Anthropological ethics today are caught between the normative ethics of the 1960s on the one hand, and a revival of the early twentieth-century idea of ethics as an object of comparative research on the other. Reflexivity is the common denominator of both, and a specifically anthropological ethics, rather than falling back on professional models of ethical codes and committees, may be nothing more than a realization of part of the discipline’s core business: accounting for oneself in relation to different others.
Normative ethics dominated discussions in anthropology from the 1960s, because North American anthropologists adopted the model of professional ethics — institutionalized in the codes of conduct and peer review committees of associations of legal or medical practitioners (among others) — in an effort to come to terms with the post-colonial situation. While protests by Franz Boas against anthropologists acting as spies for the US government during World War I met with a lukewarm response, the activities of Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and others for the Office of Naval Research during World War II hardly raised any questions at all. The first turn to ethical codification was made by ‘applied’ anthropologists after 1945, and it was only in the late 1960s, and largely because of the indignation about the use of anthropological research by intelligence agencies for counterinsurgency purposes in Latin America or Southeast Asia, that this discussion turned into a politically charged one. Especially the 1971 Principles of Professional Responsibility of the American Anthropological Association, which declared that the interests of the people studied were the anthropologist’s paramount responsibility, and that no secret or clandestine research was allowed, turned ethics into a thinly veiled attempt to keep American imperialist politics at bay. Little more than a decade later, anthropologists working outside the academy protested that the paramountcy of the people studied harmed their position, as employers demanded that they, rather than people studied, were the anthropologist’s paramount concern. They lobbied successfully for the softening of the strict ban on clandestine and secret research (for an overview, see Fluehr-Lobban 1991).
This preoccupation with the normative ethics of professionalist models is important in so far as a majority of anthropologists agree that some minimal form of peer agreement among professionals is required to maintain and teach some of the core values of the discipline. Yet codes of conduct, and committees reviewing violations were and have been the weakest link in anthropologists’ attempts to imitate the legal and medical professions: anthropological associations possess no sanctions to discipline or ostracize fellow-practitioners (since they can practise without being members of any association whatsoever), and in practice the codes and committees were used for internecine warfare rather than maintaining the standards of the discipline as a whole. At the same time, cultural anthropologists have managed to conduct these discussions with supreme indifference to the question to what extent ethical codes are themselves peculiar and particular expressions of certain types of modern culture, so that the question why the North American example of drawing up an ethical code was followed mostly (and less fervently) by Northwestern European anthropologists, but vehemently opposed by the French and German traditions, was rarely posed — let alone that people wondered how anthropologists managed ethically before the existence of ethical codes (but see Pels 1999). Different insti-tutionalizations of ethics soon overtook the discipline’s own discussions, and have forced it to reconsider — be it piecemeal and haphazardly — what ethics means for anthropologists.
It is one of the symptoms of a general social process of de-professionalization that ethics is increasingly institutionalized in the form of Internal Review Boards (IRBs) or codes of conduct of universities and other employers rather than of independent professional associations. As these models are mostly borrowed from medical schools and their fear of expensive malpractice suits, they are meant to reinforce control over employees through self-monitoring ethical conduct, thus turning ethics into a form of audit culture (Strathern 2000). Where this proliferation of forms of ethical control is less prevalent, one still finds codes of conduct drawn up by universities and other employers that often turn ethnographic research into a more or less illegal activity — because, for example, the common requirement of privacy protection or written consent is more rare, less relevant, or sometimes even impossible in much qualitative social research. What is most remarkable in these developments is not that the vast majority of anthropologists reflect on these social processes without much critical anthropological consciousness (after all, it feels good to be ethical); it is, instead, that anthropologists have so rarely acknowledged that the institutionalizations of ethics that they use are mostly ethnocentric imports from outside the discipline, that seriously threaten to misrecognize the ethics inherent to anthropological research itself.
Inspired by philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor, several practitioners have come to recognize that certain relationships deserve to be called ‘ethical’ and cannot simply be reduced to politics, economics, religion, science or whatever other social category one wants to carve life up with. Such ‘meta-ethical’ reflections revive the original anthropological project of comparative ethics (Westermarck 1906-8), but in the guise of ethics as an empirical issue equally problematic for understanding modern culture (see Ong and Collier 2005). Ethics is an everyday aspect of social relationships, and, as such, something that we reduce to the dos and don’ts of normative ethics only at the peril of severely misunderstanding our own ethical practice. Thus, recent publications in anthropological ethics go beyond issues of professional codification and arbitration, towards the ethics embedded in the practices of anthropological research (Caplan 2003; Harper and Corsin Jimenez 2005; Meskell and Pels 2005). Once there, anthropologists may discover that their methodology, which proclaims the supreme value of understanding how other people value their existence and relationships and of negotiating their values with our own, is both the source and the foundation of ethics (Evens 2008) and that anthropological methodology is therefore both logically and sociologically prior to any particular right, moral principle, law, review board, committee or code.
