Seven years ago, Susan C. Dewey met a sex worker in Armenia who needed help regaining custody of her children.
The woman, whom she called Liana, had been taken to Dubai by her “Mama Rosa,” or sex-trafficking madam, where she was forced to pay off her debts. There, Liana was caught in a dragnet and sent back to Armenia, Ms. Dewey recalled here last month during a session of the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting.
Ms. Dewey had been working at the International Organization for Migration in a hybrid role as participant-observer. That meant she offered women access to aid, just like her co-workers did, while also using the interviews and data for her book on sex trafficking, as long as the women consented.
Word of Liana’s request for help got back to the Mama Rosa, who would be exposed by it. The madam had well-placed friends and bribe money, and Liana quickly faced prostitution charges. Ms. Dewey found herself cut off from her subject.
Soon Ms. Dewey started getting threatening phone calls. Within 48 hours, she was on an airplane looking down as the lights of the city receded beneath her. The distance between her and the woman she tried to help was palpable, she said. Ms. Dewey was going home. Liana was sentenced to seven years in prison.
“Is there something else I could have done?” Ms. Dewey, who is now an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Wyoming, said she wonders. “That’s something I struggle with every day.”
Her struggle, though unique in its details, highlights how scholarship and personal ethics can intersect in complicated ways for anthropologists doing fieldwork. These researchers often spend many years in close contact with people, extracting intimate information that, once published, can have unpredictable effects. Both sides have been known to be profoundly changed by the experience.
As the relationships between scholars and sources have grown more diverse and complicated, the association has spent three years trying to create a new ethics code to help guide anthropologists.
A strong sense of duty to research subjects is reflected in the existing code, which dates to 1998 (though incremental changes have been made since then). In what many anthropologists call the “prime directive,” they are told they “have primary ethical obligations to the people, species, and materials they study and to the people with whom they work.”
By many accounts, that directive has meant that an anthropologist’s obligation to his or her research subject can eclipse the goal of acquiring knowledge. In other words, if research goes against the interests of subjects, then that research ought to be stopped.
The newer version, which the association’s executive board accepted for review at this year’s meeting but did not formally adopt, is more nuanced. It explains that the primary ethical obligation is “to avoid doing harm to the lives, communities, or environments” that anthropologists study.
The shift struck some as risky. During several sessions at the annual meeting, speakers and audience members said they held themselves to a higher standard. It was not enough to keep from hurting their subjects. They should advocate for them.
And when they observe their subjects suffering injustice, some anthropologists ask whether it is ethical to simply document what they see, or whether they are compelled to try to remedy it.
Who Holds the Power?
To assume that anthropologists must advocate on behalf of their sources is also to assume that the researchers hold a position of power.
That assumption is grounded, in part, in an image of the anthropologist as comparatively privileged, and his or her subject as vulnerable and poor, several speakers said. But that image is outdated.
“That pure anthropology maybe never existed,” said Dena K. Plemmons, chair of the association’s committee on the ethics code and a research ethicist at the University of California at San Diego. “Our subjects are tremendously diverse, and we have diverse responsibilities.”
Power relationships between anthropologists and their sources have also become more complicated, many said.
For example, Simon J. Craddock Lee, an assistant professor of medical anthropology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, said that his subjects are “well-paid cancer surgeons who give care to disenfranchised people.”
He has obligations to both groups, he said. “If my subjects are doctors, how do I balance my obligations to the people who are truly vulnerable?”
One audience member suggested that his chief loyalty should be to the person or group who is most at risk of harm among those being studied.
While that might seem straightforward, Mr. Lee replied, everyone—including the poor and vulnerable—has an agenda.
“We can’t assume there’s a David-and-Goliath relationship,” he said. “It’s not clean enough to say you can sort the good sheep from the goats.”
Power dynamics also play out in other relationships involving anthropologists, several speakers noted, including those between researchers and those who finance their work.
One of the most troubling to anthropologists is a “compartmentalized” relationship, in which a researcher may not know who is using or financing the research, or what the implications will be.
And even when the sponsor is known, several anthropologists have raised ethical objections when that sponsor is the government, corporations, or the rich and powerful. But other anthropologists argue that the real disagreement is over the politics underlying that research, not the researchers’ ethics.
“We go to high Sturm und Drang” about ethics when political objections arise about who is doing anthropological research for whom, said Laura McNamara, an anthropologist who works for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. “Ethics becomes conflated with politics in ways that I find profoundly distressing,” she said.
Some anthropologists pushed to revise the ethics code in 2007, said Ms. Plemmons, when a controversy erupted over the Human Terrain System, a program that embedded anthropologists with United States military units. The association’s executive board disapproved of anthropologists’ involvement in the act of making war, calling it “an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise” that should, instead, serve “the humane causes of global peace and social justice.”
Politics and Measurement
On an even more basic level, some anthropologists ask if it is ethical, or even possible, to study large differences in power and claim to be a neutral observer.
This critique grows, in part, from a view of anthropology as inherently compromised because of its sometimes troubled history. Archaeologists who excavated artifacts and brought them to museums in decades past look more like looters to some modern eyes.
“It is true we are an intellectual enterprise that is based on a researcher-subject relationship that has been, in far too many instan-ces, horribly exploitative,” Barbara Rose Johnston, an environmental anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology, in California, wrote last year in a review of the film Secrets of the Tribe. That documentary explored a controversial episode in which anthropologists were accused of wrongdoing and ethical malpractice in the Amazon in the 1960s.
Even in the most “scientific” fields within anthropology, areas in which researchers seek to strip down their analyses to such essential tasks as measuring and counting, political controversies can erupt, and the results can be seized upon by partisans. Some of the most contentious measurements, both historically and today, arise when they are used to define race.
“We never just count,” said Jason Antrosio, an associate professor of anthropology at Hartwick College, in New York. “We choose things to count and choose things to measure.”
Those choices can spark what he called political-ethical and power concerns. Thousands of topics are available, and an anthropologist ought to consider why he or she is choosing to study one and not another. “Even if you don’t see a political perspective to your work, you need to think about how it’ll be used,” he said.
Ms. Dewey thinks a lot about how her research will be used, and has tried to strike a balance between advocacy and scholarship, publishing with presses that emphasize one or the other, depending on her subject. Her position in Armenia as a participant-observer, and as an aid worker and anthropologist, also reflected an attempt to bridge roles as activist and scholar.
Each role has its advantages and drawbacks, she said. Sex workers are more willing to talk to her as a researcher than to social workers or advocates, who may want them to embrace a certain viewpoint.
“I like to tell myself that I’m engaging in a happy medium between these worlds by writing accessibly for a broad audience, and attempting to publish in venues that might reach nonacademics,” said Ms. Dewey.
She also recognizes that activists for sex workers use her published research to push for change, and that international organizations cite her work, which she said is gratifying.
“At the end of the day, though, honestly, I still struggle with the idea that there might be something parasitic about making my living from retelling the stories women share with me,” she said.
The real struggle is not how to act ethically in the field; after all, the rules are comparatively well established, she said. The deeper question, she wonders, is if “it can ever be right to benefit in any way from other people’s hardships.”