Since we are in the throes of completing our MA fieldwork proposals and applying for IRB approval for our projects this summer, I thought I'd share a little reflection from the anthroblog "Savage Minds." (The photo here is mine -- a little test in posting photos for future reference....)Educate your IRB (a boilerplate experiment)
1. Virtual versus real ethics: creating alternatives to cynicism and disengagement
Very few anthropologists confuse IRB reviews with the “real” ethical work involved in a field project. Anthropologists of all theoretical stripes understand that participant observation-based fieldwork involves the long-term cultivation of social relationships as both the medium and the substantive content of the work. What is more, we know that this cultivation of social relationships must proceed in important respects on ones informants’ terms—not on the researcher’s terms (as is the case in interview-based and experimental social science). Because participant observers aren’t in control of the research process, the ethical challenges that they face in their projects cannot be known in advance and preplanned except in the most general—therefore ultimately vague and inaccurate—ways.
Because participant observation is a necessarily non-methodical method in the preceding paragraph’s sense, IRBs’ mandated insistence on prospective reviews of research designs set anthropologists up to fudge, circumlocute, and fake their descriptions of project “design”, “subject selection”, “informed consent”, and the rest.
That is, so long as structures of ethical accountability are only imaginable in the form of managerial auditing (using unitary compliance criteria external to the historically elaborated disciplinary standards of good practice), practitioners will be forced to simulate consilience with the regulatory ideal so as to appear compliant, cooperative, and transparent—therefore ethical—to their local IRBs.
This is a prescription for cynicism and disengagement as Chris Kelty made clear in his post last year and others have confirmed. That would be bad enough, if there weren’t also the sense that our efforts to satisfy our local IRBs have begun to take up so much intellectual space that it is crowding out conversations about “real” field ethics that we ought to be having with one another and our students.
