“Professional Anthropology”: The Ethics of Interference_A.C.Oesterle.pdf (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ethical Concerns, Dilemmas and Challenges in Practicing Anthropology1
INCAA, 2023
Anthropology has always claimed to be a people’s science. It is a field science as it follows field methodology that facilitates the anthropological researcher to become immersed in the field with the aim to unravel the mysteries and meanings of human behavior within the respective cultural boundaries, which may be different from one’s own culture or the same as that of the researcher with varying degrees. In the process, they have to uphold the value of science on the one hand, even while they have to be mindful of the interests and concerns of the people concerned, on the other. These dual responsibilities create a lot of challenges and dilemmas in the practice of Anthropology. Thus, there has been concerns raised throughout its history of more than a century, with regard to the ethics of fieldwork and in the practice of Anthropology vis-à-vis the interests of the people concerned. The present paper takes a deep look into the issue of ethics involved in Anthropological researches and identifies the ethical concerns, dilemmas and challenges in the practice of Anthropology.
The Coming of Age of Anthropological Practice and Ethics
Journal of Business Anthropology
Anthropology as a discipline is well over 100 years old; as a profession it is just gearing up. It is the diversity of anthropological work, not simply by subfield and geographic location, but by job function that has contributed to the field’s expansion. This growth has led to ethical questions and issues surrounding anthropological identity, adaptation, and collegiality, as increasing numbers of anthropologists are finding alternatives to the work of the professor. While the “split” or “divide” between academic and nonacademic work now seems narrower, much more needs to be done to acknowledge that practitioners are a growing and contributing segment of the field. As the career paths of anthropologists continue to differentiate, efforts will be necessary to unify anthropology so that the work of practitioners is considered on par with academics. This article takes on that challenge and proposes solutions to help practice and academia work together to advance the field.
The ‘fourth aim’ of anthropology. Between knowledge and ethics
Anthropological Theory, vol. 8, n° 4, 2008, pp. 345-356.
Any anthropological research mobilizes an axiological system, composed at once of moral values and epistemological values. Starting from the example of my first fieldwork among officers of the secret political police in Poland under marshal law in 1982-3, and subsequently examining several types of moral agendas in anthropology (as a science of moral reform in E.B. Tylor; as a salutary revelation of social mechanics in E. Durkheim; as a lesson of ethics in C. Lévi-Strauss; as an expedient for raising the moral standard of colonial action in M. Delafosse; 'applied anthropology' as a science useful in the struggle against totalitarian regimes during the Second World War and the Cold War; as cultural criticism in 1970-1980; 'moral anthropology' as a way of defending the rights of the oppressed in the 1990s), I stress some potentially negative consequences of moral stances in anthropology, insofar as values of ethical commitment may come into conflict with epistemological values. In conclusion, I plead for an anthropology able to objectify its own moral agenda and to grasp its epistemological impact on scholarly representations we aspire to produce.
Anthropological Research, Ethics of
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015
Anthropology's relationship to ethics in research has been driven by periodic disciplinary controversies, often in close association with the involvement of anthropologists in successive war efforts, primarily in the U.S. Over time disciplinary ethics have increasingly focused on the unique exigencies of ethnography, as a disciplinary-specific method. While professional anthropological organizations developed codes of ethics beginning in the Vietnam era, historically, disciplinary ethical language has been used in two ways: as a basis for internal disciplinary self-policing and as a means to claim public professional standing as a social science. These uses continue to be prevalent today. But anthropology's relationship to its ethics also has been historically dynamic, changing with changes in disciplinary identity, values, and priorities. Less recognized are the ways that disciplinary ethics have been regularly reconstituted in close proximity to the frontiers of the identity of anthropology as a changing project. Anthropology's ethics reflect the discipline's specific history and identity debates, and they are one key index of these changing frontiers. This is most evident with respect to anthropology's ambivalent relationship to: science, the nation-state, and encompassing normative structures.
1972
This is the last part of a paper entitled, "concerning the content and the political role of the social sciences in developing countries." it centers around the following question: is it not true that a discussion about ethics and attempts to formulate a professional code obscure a far more fundamental question, namely the justification of the practice of social science? Regarding an "ethical hassle," reference is made to the 1971 report, "to evaluate the controversy concerning anthropological activities in Thailand," about which great unrest had developed in the us. The question of ethics is not seen as an isolated problem, but as pointing directly to the essence of science itself and its essential components: the choice of the object, method of research, and method of application. By putting forward empirical material (in the original article) it is illustrated to what misery science can contribute when questions like "for whom" and "wh...
Applied Ethics: Anthropology and Business
Applied Ethics is society’s response to need to resolve social control problems posed by cultural crisis. Applied ethics is a term used to describe attempts by non-philosophers, or ethicists, to use philosophical methods to identify morally correct courses of action in human life. Business anthropology is a relatively new subfield of traditional anthropology. Business anthropologists represent a mix of traditional academic researcher, business teachers, private consultant practitioners and technical staff members of business enterprises. We define these as “career anthropologist.” As a group they face a wide variety of ethical conflicts based on their status and role in the business context. In this paper we explore these conflicts and how the anthropological institutional establishment has attempted to address the needs of “career anthropologist.” We do this by applying a structural-functional analysis of the role ethics plays in our understanding of socio-cultural institutions. Then we apply this to a review of the evolution and institutional development of ethical thinking in anthropology for the past 75 years as manifested by the SfAA, AAA and more recently, NAPA. Finally, we propose an applied ethical approach as a solution to the crisis based on a return to core values represented by what we call, The Boasian Code.
The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology
Current Anthropology, 1995
In bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be "suspending the ethi• cal" in our dealings with the "other." Cultural relativism, read as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag ine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged an• thropology might take.