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Informed Consent

Natural History, March, 2001 by Samuel M. Wilson

A muckraking book spotlights the ethics of anthropological fieldwork.

Early last September, an ominous message addressed to the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) began making the rounds of the e-mail grapevine. "We write to inform you," it began, "of an impending scandal that will affect the American anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among members of the Association." Prompting this warning was the imminent publication of Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (W. W. Norton). The book's author, freelance journalist Patrick Tierney, was charging anthropologists and other outsiders who worked in Amazonia in the 1960s with a wide range of misdeeds and ethical violations, the most horrifying of which was that they had intentionally introduced a devastating measles epidemic among the Yanomami. One of those singled out was Napoleon A. Chagnon, who published a vivid account of his fieldwork, "Yanomamo--The Fierce People," in Natural History way back in January 1967.

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When news of the book first hit, the reaction of many anthropologists was a quiet dread that it represented only the start of an unpleasant airing of the profession's less defensible acts and practices in the past. Anthropology emerged late in the nineteenth century, when many traditional societies were vanishing or being forever changed by colonial expansion and modernization. Anthropologists felt it was their mission to record what remained of the languages, knowledge, and worldviews of disintegrating cultures. They did not necessarily pause to consider that their presence in the field or the dissemination of the knowledge they gained might harm the people they studied. In fact, their work often aided colonial administrators and occasionally served as a cover for espionage.

By the 1960s, anthropologists had begun to agonize over their ability to be impartial observers. With the social upheavals of the Vietnam War, the belief that science was politically neutral came sharply into question. When some social scientists provided cultural information in support of the U.S. war effort, they were called to account by members of the AAA. At the same time, a feminist critique of science emerged, challenging long-held, deeply biased interpretations. Ethnographers also reconsidered what they owed their "informants" in terms of shared credit and editorial control over what was being written about them, and reassessed the condescending assumption that they knew what was right for "their" tribe.

Among the results of this soul-searching was that in 1965 the AAA impaneled a Committee on Research Problems and Ethics and, in 1967, adopted a code of ethics. Much amended over the years, the current code includes the following wording: "Anthropological researchers have primary ethical obligations to the people, species, and materials they study and to the people with whom they work. These obligations can supersede the goal of seeking new knowledge."

The claims made in Darkness in El Dorado are now being carefully reviewed and debated. The most damning accusations appear to be unsupported or false. Nevertheless, past research among the Yanomami was not ethically untainted, particularly in that acts of violence may have been instigated to study the supposedly violent nature of men. Long before the book's publication, in fact, criticism against some anthropologists was expressed within the field. (Web sites that document the charges and countercharges include www.tamu.edu/anthropology/Neel.html and www.anth.ucsb.edu/chagnon.html.)

The practice of anthropology will always be ethically complex, simply because the researcher is caught between different cultural systems. The El Dorado scandal, however, highlights the sea change that has occurred over the past forty years. Although some research from the 1960s and before was of the highest ethical standards and some research being carried out today is still questionable, on the whole the discipline has become more self-aware. And while at one time seeking the "informed consent" of the studied was unknown, proceeding without it now is almost unthinkable.

Samuel M. Wilson is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Informed Consent

Natural History, March, 2001 by Samuel M. Wilson

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