Ethnography and research ethics

Why do anthropologists experience difficulties when it comes to research ethics regulation and governance? Research is systematic enquiry which sets out to find something out about the world in which we live and as such covers a vast topology. 1 Within this topology, social anthropological research mostly tries to understand something about the world by focusing on the people living in it with the aim of producing an ethnography. The participating and observing anthropologist starts with an idea of knowledge making that is collaborative and emergent. As such, it is dependent on the relationships established with people in a particular lifeworld (Habermas 1984) and, because these are social relationships, they are usually dependent on trust, mutuality, engagement, commitment, empathy and the ongoing cultivation of these qualities. However, epistemologies and ontologies are interwoven in complex ways in anthropological enquiry. Within the bigger picture, the relational foundation of the process of enquiry undertaken by the participant-observer does not sit comfortably with models of research that are predicated upon epistemological separation of researcher and subject at the outset. Where research ethics is concerned such approaches begin with a pre-configured notion of the ‘human subject’ as the focus of research rather than the idea of persons to be understood through direct engagement over time.

1In the UK’s last research assessment exercise ‘research’ was defined as: ‘a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared ... It includes work of direct relevance to the needs of commerce, industry, and to the public and voluntary sectors; scholarship; the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances, artefacts including design, where these lead to new or substantially improved insights; and the use of existing knowledge in experimental development to produce new or substantially improved materials, devices, products and processes, including design and construction.’ Research Excellence Framework, Assessment framework and guidance on submissions (2011)

Questions of Epistemology and Ontology?

As anthropologists hoping to produce work that will result in an ethnography, it is only relatively recently that we have found ourselves thinking and speaking the language of research. Anthropologists did fieldwork and this was the part of their practice which brought them into more or less intimate and sustained contact with people and their ways of life. Rather than ‘research on the …’ it was more appropriate to speak of ‘fieldwork among the …’. The shift is subtle but significant when it comes to deciphering some of the tangles that arise when we start to engage with research ethics and governance. ‘Research on the ….’ pushes us towards levels of systematicity and objectivity that we may not wish for and which might indeed not be possible given the nature of the research setting. The researcher is presumed to be on the outside looking in. ‘Fieldwork among the….’ on the other hand, situates the ethnographer on the inside and allows for open ended, inductive and improvisatory engagement with a lifeworld that has not been fully preempted. Here we begin with people who have to be known as social and cultural beings on their own terms from the very first encounter. Once we take this basic tenet on board it becomes clear that ‘their’ ontologies and ‘our’ epistemologies are fundamentally caught up in one another. This entanglement is not an impediment to research but, on the contrary, is essential to the dynamics of anthropological enquiry.

This view of things is likely to be exceptional for natural scientists and, perhaps, for some social scientists. Most social anthropologists, however, would have internalised it in their early years of study. It would have been delivered implicitly in the ethnographic writings that make up the disciplinary canon and rather more explicitly in courses on method and theory. Yet, as a strategy that informs systematic enquiry into the lifeworlds of others and one that gives identity to our particular disciplinary community, it seeds an incompatibility with others when it comes to research ethics. The participating and observing anthropologist starts with an idea of knowledge that is collaborative (Lassiter, 2005), an act of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004), coeval (Fabian, 1983), based on correspondence (Ingold, 2017a) and even complicity (Marcus, 1997). From the outset, there are relationships and, because they are social relationships, they are dependant on trust, mutuality, engagement, commitment, empathy and the cultivation of these and other such qualities over time. Implicated in these relationships are also notions of ethics and moral duties which may or may not coincide with those of the anthropologist (and even less with the premises of an anticipatory ethics review). The relational foundation of the process of enquiry undertaken by the participant-observer does not sit comfortably with models of research that are predicated upon epistemological separation of researcher and subject at the outset. The framing of this distinction takes us back to a classic, Weberian distinction between interpretative understanding and causal explanation which has long been used to mark out social science as something distinct from natural science (Winch 1958). We might go further in the case of ethnography and suggest that the conditions of its production are relational. As Ingold, among many others, has stated, anthropological enquiry involves studying ‘with’ people rather than just treating them as objects of study (Ingold 2017b, 23). This mode of engagement renders social anthropological enquiry exploratory, more or less open-ended and therefore always with a potential to generate unexpected social relations and forms of knowledge.

This mode of enquiry has a number of further corollaries that are not just epistemological but also political…

In work carried out on behalf of the Academy of Social Sciences, Dingwall and colleagues have attempted to identify a set of ‘common principles’ for social science research ethics (Dingwall et al 2014). The first principle they identify is that a free social science, based on a plurality of interests, funding, methods and perspectives, is fundamental to a democratic society. The starting point for this version of research ethics is not the protection of the human subject as prefigured in a genealogy of harm and abuse, but a positive vision of the social scientist exercising vital and responsible freedoms within society as well as in relation to the subjects of research (Dingwall et al 2014, 115). This perspective is less likely to confound the objective of producing good ethnography. However, it is not without its problems. The Academy of Social Sciences’ first principle envisages a researcher nested within a singular democratic context with responsible engagement as a political imperative. This is a helpful starting point but, as we will see in the section dealing with international research, anthropologists typically work across national boundaries and jurisdictions. It is, therefore, not uncommon for them to encounter not one but two (or possibly more where research is multi-sited) versions of what a researcher’s primary responsibilities are.

A further corollary of this position is that the ‘human subject’ upon whom the existing tradition of research ethics has been largely built is not quite as easily isolated as might be inferred from the documentation made available to researchers (Lederman, 2006). Anticipatory questions of who the researcher will engage with, where and under what conditions meetings will take place and what the structure and content of the exchanges are may be impossible to answer. Likewise, presumptions about autonomy, voluntarism and the nature of the individual may be confounded when pitched into settings where ideas of personhood and the ethics of interaction are configured differently. Indeed, understanding the form that relationships take might in itself be fundamental to the enquiry and not something that can, or should, be taken for granted.

The meanings of ethnography and their significance for research ethics.

The term ethnography is widely used yet carries a wide range of meanings and assumptions. Whilst the elasticity of the term is useful in enabling a wide community of researchers to think they are all talking about the same thing, it can be less useful in circumstances where it the term is presented to those outside the discipline who may be concerned with precision rather than flexibility. The discussions that might go on around ethnography and research ethics are a case in point.

It is now common for a range of disciplines to claim that ethnography is integral to their approach to research. Not only anthropologists but sociologists, geographers, educationalists, business analysts and many more besides would lay claim to ethnography as the necessary means to reveal the complexities of how people actually live in the world rather than how they are supposed to live in it. However, ethnography has different inflections when practiced across disciplines and, indeed, can give rise to different readings within the same discipline (see debate between Ingold 2008, 2014 and Da Col and Graeber 2011, Da Col 2017).

One distinction that is of some consequence when it comes to thinking about research ethics is that between ethnography as method and ethnography as text. The former usage has tended to be found in sociological approaches in which it is common to hear of doing ‘ethnography’ or ‘ethnographic fieldwork’. The identification of ethnography as a method is now widespread and has perhaps led to a rather clumsy conflation of actual methods into a singular entity - ethnography. Moreover, it is assumed that when invoked, ethnography will guarantee higher orders of perception of the worlds in which the researcher finds him or herself. Ethnography as text, however, is perhaps a more precise usage of the word and the one which is more commonly found in play among anthropologist (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos "folk, people, nation" and γράφω grapho "I write"). In this usage the term refers to the written synthesis of the researcher’s experience of the lives of others in their ‘natural’ settings. In terms of method this is usually accomplished in terms of that most productive of oxymorons: participant-observation. Yet, there are other methods that might go into the production of an ethnography: interviews (structured through to unscripted dialogues), group meetings (formal - as in focus groups - or informal), surveys, photographic and sound recording, collection of material culture and so forth.

One way in which this distinction (method vs text) is to be inferred is from the fact that one of the most successful (i.e. widely used) textbooks on ethnography is Hammersley and Atkinson’s: Ethnography: Principles in Practice. This textbook was first produced in 1983, and was targeted, in general, at a social-science and, in specific, a sociological readership. There was a second edition in 1995 and a third in 2007. It has been reprinted 10 times since the original 1983 version. There is no equivalent text for anthropologists (indeed, Hammersley and Atkinson’s book does often crop up on anthropologists’ student reading lists). Conversely, there is a tendency among anthropologists to eschew the view of ethnography as one of the tools in a box of methods in favour of seeing it as an endpoint made up of an array of engagements which culminate in a holistic account. When anthropologists’ do account for methods in the production of ethnography things are at once both less and more opaque. They are less opaque in that ethnographic accounts tend to give a full description of time, place, context, relationships and the conditions under which insights were generated. However, they are more opaque in that the alchemy of just how the written account of a world is produced is left for the reader to infer. For a novice anthropologist this can be less than helpful: one is faced with multiple accounts of ‘what I did’ without me actually telling you and ‘how I did it’ and with little clue as to how this might be related to how you are going to do it.

The relevance of this brief excursion into the speciation of ethnography for research ethics is that it highlights a number of paradoxes which need to be thought about when navigating the ethics landscape even if they can’t be resolved: On the one hand, ethnography as method is likely to be discomfiting because we are resistant to thinking of it in fragmentary terms; to do so would impinge upon our commitment to holism and the fact that things come all of a piece! To see things in this chopped up in this way would be to subscribe to a view which sees the world as data, and research methods as merely about different ways of extracting that data. The approach predisposes one to carry out ‘research upon’ rather than ‘fieldwork among’. On the other hand, replacing this view with the idea of ethnography as an endpoint instantiated in text leaves open the charge that what anthropologists do when they do research is not accountable in terms of just how knowledge of an ‘other’ was generated.

The question of whether ethnography is treated as an ensemble of specifiable encounters or as a methodological black box, impenetrable to external scrutiny is an important one and particularly when filling out an ethics application form. What the members of an REC are going to be interested in is whether, on the basis of the information you have supplied, your research will cause harm (and possibly harm in the sense of gross and obvious damage). To supply them with an account which conflates ethnography as text with the methods you will use to produce that text will give the impression that we can know nothing of fieldwork in advance. This way of presenting things is unlikely to pass muster with an ethics committee. To do their job they need to know in broad terms the particular strategies that you will bring into play to accomplish meaningful engagement with your subjects. Whilst this can never be known precisely in advance, it is possible to present it in ways that give it enough of an outline to enable a REC to make an informed judgement regarding the things that they are charged with responsibility for.

Are we dealing with human subjects or social subjects?

In an earlier publication, Simpson attempted to clarify the conceptual genealogy that has led to this particular construction of the ‘human subject’ that underpins the REC approach to research ethics (Simpson 2010). This analysis posed a distinction between an ‘ethics of the body (that comes with a person attached)’ and ‘an ethics of the person (that comes with a body attached)’. The former emerges out a tradition of medical research ethics that was established following the discovery of experiments carried out on the inmates of concentration camps throughout the period of the Third Reich. In circumstances of total confinement, human beings were subjected to degrading, painful and often lethal experiments involving infection with diseases such as malaria and typhoid, poisoning, subjection to extremes of pressure, cold and altitude (Lifton 1988, Weindling 2005). The full extent of the systematic abuse and murder of inmates was brought to the attention of the world in the so-called doctors’ trials that began at Nuremberg on 19th August 1947. One outcome of the trials was the much vaunted Nuremberg Code. Consisting of ten principles that would henceforth inform the practice of medical research, this was just one of many subsequent international projects, such as the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (1964 and revisions in 1975, 1983, 1989,1996, 2000 and 2008) intended to ensure the future protection of human subjects(Macfarlane 2009). These canonical and universal principles concerned the voluntary participation of research subjects, the need to justify research on humanitarian grounds, a consideration of risks and hazards, efforts to minimise distress, injury and death, right of free withdrawal from research, and an obligation to end the research if subjects show signs of distress. The paradigm shift which the Nuremberg Trials ushered in brought into focus the relationship between the human subject and the doctor or scientist. In so doing, it highlighted the existence of the camps, not merely as a ‘state of exception’, but as a stable one in which totalitarian power could strip away rights, identity, citizenship and nationhood to create a condition of ‘bare life’, that is, one of absolute and abject vulnerability (Agamben 1998:171). As a way of reversing this catastrophic power imbalance, the Nuremberg Code placed at its centre the idea that the subjects of medical therapy or research should never again be reduced to the status of a ‘life that does not deserve to live’ (ibid 136). The mechanism to achieve this was to place a responsibility on the global medical and scientific community to elicit the freely-given consent of the subject. Implicit in this process, there is, as Kelly suggests, a redirection of the flow of power from the doctor to the patient (Kelly 2003:184). Over time, the elicitation of this particular form of agency in the face of science, research and the state has been refined and elaborated such that gaining informed consent has now become the sine qua non of ethical research practice. In the passing back and forth of information, forms and signatures which makes up the ritual of ‘consent taking’, what is made visible is the ‘human subject’ or what Lambek has characterised as ‘the forensic person’, that is, the one that will be held to account or, indeed, will be capable of holding others to account for things done to them in the future (Lambek 2013). In medical ethics, and in the approach to research ethics it has engendered, there is an underlying corporeality in play. In a grand Cartesian projection, agents are brought forth to exercise sovereignty over their bodies. The dualism is further reinforced by a neo-Kantian ethics which emphasises the rights and independence of the autonomous person. This paradigm has come to be the yardstick, not only when it comes to evaluating the ethics of research in the medical sciences, but also in a range of other disciplines which have human subjects as their research focus. In this paradigm, the evocation of Nuremberg remains a powerful nomos; whatever the disciplinary practice in question, it is a difficult proposition to ignore if to do so amounts to placing oneself in a position of ‘sovereign power’ in relation to ‘bare life’.

Whilst it is entirely appropriate to attach the research ethics governing human experimentation to the excesses perpetrated in the camps, we would question the degree to which this is helpful for research that falls outside of the experimental paradigm. Whilst anthropologists engage with subjects that are indeed human, they would not normally think of themselves as studying ‘human subjects’ in the sense outlined above, nor as part of a legacy of experimentation. Yet, this framing of the ‘human subject’ is one that crops up widely in the material and procedural forms that research governance takes. The vocabulary of subjectivation, in the sense of the constitution of mutual identities, is far richer and ranges through informants, providers of information, interlocutors, research participants, consociates, collaborators, consultants, hosts and friends to list just a few of the terms that appear in ethnographic accounts. All of these suggest relationships with persons for which the reduction to a corporeal ethics may prove unhelpful. The usage brings into question the ‘skin bound individual as the natural boundary of the total person’ (Battaglia 1999:235). The anthropologist, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes part of a relational field and, as a moral agent, is subject to evaluation by those whom he or she engages with when in the ‘field’. By means of their own processes of ‘counter-subjectivation’, those who we might otherwise objectify as ‘human subjects’ are apt to locate the researcher in terms of motive, intent and the level of threat or danger that their presence brings, now and in the future (Carrithers 2005, Simpson 2005).

If a philosophical progenitor were needed for the ethics of this kind of research, the job might well fall to Emmanuel Levinas. Out of his differences with Heidegger, Levinas developed a radical challenge to the mainstream of twentieth century philosophy and its emphasis on the ‘solitude of being’. As with the corporo-centric philosophy of research ethics outlined above, Levinas’ world view was forged out of the horrors of the concentration camps of the Third Reich. However, his philosophy was not intended to separate out a being linked to universal laws and indexed to abstract justice, but one which had at its centre the primacy of the ‘infinite obligation to the other person’ and, by extension, the centrality of hospitality in the interaction between those who wish to become something more than strangers. In his philosophy there is a call to responsibility for the other; ‘an ethical relation with alterity’ (Hand 1989:6). Within this genealogy of ethics, the locus is no longer the body separated off as an object which might be the subject of harm but a much more radical idea of the priority of existence as constituted in ‘face-to-face’ relationships. Such an ethics begins with a responsibility, not just for the physical bodies of others, but for the social life by which they are connected. It is an approach that takes us beyond a rule-based notion of ethics and into a terrain in which the skill of the researcher lies in developing and managing relations founded on trust, respect and an avoidance of delimiting the subject. In short, the endpoint of this kind of engagement is not the body but the complex and dynamic relational worlds that anthropologists enter and in which people live and exercise their own ethical and emotional sensibilities, realise deliberative strategies and do so with the benefit of accumulated experience and knowledge. What constitutes harm, insult and abuse is not something that can be presumed in advance but is emergent from the encounter. These details are not merely to be passed through on the way to the body; they are the very fabric of relations that the anthropologist is setting out to engage in, understand and describe.

Such perspectives pose significant challenges for governance regimes that have been built upon the notion of a body that needs protection, but which now encompass research that extends beyond bodies per se and takes in social interactions of every kind. In practice, the tools to hand lack the subtlety needed to handle the ethical complexities of context and encounter that anthropological fieldwork typically generates {see Caplan 2003, Meskell and Pels 2005, Faubion 2009, Fluehr-Lobban 2003, Armbruster and Laerke 2008}. For example, in seeking informed consent about anything that concerns collectivities and the relationships of which they are made up, one might ask who owns the relationship? How do people know what they can legitimately give permission for and how can consent given at any one point keep pace with the changing kaleidoscope of relations that characterises social ‘reality’? In a discipline which aspires to treat lifeworlds holistically, how can the researcher or the interlocutor know what might be meaningfully circumscribed by an informed consent transaction. In trying to answer such questions, anthropologists are concerned that the current framing of ethics review and informed consent procedures will result in the fragmentation and, indeed, the closing down of possibilities for ethnographic engagement before the research has even commenced. For example, the interview as a key methodological tool appears to be gaining greater prominence in anthropological accounts. One explanation that might be put forward is that, as a time-bound, pre-configured and auditable transaction, the interview corresponds appropriately with the logic of ethics review and researchers are articulating their research practices accordingly. As a consequence, there is a danger of the part (the interview) standing in for the methodological whole, leading to a vitiated form of ethnography.

In the foregoing, we have outlined some of the epistemological roots of the difficulties that social anthropologists encounter when locating their disciplinary practices within the current landscape of research regulation and governance. At this point, we might say that our job is done. We have rehearsed a widely held position and in a way that will be familiar and, indeed, reassuring to many. However, it is at this point that our work actually begins. Those embarking on an anthropological enquiry still have to deal with oversight and approvals coming from various directions. There is always the option, of course, of seeing these as mere bureaucratic and institutional impositions that can be sidestepped and ignored. However, becoming ‘outlaws’ (Katz 2006:499) may not be the best way to achieve one’s objectives. Many of the settings in which anthropologists now operate could not be accessed without formal ethical approval, and questions of positionality and responsibility are of paramount and growing importance. Fieldwork is no longer a simple dyadic transaction between the anthropologist and those that constitute the ‘field’ but a triad, the third element being the regulatory structures and processes within which projects are now hedged at all stages, especially in the Anglophone countries. The situation faced by researchers as we see it is not dissimilar to the one put forward by Becker and Geer in a classic and rather sobering piece entitled the ‘The fate of idealism in medical school’ (Becker and Geer 1958 and - with thanks to Robert Dingwall for recalling this essay). Here, they document a move from idealism to cynicism on the part of medical trainees as the pragmatic requirements of the profession become more salient in their daily practice. As far as social anthropologists and regulation is concerned, the knack would seem to be one of preserving idealism, not as an alternative to the pragmatics of working in the academy, but despite it. This, we believe, is why there is a need for an overview of the landscape as we present it here. It is to enable researchers to work out their own ethical position as this impinges upon the people they work with and as their research unfolds over time.

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