’s University Research Ethics Committees nor from the USA’s International Review Boards. But wait before any of you would-be regulators drum up frameworks around leaving the field. The one common finding across field sites from forest fragments in Uganda or Caratinga, Brazil, to the homes of new fathers, and London’s sexual health clinics, is that ethical dilemmas are contingent upon context and cannot be predetermined.
One of the most hair-raising and perhaps illuminating examples of all lies in the experience of Parker and Allen who worked within the global health arena in Africa. A project designed to distribute free drugs to populations deemed at risk of common parasitic diseases did not fulfil its stated aims because of the ways in which the drugs were distributed. Yet, once these observations were brought to the attention of regulators, local state authorities and funders, each passed the buck or fudged the conclusions in some way. Here discussions of ethics had little or nothing to do with protecting the vulnerable and much more to do with protecting researcher and funder. At certain points high in the chain of authority, ethics were cited as a means of controlling the kinds of information that should be elicited from study populations and made public. Such references on the part of major players introduced a vague notion of moral authority allowing them to act as gatekeepers while deflecting attention from areas of ignorance and/or elements of research protocols that some may find unethical in themselves.
The sum of this experience leads Parker and Allen to conclude that ethics can be used to support established power hierarchies and that ever more detailed regulatory frameworks do not help. Just as MacClancy and Fuentes argue in their introductory piece, moralities are indeed multiple and all absolutes are relative.
I imagined when I began reading this text that it was largely aimed at the practising fieldworker. This book is more important than that. Clearly it will appeal to anyone working within anthropological or conservation based disciplines, but it will encourage scholars and students of virtually any discipline, even journalists, to think about the effects of their work. More, much more, this volume should be required reading for anyone who ever sits on an ethics committee.