Ethics in the Field

Contemporary Challenges

Jeremy MacClancy, Agustín Fuentes, Jeremy MacClancy, Agustín Fuentes

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781782387930
• eBook ISBN: 9780857459633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years ever-increasing concerns about ethical dimensions of fieldwork practice have forced anthropologists and other social scientists to radically reconsider the nature, process, and outcomes of fieldwork: what should we be doing, how, for whom, and to what end? In this volume, practitioners from across anthropological disciplines—social and biological anthropology and primatology—come together to question and compare the ethical regulation of fieldwork, what is common to their practices, and what is distinctive to each discipline. Contributors probe a rich variety of contemporary questions: the new, unique problems raised by conducting fieldwork online and via email; the potential dangers of primatological fieldwork for locals, primates, the environment, and the fieldworkers themselves; the problems of studying the military; and the role of ethical clearance for anthropologists involved in international health programs. The distinctive aim of this book is to develop of a transdisciplinary anthropology at the methodological, not theoretical, level.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Ethical Fieldworker, and Other Problems
• 2 Questioning Ethics in Global Health
• 3 Ethical Issues in the Study and Conservation of an African Great Ape in an Unprotected, Human-Dominated Landscape in Western Uganda
• 4 Are Observational Field Studies of Wild Primates Really Noninvasive?
• 5 Complex and Heterogeneous Ethical Structures in Field Primatology
• 6 Contemporary Ethical Issues in Field Primatology
• 7 The Ethics of Conducting Field Research
• 8 Scrutinizing Suffering
• 9 Messy Ethics
• 10 Key Ethical Considerations which Inform the Use of Anonymous Asynchronous Websurveys in Sensitive Research
• 11 Covering our Backs, or Covering all Bases? An Ethnography of URECs
• Notes on Contributors
• Index