The AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) has published its final report on the Human Terrain System (HTS).  Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.

In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of “anthropology” within DoD.

The entire report can be read online at http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/upload/CEAUSSIC_HTS_Final_Report.pdf.

–L.L. Wynn

Recently we were informed that Macquarie was to change its ethics policy to make it so that students could no longer be listed as chief investigators on ethics applications.  This would mean that supervisors would have to be listed as CIs for all student research projects, including those of PhD students.  Should these changes be put in place students will have the choice of being minor researchers or, at best, ‘Co-investigators’. The proposed changes immediately raised concerns in the anthropology department about the implications our students’ research.  I’d like to raise some of these issues here in the hope that it will generate a productive discussion of the subject.  The central question essentially is this: why might a change that is perfectly innocuous for other disciplines be problematic for anthropological research?

First, what are the stated reasons for making these changes?  The primary justification for the new approach is to better recognise the role of students as research trainees rather than researchers in their own right, and to better reflect the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, which states that

“the research supervisor… (must provide) guidance in all matters relating to research conduct and overseeing all stages or the research process, including identifying the research objectives and approach, obtaining ethics and other approvals, obtaining funding, conducting the research, and reporting the research outcomes in appropriate forums and media”

I don’t think anyone would disagree that it is always the supervisor’s role to provide guidance in all the areas stated here.   But making supervisors CIs is something rather different than acknowledging their role as mentors; it implies that this is their own research in some sense, and more importantly it assumes that they can take ethical responsibility not only for the design of the research project but also for its conduct.

It seems to me that these changes are an attempt to apply a laboratory-based model of research across the board in which students either work on a project in collaboration with their supervisor, or work in a controlled environment in which they can, at least in theory, be constantly under the supervision of an academic.  I was reminded of the different disciplinary expectations of lab-based research when I discussed this issue with my wife, a molecular biologist.  She couldn’t initially see why the anthropologists were so concerned about the implications of the changes; for her it was perfectly normal for the lab head or other senior researcher to be the CI for student projects.  This gave me cause to reflect on why the changes seemed so problematic for anthropological research.

So why is anthropology different?  Here are four reasons I can think of why the proposed ethics model is problematic for ethnographic research:

• First, students doing fieldwork in often far flung locations cannot reasonably be expected to be under the direct supervision of an academic.  Guidance may come from afar but in the end the student must be able to take responsibility for their own ethical conduct.  Related to this, the research ’situation’ is never determined once and for all as it is in a laboratory environment; it is an ongoing, evolving process in which the ‘terms’ of the research, and the frame which differentiates the research from not-research, are never fixed.  This therefore requires researchers to make ethical decisions in real time, in novel situations as they arise.  Thus it would not be possible for a supervisor to visit a field site, determine that everything is okay ethically, and then leave again.  For a supervisor reasonably to take responsibility for the ethics of an ethnographic field project s/he would have to be there the whole time.
• Second, the ethical qualities of anthropological research cannot be separated from the relationships of trust established during fieldwork.  As the sole fieldworker the student, and no-one else, enters into relationships (hopefully) of trust and obligation with the people s/he is working with.  This kind of rapport is not something that can simply be transferred to others, people whom the research communities have never met.  How can informants be sure that sensitive, personal or secret information won’t be shared with the other researchers on the project?  How could the student researcher guarantee the confidentiality of information s/he acquires?  And would, indeed, supervisors have the right to demand to see their students’ fieldnotes on the grounds that they are CIs in the research project?
• Third, in interactions with bureaucracies and others in gate-keeper roles, it is the student who must act on his/her own behalf.  The perception that the student was merely an assistant (because even as ‘co-investigators’ they would clearly appear to be the junior party) would certain diminish his/her ability to negotiate terms of the research.
• Fourth, unlike fields such as biology in which the lab head always appears as last author on papers regardless of whether s/he contributed to the research in any practical sense, in anthropology the student is usually the sole author of work based on her/his research.  There are some exceptions of course, but in the case of co-authored work there would be expectation that the supervisor has also did a substantial amount of the research or writing.  If supervisors were required to be CIs with regard to ethics, would they also appear as authors of the research outputs?  Shouldn’t there be a logical consistency between ethical requirements and authorship, both of which are expressions of the subject-position of the researcher?

So those are four reasons, although I am sure there are more.  The broader consequence of my argument is that there can’t be an a priori universal ethical researcher-subject, independent of discipline or research situation.  In order to work with this recognition ethics committees need to be able to indulge in a sort of ethical relativism, which is to say that they see ethics as contextualised by discipline and research situation rather than being based on universal models that can be applied uniformly in every situation.  This is of course a very ‘anthropological’ way of viewing things.  But I think anthropology and its methods demand the ongoing contextualisation of ethical engagement, which is to say that it demands to practise what it preaches.

I’m interested to hear what others think on this matter though.  Are there other universities adopting a similar approach to student researcher ethics?  Are there any precedents for this sort of change?  Are there good arguments for making supervisors CIs for all their students’ research?  Or does this put supervisors themselves in an unethical position, i.e. being asked to take responsibility for things that are largely out of their control?  And if supervisors feel that they are morally and even legally accountable for their students’ ethical conduct during research, what effects would this have on the sorts of projects they would be willing to take on?

Readers familiar with the ongoing discussions on the utilisation of anthropological knowledge and the employment of anthropologists within the Human Terrain System will be familiar with the views of the small band of its most vocal supporters: namely Montgomery McFate, Andrea Jackson and Steve Fondacaro. While these vocal supporters and a number of other program personnel (including, among others, Zenia (Helbig) Tompkins, Marcus Griffin, Brit Damon, and Major Robert Holbert) have expressed their opinions and experiences with the program publicly, the overwhelming tone of analyses of such opinions and  experiences has focused not on their stated experiences but on what their stated experiences belie about the program. Concerns expressed with the HTS largely revolve around the potential of the program to produce effects which are in conflict with anthropological values and ethics.

The views of the anthropologists involved with the HTS have often been censured, derided and ignored on the basis that they are representative of supreme ignorance, immorality and/or naivety. This is likely too simplistic a reading. It is important to acknowledge the diversity of experiences and thoughts of the HTS personnel or else we are subjecting ourselves to a narrow (and potentially flawed) conception of the program and the HTS personnel. In adopting such a narrow conception, we risk distancing ourselves from the actual issues of the program and fighting a war against a phantom of our own creation.

I would thus like to direct your attention to a blog by Ben Wintersteen, a current HTS member. The stated audience of his blog is his friends and family, but as his stated purpose in the program is (at least in part) to critically examine the workings of the HTS from the inside, his blog contains many reflections on his experiences with the program to date (he is currently in week 15 of training). He posts 2 extended blogs per week on his ethical, educational, social, emotional and physical experiences in the program, and often takes the time to compare them to the issues raised against the HTS in the broader disciplinary debate.

Without further ado, here’s the link:

http://www.thoughts.com/blog/browse/keywordSearch/ben%20wintersteen

–Nikki Kuper

I am starting a new study that aims to understand ethnographers’ subjective experience of ethics oversight – their memories of when and how they first became aware of ethics oversight, what they think and feel about it, whether and how they comply with it, and whether they think it makes ethnographic research more ethical or not.

I hope to compare the attitudes of researchers who spent most of their careers not seeking ethics clearance, a younger generation for whom it has always been standard, and those who started their research under one regime and now live under another.

I’m one of those researchers who has lived through two eras: when I first went to conduct my dissertation research, it wasn’t the practice for anthropologists in my department to seek ethics approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board (US equivalent of Australia’s Human Research Ethics Committees). But by the time I came back from the field, graduate students were getting IRB approval before starting research. For a long time, I felt furtive, like I had somehow failed to do something that I was supposed to do, and wondered whether I would ever be accused of unethical research practice (even though I didn’t think I had been unethical in my research). I didn’t understand that it was a changing era.

Now that I have a bit more perspective, I’m interested in knowing more about other researchers’ experiences of this process.  If you are interested in participating in the survey, please go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=N1v1MJvyg3USMopDA0QV3g_3d_3d. The survey will take between 15-30 minutes, depending on how detailed your responses are. All responses will, of course, be anonymous.

PS: I’ve tested that, and it really takes 15 minutes or less if you don’t spend a lot of time on the free answer questions. Which you might do if you have a juicy or provoking story to tell. But it won’t take much of your time. I hate it when people send me surveys that they say will take 5 minutes and they take 45 minutes.

–L.L. Wynn

When I arrived at Macquarie in 2007, I had big plans for my students.  I was scheduled to teach a postgraduate methods class, and I decided that the students were going to learn research methods by undertaking their own research project from start to finish and trying to publish the results.

“Crazy!” one of my colleagues said.  “Do you really think that they can get published?”

“Of course!” I said. “Have you seen how many journals there are out there?  You can publish anything if you are persistent enough.”

Another colleague said, “What are you going to do about ethics clearance?”

Uh-oh.  I hadn’t thought about that.  But I wasn’t going to let it derail my plan, so my ad hoc solution was to make each of my students apply for ethics clearance.  Macquarie has 30+ page ethics application form for human research — not including appendices.

I tell you, the students LOVED that.  And so did the Ethics Secretariat, which had to process 20 ethics applications from one class and deal with weekly phone calls from me cheerfully asking when so-and-so’s project was going to get approved so s/he could start her research.  Some students didn’t get ethics approval to start their research until the last week of classes.  There were lots of extensions and late papers.

Despite the slow start and the frustrations, the work that my students did was really good.  In one semester, every student had to come up with their own original research projects, design an appropriate methodology, obtain ethics approval, execute the project, write up the results, and submit for publication. Every student came up with a completely unique research project, from researching the smoking practices of international students at Macquarie to investigating online lesbian networking in New South Wales to studying how Aboriginal artwork is marketed to tourists. Students gained a tremendous amount of hands-on research experience. At every seminar we discussed the progress of their research projects, and there were fascinating discussions about methods and ethics.  Even though they had largely seen the ethics application as an exercise in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, they were genuinely concerned with ethics, and we regularly discussed research ethics dilemmas.

So at the end of the year I decided that it was a good exercise and worth keeping the independent research projects the next time I taught the class. But the students were pretty clear in their feedback that they didn’t want to have to deal with the bureaucratic obstacles themselves.

Informal feedback from the Ethics Secretariat also suggested that they would be grateful if I found another solution (or at least stopped ringing them to ask about the status of students’ ethics applications).

Finding work-arounds for bureaucratic obstacles

So after the semester was over, I made an appointment to meet with the head of the Ethics Secretariat to try to find ways to simplify the ethics approval process for student research projects.  I’d gotten a fellowship from the Provost, Judyth Sachs, to work on this project, so I was empowered by significant institutional support.

We batted ideas around together. The Ethics Secretariat pointed out that Macquarie had a simpler process for evaluating student research projects that weren’t going to be published, but since helping students to publish was a major goal for me, I didn’t want to take that easy route.  They rejected the idea of a blanket template that would cover any sort of student research project.  I wanted to give my students some choice in what they could do.

The compromise that we worked out was this: I designed 4 basic research projects, all revolving around a different methodology and method of recruiting research participants. Students could then pick a project that already received ethics approval.  I tried to come up with projects that collectively would use every method that I could imagine a social science discipline using: online and street surveys; interviews, formal and informal; research in online communities; public observation; participant observation; even oral history, which has quite different conventions surrounding confidentiality and intellectual property than I was familiar with. The goal was to create a set of “templates” that colleagues could adapt to develop their own ethics applications for student research projects, so others could take advantage of my work and wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

The 4 projects

Here are the research projects I came up with, along with an extract from the project summary that I included in the ethics application. Each project title links to the full ethics application that I submitted. Of course, it is in the peculiar and particular format of Macquarie University’s ethics application form, but because MQ’s form is more elaborate than that of many other universities, you’re likely to find that I’ve dealt with most of the concerns that your own ethics committee or IRB might raise. All these ethics applications are Creative Commons licensed for non-profit use and adaptation, so feel free to borrow as much as you want. If you do decide to adapt one of these ideas for your own teaching, I’d love to hear about it! Send me an e-mail at lisa.wynn[at]mq.edu.au.

1) An ethnographic study of mobile phone use in Sydney

Anthropologists have always been interested in the relationship between technology and culture.  Contemporary anthropologists have recently been particularly interested in the spread of global communication technologies and how they are taken up in local social and cultural contexts (Axel 2006).  Mobile phones, in particular, have been revealed as devices which extend social networks in unique ways and which have been incorporated into local cultural norms about sharing, gift giving and exchange, and economic strategies (Smith 2007, Horst and Miller 2006, Wong 2007).  Corporate anthropologists have also researched the materiality of cell phones – where they are carried, how they are held, when they are turned off and on – to inform product design (Chipchase 2007).  Sociologists and psychologists have also examined the uptake of cell phone and messaging technologies amongst subcultural groups (e.g. Sylvia and Hady 2004).

Globally, some 3 billion people are expected to have cell phones by the end of this year, so it is clearly a technology that has a powerful global reach across cultures and socioeconomic class. How do new technologies such as cell phones extend or modify existing cultural norms and social networks?  What are the explicit and implicit cultural rules that shape how people use these technologies?

The methods for this study included street interviews and online questionnaires, as well as participant observation.

2) An ethnography of a virtual online social world

Tom Boellstorff (2008) poses this question: “How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can now live parts of their lives in virtual worlds?”  Some of the potential research questions raised by cybersociality in online virtual worlds like Second Life include the following:

• How are social norms enforced and violated, and how does that contribute to a sense of community?
• What does identity mean in a massive multiplayer online role playing game when people can have alts (secondary accounts not linked to their primary avatar, or animated representative), or more than one person can control an avatar?
• What does embodiment mean in Second Life, where you can change your gender, body type, skin color, and even species at will, where other players can even *give* you a new body type to “wear,” and you can buy a penis to use for cybersex?  Do people change certain aspects of appearance (such as clothes or hair style ) more than others (such as body shape or gender)?  How often to people change their appearance?  To what extent does an avatar’s appearance influence how people interact with that avatar?
• What religious or cultural rituals do people engage in, in cyberspace?
• What are the social norms for gift-giving and reciprocity in cyberspace, and how does this contribute to community and sociability in cyber worlds?
• Are there coercive exchanges, and how are they handled or talked about?
• How does partnering occur in Second Life? Do virtual partners know each other in real life, and if not, how does it impinge on their real life worlds? What is the interface between Second Life and “real life”?

In this ethics application, I got a lot of help from Tom Boellstorff (whose ethnography on Second Life we read for the class). He generously shared with me his original ethics application for his research in Second Life, which I was able to draw on in figuring out how to answer the Ethics Committee’s concerns about privacy and the permissibility of research in Second Life.

3) Oral Histories of International Students in Australia

Education is a $12.5 billion “export industry” for Australia, bringing in more income than tourism (Rout 2008).  Yet little is known about the social experience of international students in Australia, despite the fact that they face unique pressures.  Rout (2008) summarized recent research that points out that, “Contrary to their image as cashed-up BMW drivers, many overseas students cannot afford to eat, are paid well below the minimum wage and are among those most vulnerable to exploitation in this country.”

For this project, students in ANTH 801 will conduct oral life histories of international students at Macquarie, focusing on their educational trajectory leading to, and including, their student experience at Macquarie.  How did they end up at Macquarie?  What are the personal, social, financial, and familial obligations that shape students’ experiences at university in Australia?  What are the cultural factors that influence their integration into, or alienation from, the Macquarie student body?

Very little qualitative research has been done on the higher education experience of international students in general, and yet they comprise a large minority of students at Macquarie.  Letting them speak in their own words about their experiences is an opportunity to learn about the pressures and problems that international students face, their goals and aspirations, and the social and learning strategies that they use to cope with a culturally new educational experience, which Macquarie University may be able to use to improve the experience of international students on campus.  It also has the potential to inform our understanding of the informal, affective, and social aspects of learning and intellectual development for international students.

I grounded this project in the principles of oral history methods, which specify that (1) the interview or transcript must be placed in a repository, and (2) those interviewed retain copyright and control over the use of their interviews.  It was therefore a complicated application, and probably the most closely scrutinised of all the projects I submitted, but it eventually received approval.

4) An applied anthropological study of the social use of space on campus and its relationship with ‘intellectual climate’

Macquarie University is looking for ways to improve its rankings in graduate student evaluations of “intellectual climate” on campus.  U@MQ is eager to think about new ways that the food and social facilities on campus could be restructured to be more appealing and better utilized.  Might these be linked?  Do students’ most formative moments at university happen inside or outside of the classroom?  How is social time in or outside of the classroom related to intellectual interaction?  To what extent is intellectual climate shaped by space and facilities?  What other factors shape the perception of intellectual climate on campus?  The aim of this project is to study use of space and evaluate whether there are any inexpensive or cost-effective interventions that you can recommend to improve the intellectual climate for students at Macquarie.

Here are some angles that you may consider:

1) In the library, how do students mark off spaces for individual and group work?  The library is the most formal learning space on campus.  How do students claim it to be more informal?

2) How much does home life influence use of public spaces on campus? Do students who use the campus do so to escape from home life for whatever reason?

3) Using the language of de Certeau, what are the tactics that students use to claim space and how does it differ from the ostensible ways that the space was designed to be used?

This particular project was set up as an applied anthropology project for a “client,” Macquarie University, and one organisation in particular, U@MQ, was very interested in the results and sponsored a competition and prize for the best student project.  (U@MQ is the company that provides non-academic services on campus — they run the coffee carts, the food court, the gym, etc.)  At the end of the semester, the students who did this research project presented their research results and policy recommendations to a panel from U@MQ, the Learning and Teaching Centre, and Facilities Management.

Protocols and scripts

In the ethics application for each project I had to set out the general research question and draft protocols – scripts actually – for students to follow in recruiting participants.  This was the only way that the ethics committee could feel satisfied that students wouldn’t put undue pressure on friends and family to participate in their research projects.  I also had to draft protocols for taking pictures, and several variations on informed consent forms and recruitment advertisements.  Students put their own spins on the research project and came up with their own lists of interview questions.  They submitted a short description of their own approach at the beginning of the semester and this received expedited review by the Ethics Secretariat.

So students in that same methods class the following year were able to either do their own research project (and go through the whole ethics approval process), OR they could take one of these 4 research projects and interpret it in their own way, while following the basic protocols and methodologies that I’d already gotten clearance for them to use.  Two did their own projects (one on roller derby leagues in Sydney and another on the Miss India-Australia beauty pageant); the rest of the class slotted into the projects I’d gotten pre-approval for.  With ethics approval mostly taken care of in advance, the students in 2008 were able to start their research right away.  We still had extensive discussions about research ethics, facilitated by the online ethics training module (see section 2 above), but this time students didn’t see research ethics as a tedious bureaucratic requirement, but rather as an area of intense current debate in anthropology.

They all did great work.  Most of them have submitted their papers to journals.  Several are under review, and so far one has been published (Elisabeth McLeod’s study of mobile phone use amongst Baby Boomers in Sydney in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies) and another was just accepted for publication (Vanessa Gamboa Gonzalez’s thought piece on conceptions of the body and health in Second Life for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research). I’m over the moon about this. (I wish that I’d thought about my essays for class in graduate school as articles to submit for publication.  Then maybe I would have had more than 2 obscure publications when I finished my PhD.) These are the exciting possibilities when students are doing their own research instead of writing about the research of others.

–L.L. Wynn

There’s a fabulous little piece in the July issue of Harper’s from Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven, a couple of professors at Princeton who put together a $650K, 3-year grant proposal for Lockheed Martin to identify irony and weaponize it.  An excerpt:

“Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes…

“If we don’t know how irony works and we don’t know how it is used by the enemy, we cannot identify it…. Without the ability to detect and localize irony consistently, intelligence agents and agencies are likely to lose valuable time and resources pursuing chimerical leads and to overlook actionable instances of insolence.  The first step towards addressing this situation is a multilingual, collaborative, and collative initiative that will generate an encyclopedic global inventory of ironic modalities and strategies.  More than a handbook or field guide, the work product of this effort will take the shape of a vast, searchable, networked database of all known ironies.”

Human Terrain indeed.

Harper’s notes that “Princeton declined to forward [the proposal] to Lockheed.”  It puts me in mind of David Vine’s vow to write a proposal for Minerva funding from the Pentagon to study “how overseas military bases affect relations with other nations, ‘how they’ve damaged our international reputation and how they’ve damaged the lives of people around the world.’”  Anyone know of other examples of this wonderful genre of grant proposal as parodic critique of the funding source?

–L.L. Wynn

I’ve been meaning to write about an ethics project I’ve been working on, and now someone else has beaten me to it! Serves me right for neglecting poor Culture Matters for three weeks. I’ll tell you about the project and then I’ll tell you who has scooped me with a critique of my own website.

It all started out because I teach a couple of methods classes and I ask my students to do their own independent research projects. This requires a bit of careful work to secure ethics clearance with our Human Research Ethics Committee. Another time I’ll write about that what that entails. Here I want to describe my solution for giving the students training in research ethics. It became apparent to me that our ethics committee would be more comfortable about the idea of undergraduate students launching into their own fieldwork if they were sure that they’d been trained in research ethics, so I had the idea that I could develop a set curricula to use with every class that I want to send “into the field.”

My inspiration, and nemesis, was the U.S. NIH ethics training module. I had to take it when I was a graduate student, and so I had only dim recollections of what it covered. My first thought was that I could use it as a starting point for my students, but when I went back to look at it, I was shocked at how inappropriate it was for training anthropologists in the ethical dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork. Like most international ethics codes, its basic assumptions about research are grounded in a model of a clinical (mostly biomedical) encounter. Plus it was full of U.S. regulatory code. Ad nauseum.

So at first I thought, OK, it’s a government document so they would probably give me permission to adapt it for my own non-profit, educational use. I’ll just change a few things around, drop every mention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with a reference to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, mention “ethnography” a few times, and add some stuff about Australian research.

But the more I played around with the idea, the more I thought it needed something completely new. I wrote an application for funding from a Macquarie University Learning and Teaching Fellowship and got money to support a one-year project with funding for some teaching relief and money to pay a research assistant and web programmers (thanks, Macquarie!). And I recruited two co-authors: Paul Mason, a PhD student here at Macquarie, and Kristina Everett, an anthropologist in Macquarie’s Department of Indigenous Studies / Warawara who helped develop the material on research in Indigenous Australian communities. Then the Macquarie Learning and Teaching Centre got involved and created the website and programmed it to offer an optional online quiz afterwards to assess comprehension of content, in case people wanted to use it in a class.

I won’t describe the entire module. It’s freely accessible so if you’re curious you can go have a look at it yourself (http://www.mq.edu.au/ethics_training). It is licensed under Creative Commons, meaning that anyone can use it or adapt it for their own purposes, as long as these are non-profit and attributed. So people can use it in their own classes, or use some of it as lecture slides, or they can take it and re-jig the entire thing according to their own perspective on research ethics.

Here I’ll just list some of the ethics issues that we decided to cover, some of the unique ethical dilemmas that can arise in ethnographic research but that rarely come up in clinical research.

Sex in the field

For the section on the ethics of sex in the field, Paul Mason produced a video interview with Julienne Corboz, an anthropologist who has researched BDSM communities

Here’s a classic dilemma that many fieldworkers face but which is unthinkable in clinical research. Paul drafted most of this section. Before going into the field, one of his research supervisors had given him this advice: “Don’t sleep with the locals.” At the same time, he was hearing from other staff in our department (ahem – I mean from me) that “everyone has sex in the field and half of anthropologists end up marrying ‘natives’.” (Of my cohort of 6 PhD students at Princeton, two married “natives” – and are still happily married, one came back with a long-term girlfriend, and another married no one but happily confesses to shagging through fieldwork!) So Paul was curious to explore this issue from the perspective of research ethics.

Oral vs written consent

A screenshot from the section of the module on oral vs. written consent

During participant observation, when should informed consent be written and when should it be oral? Anthropologists have often complained about ethics committees insisting on signed informed consent, even when it is entirely inappropriate, so I was delighted to find both disciplinary and national ethics codes that say clearly that written consent is not always possible or appropriate, even when your informants are literate.

Maintaining informed consent over years of fieldwork

A screenshot from the section on maintaining informed consent over time

How do you maintain informed consent over a long period of time? I illustrated this with an example from my own research: gossip, a small community, and I was pretty certain that when people told me about X’s affair with Y’s husband, they weren’t talking to me as an anthropologist but rather as a friend, and my own decision to not publish on this because it wasn’t clear to me that I was told such information under conditions of truly informed consent.  (Plus I couldn’t adequately disguise people’s identities in such a small community.)

Protecting informant identities in small communities

How do you protect informant identities without changing their identifying details so much that you have created fictional characters? This is a dilemma that many anthropologists have grappled with, and indeed, some have dealt with this problem by writing ethnographic fiction (like Laura Bohannan who published an “anthropological novel” under the nom de plume Elenore Smith Bowen, to protect her informants’ identities).

Researching people who commit crimes

Illustrations from the case studies

What are the ethical choices that you have to make when your research informants are engaged in felonies? I used examples from ethnographic sociologists: Sudhir Venkatesh, who wrote Gang Leader for a Day, and Laud Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade study.

The ethics of applied research / Human Terrain System

Applied anthropology: readers of Culture Matters will be familiar with my interest in controversy over the Human Terrain System, which has prompted the AAA to debate revising its code of ethics, particularly around the issue of applied anthropological research and the extent to which the results of commissioned research data are proprietary or should be in the public domain. It’s a perfect case study, in part because it’s so controversial – so much so that it’s prompting an entire national disciplinary association to redo its whole ethics code – and in part because it’s so recent, which serves as a reminder that ethics controversies aren’t just things that happened in the past (which is the impression you might get from reading some surveys of the history of ethics regulation).

Teaching ethics as debate, not consensus

When I first started this project, I had the idea that, since I was writing for an undergraduate audience, I needed to provide concrete advice and unambiguous solutions. The more I wrote and researched ethics, the more I realized that not only was this impossible, but it was an intellectually barren goal to set. Instead what I ended up doing was showing how much research ethics are contested, both within and across disciplines. That researchers come to completely different conclusions about whether it’s OK to be deceptive in your research, about what research collaboration should look like, and about whether anthropologists should deploy with an occupying army. That researchers had made grave ethics mistakes and yet had gone on to major academic careers because the insights gained through ethically dubious research were so important. In sum, that there was no triumphant, linear narrative of ethical enlightenment – that despite the international “creep” of ethics regulatory regimes and surveillance, research ethics scandals and controversies are unfolding as we speak.

Yet even as I described controversies and lack of consensus, each issue and case study raised is far more complicated than I could ever convey. Virtually every case study I provide gets simplified for the sake of narrative coherence. And even if I could, in a short training module, satisfy myself that I’d covered these issues thoroughly and with enough attention to the ethical complexities raised, I could never satisfy others. Just about everyone who has reviewed this site has pointed out key issues that are missing and should have been covered. In many areas, I see no consensus in how the issues should be covered. Here are some examples from when I asked people to review the section on research in Indigenous communities.

An illustration from the section of the module on research with Indigenous communities

Their critiques:

(1) Not enough Indigenous voices are represented.

(2) But if a non-Indigenous person adds Indigenous voices, it would only be coopting them to authorize colonial methodologies.

(3) We should show examples of research that is truly “decolonising” and collaborative, so that students have a positive model to work towards, rather than only negative models to work against.

(4) But if we present examples of research that is supposedly decolonising and collaborative, then we are reinscribing the enlightenment narrative that conveys the message that we are all marching triumphantly on the path towards egalitarian, ethical research; yet hierarchies and inequalities between researcher and researched – particularly when the researched are Aboriginal – are not going away anytime soon.

(5) We should include a discussion of the recent Howard government Intervention as a crisis that’s fundamentally generated by the ways that politicians uses and twists social science research to advance its own agendas. In so doing, we could avoid giving the impression that unethical interpretations and applications of research only happened in the past and show that this is in fact an ongoing dynamic that links contemporary research agendas with those that led to the Stolen Generation in the last century.

(6) We shouldn’t, as three white academics, think that we can criticize the Howard government Intervention to advance our own academic agendas – a lot of Aboriginal people are happy with the initial outcomes of the Intervention and we need to be patient before assessing its overall impact.

The simple (not to mention simplistic) point is that research ethics are and will always be contested. Of course, that’s not the impression given by ethics codes, which make the issues appear to be settled, even though the codes get revised every few years. To quote Tess Lea (whose 2008 ethnography Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is fabulous – I’m going to review it here when I get the chance), “policy artefacts” are

fetish objects or magical relics that travel through time and space, often referring to each other and just as often ghost-written, that are attributed great expressive power and controlling capacities; a power acquired through ritualistic production efforts, including the careful addition of special words and consecration by anointed reviewers…. Well-worded strategies and well-formulated plans become talismans against an ever-present threat of intervention failure (2008:20).

Lea pushes the magic metaphor, but maybe a better analogy is between ethics codes and scripture. That’s mixing metaphors, but perhaps we’re being too cruel to magic – which is, after all, mysteriously efficacious – and we might do well to implicate religious faith and catechism as well. After all, religions are bureaucracies. Thinking of policy artefacts as scripture or formal documentation of sect doctrine, rather than just magical talismans, gives fuller meaning to another point that Lea makes, namely that ethics codes as policy artefacts are also scoreboards of relations of influence (Lea 2008:37, citing David Mosse). Perhaps that’s why we see both ethics codes and the NIH ethics training module organized primarily around clinical research contexts rather than ethnographic methods: we anthropologists are not powerful enough to shift their clinical orientation.

There is a handful of anthropologists and historians, including Rena Lederman, Jack Katz, Daniel Bradburd, Richard Shweder, and Zachary Schrag, who have recently started the important work of closely examining research ethics protocols and bureaucracies from ethnographic and historical perspectives, which is showing just how much variation there is in what is considered ethical and how differently it is applied and policed across countries, institutions, and disciplines.

It is Professor Schrag, in fact, who has scooped me with a critique of our ethics training module. He reviewed it at length on his Institutional Review Blog. He has some really nice things to say about it, and some potent critiques, too. Have a look and see what you think, and if you have your own feedback on the site, post a comment here or on the IRBlog or send it to lisa.wynn(/@/)mq.edu.au.

Next up, I’m going to post on my new idea for a research project on ethics…

–L.L. Wynn

Merriden Varrall, our PhD student who is doing her research on Chinese foreign policy, forwarded a review of Under Construction: Making Homeland Security at the Local Level, a dissertation-turned-book by Kelly Fosher published by the University of Chicago Press. Writing in The Times Higher, Jeremy Keenan rubbishes the book as “the epitome of all that anthropology should not be,” and Merriden’s email seemed to have a worried undertone as to whether all research on government apparatuses may meet with censure for possible complicity. For Keenan does not say much about the book itself; for him, “Fosher’s relationship with the US military-intelligence-security establishment”, i.e. the fact that she is employed as “the US Marine Corps’ command social scientist at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Virginia” (having decapitalised “command”, Keenan makes some cheap fun of what a “command social scientist” might be) makes it impossible to take any of her claims of a detached observation seriously.

This may be so, but I would still be interested in what the book says. Those who have opposed any engagement with the military by anthropologists have tended to say that they would not produce any critical studies of the establishment anyway. Yet here is someone who, apparently, claims to have tried to do just that with the  apparatus of “homeland security.” Clearly this is a very important thing to do, and it is probably impossible from the outside. On the other hand studying it from the inside, without being kicked out, is likely to entail compromises and ethical dilemmas (whose description, according to Keenan, make the book “an unrewarding read”). I haven’t read the book myself, but I am looking forward to reading at least a serious review.

Any research of government apparatuses, assuming that to some extent it has to be done from the inside, can attract accusations of complicity. Sure, this is especially so if the apparatus is a military one and if the researcher is actually employed by it. Still, I can hardly think of more important tasks for anthropology than studying precisely these mechanisms of power from the inside.

The Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO), an Indigenous umbrella group, has issued a press release condemning the American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expedition, “México Indígena.”  (Below I’ve pasted this press release, and following that, the text of the AGS description of the Bowman Expedition’s “México Indígena” project, which refutes many of the UNOSJO charges.)

The first charge is that one of the AGS researchers, University of Kansas’s  Peter Herlihy,  failed to disclose the fact that his research was partially funded by the U.S. military, specifically the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army. It also claims that Herlihy failed to disclose the participation of Radiance Technologies, “a company that specializes in arms development and military intelligence.”

Another ethics charge is a novel variation on accusations that international researchers exploit Indigenous cultural and intellectual property: they accuse the project of “geopiracy.”

They also claim that the mapping data collected by the project is fed into “a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others.”

AGS refutes  the association with HTS, but one thing that seems clear from this project is that one of the 5 main concerns expressed by the American Anthropological Association about the HTS, namely its prediction that HTS would taint anthropologists and their informants worldwide, seems to be coming true.

–L.L. Wynn (pasted press releases below)

_________________________

PRESS BULLETIN FROM UNION OF ORGANIZATIONS OF THE SIERRA JUÁREZ OF
OAXACA (UNOSJO, S.C.) – Oaxaca, Mexico

TO ALL STATE, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA SOURCES:

We kindly request that you publish the present bulletin in your
respective means of communication.

Towards the end of 2008, the results of the research project México
Indígena (Indigenous Mexico) were handed over to two Zapotec
communities in the Sierra Juárez in the form of maps. Research had
been undertaken two years earlier by a team of geographers from
University of Kansas. What initially seemed to be a beneficial project
for the communities now leaves many of the participants feeling like
victims of geopiracy.

In August 2006, the México Indígena research team arrived at the Union
of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO, S.C.) to
present research objectives and garner support to commence work in the
Sierra Juárez region. At the time, the team included a Mexican
biologist Gustavo Ramírez, an Ixtlán native well known in the area,
who was responsible for initially approaching UNOSJO.

Project leader and geographer Peter Herlihy explained the project
objectives to UNOSJO, S.C., initially stating that it was to document
the impacts of PROCEDE [a Mexican Government program has had on
indigenous communities. He failed to mention, however, that this
research prototype was financed by the Foreign Military Studies Office
(FMSO) of the United States Army and that reports on his work would be
handed directly to this Office. Herlihy neglected to mention this
despite being expressly asked to clarify the eventual use of the data
obtained through research.

Herlihy mentioned that his team would collaborate with the following
organizations: the American Geographical Society (AGS), Kansas
University, Kansas State University, Carleton University, the
Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí and the Secretary of
Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). He failed, however, to
acknowledge the participation of Radiance Technologies, a company that
specializes in arms development and military intelligence.

Although UNOSJO, S.C. participated in some of the México Indígena
Project’s initial activities, the organization soon ceased
participation due to unclear project intentions. The Santa Cruz
Yagavila and Santa María Zoogochi communities also ended up feeling
the same distrust and they too abandoned the Project. For these
reasons, the México Indígena research team localized activities within
the San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan Yagila communities, both located
in the Zapotec region known as El Rincón de la Sierra Juárez.

In November 2008, México Indígena members Peter Herlihy and John Kelly
attended a meeting of the UCC, the Unión de Comunidades Cafetaleras
“Unidad Progreso y Trabajo” (the Union of Coffee-Producing Communities
“Unity, Progress and Work”), held in the community of Santa Cruz
Yagavila. They announced the completion of the Yagila and Tiltepec
community maps and offered their services to other organization-member
communities. They went on to mention that research had been carried
out with the collaboration of UNOSJO, S.C.’s own Aldo Gonzalez, a fact
that was immediately refuted.

Following the aforementioned UCC meeting, UNOSJO, S.C. began looking
into the México Indígena Project. Investigation revealed that México
Indígena forms part of the Bowman Expeditions, a more extensive
geographic research project backed and financed by the FMSO, among
other institutions. The FMSO inputs information into a global database
that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a
United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and
applied within indigenous communities, among others.

Since 2006 the Human Terrain System HTS has, since 2006, been employed
with military purposes in both Afghanistan and Iraq and according to
what we g=have been able to determine Bowman Expeditions are underway
in Mexico, the Antilles, Colombia and Jordan.

In November 2008, the México Indígena Project completed the maps
corresponding to Zapotec communities San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan
Yagila. Contrary to the often-mentioned promise of transparency,
México Indígena created an English-only web page, a language that the
participating communities do not understand. Before the communities
received the work, said maps had already been published on the
Internet. Furthermore, the communities were never informed that
reports detailing the project would be handed over to the FMSO.

In addition to publishing the maps, the México Indígena team created a
database into which pertinent information was entered: community
member names and the associated geographic location of their plot(s)
of land, formal and informal use of the land and other data that
cannot be accessed via the Internet.

According to statements made by those heading the México Indígena
research team, this type of map can be used in multiple ways. They did
not specify, however, whether they would be employed for commercial,
military or other purposes. Furthermore, as the maps are compatible
with Google Earth, practically anyone can gain access to the
information. Yet only community members can decipher information
expressed in Zapotec (toponyms), unless, of course, one has the
capacity to translate them, as in the case of FMSO linguistic specialists.

UNOSJO, S.C. is against this kind of project being carried out in the
Sierra Juárez and distances itself completely from the work compiled
by the México Indígena research team. We call upon indigenous peoples
in this country and around the world not to be fooled by these types
of research projects, which usurp traditional knowledge without prior
consent. Although researchers may initially claim to be conducting the
projects in “good faith”, said knowledge could be used against the
indigenous peoples in the future.

We hereby demand that Peter Herlihy honor his promise of transparency
and that the Mexican public be made aware all his sources of funding
and the institutions that received information on findings obtained in
the communities.

We further demand that, in light of these facts, the Mexican
Government, firstly the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources
for having financed part of the research, as well as the Department of
Internal Affairs, the Department of External Affairs, Deputies and
Senators for possible violations of the Indigenous Peoples’ National
Sovereignty and Autonomy, clarify its position on the matter.

Oaxaca de Juárez, Oax., 14 January 2009

UNION OF ORGANIZATIONS OF THE SIERRA JUÁREZ OF OAXACA (UNOSJO, S.C.)
________________________________

The American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expeditions seek to improve geographic understanding at home and abroad: Spotlight on México Indígena

Since 1851 the American Geographical Society (AGS) has been recognized worldwide as a pioneer in geographical research and education. Our mission is to link the business, professional, and scholarly worlds in the creation and application of geographical knowledge, methods, and technology to address economic, social, and environmental issues. To this end, AGS and collaborating universities send teams of geographers to foreign countries to build a comprehensive multi-scale geographic information system (GIS) for each region, collect open-source GIS data, conduct participatory GIS, build lasting relationships among American and foreign scholars and institutions, conduct geographic research on issues of national interest to the United States and host countries, train a new cadre of regional experts, disseminate GIS data freely to the public here and abroad, and publish results in scholarly journals and popular media.

Our purpose is to improve U. S. understanding of foreign lands and peoples and, thereby, to reduce international misunderstandings, provide a knowledge foundation for peaceful resolution of conflicts, and improve humanitarian assistance in case of natural disasters, technological accidents, terrorist acts, and wars. Each project is called a Bowman Expedition in honor of former AGS Director Isaiah Bowman, one of the greatest scholar-statesmen of the 20th Century, who served as geographer and close advisor to Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, served as chief advisor to the American Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and played a key role in establishing the United Nations.

“México Indígena” was the first Bowman Expedition and is the prototype for all subsequent expeditions. From 2005 through 2008, we worked in two indigenous regions of Mexico, studying the effects of changes brought on by Mexico’s massive new land tenure program. We put geographic tools in the hands of the communities to help them use the power of GIS and maps to support their property claims and cultural rights, educate their youth, and plan conservation and community development strategies. México Indígena is an academic, transparent investigation led by Associate Professor Peter H. Herlihy of the University of Kansas (KU) and conducted entirely by university faculty and students with the knowledge, consent, and enthusiastic participation of indigenous authorities and local investigators chosen by their communities to work directly with the research team. A key role of the AGS is to ensure that the researchers maintain their academic freedom and independence.

AGS President and KU Professor Jerome E. Dobson conceived the Bowman Expedition program in the belief that “geographic knowledge is essential to maintain peace, resolve conflicts, and provide humanitarian assistance around the world” – a topic we discuss in the Geographical Review (Volume 93, Issue 3, July 2008). The goal is worldwide coverage (see http://www.amergeog.org/bowman-expeditions.htm). To date, expeditions have been sent to Mexico, the Antilles Region, Colombia, Jordan, and Kazakhstan.

The AGS Bowman Expedition program operates according to a strict set of ethical guidelines for foreign field research posted on the México Indígena website (http://web.ku.edu/~mexind/ethics_statement_prototype.htm). The program has never requested nor has it received any funding from the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) program, whose design differs in crucial ways from our posted guidelines. The México Indígena research project was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Kansas.

Research topics are chosen by each expedition leader, and results are shared with all of the participants and the general public. The México Indígena expedition represents collaboration between the AGS, KU, Carleton University (Canada), and the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí (Mexico). The project has had two objectives: (1) as the first expedition, to develop a prototype for the Bowman Expeditions for the AGS, and (2) to develop a geographic, multiscale analysis of the new property regime in Mexico, in particular the Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales y Titulación de Solares (Program for the Certification of Ejido Rights and Titling of House Plots, PROCEDE) and its influence in indigenous communities. For the analysis we combined public information at various levels or geographic scales to understand the impacts of land certification in the rural sector. The results show that while privatization can bring benefits to some sectors of Mexican society, they also threaten indigenous lifeways through the introduction of individualistic and capitalistic practices. Land certification changes the historic guarantees of the inalienability of ejido and communal property and puts at risk the patrimony of rural families. It is hoped that the results will have a positive impact on understanding and disseminating the problems of the new neoliberal reforms on indigenous peoples in the country.

We use participatory research mapping (PRM), a methodology that we initially developed in Central America to provide technical training (and global positioning system, or GPS receivers) to local people who participate directly in the research. Together, we produce standardized maps for the indigenous communities that they use to promote their culture and traditions, protect their territorial rights, and plan their own projects. These maps combine, for the first time, the government cartography of the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, INEGI) and cadastral information of the National Agrarian Registry (Registro Agrario Nacional, RAN) with local community knowledge.

Financing for the AGS Bowman Expeditions can come from any source, public or private. When Dobson first sought funding for the program, he found a champion in the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Subsequently, FMSO has financed the expedition to Mexico, as well as others to Colombia, the Antilles and Jordan, through the Radiance Corporation that administers the contracts between FMSO, AGS, and the universities. Support for the first stage of this project also came as a research grant from the sectorial fund of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) and the Secretary of the Environment and Natural Resources (Secretaria de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, SEMARNAT) through the UASLP Coordinación de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, as well as from the U.S./México Fulbright García Robles program, for financing the participation of professors and students in the participatory mapping during 2005-06. Additional support came from the universities. All sources have been publicized on our web page from the beginning and announced repeatedly in presentations and publications.

The PRM methodology implemented in this project was approved by local assemblies and authorities in each of the eleven communities in which research was undertaken. Participation in the research was, of course, voluntary and not imposed. Local populations were involved and informed from the initial research design to the final development and publication of findings. The maps and other information generated have been submitted to the communities in digital and paper formats. For the first time, the maps document community boundaries together with topographic data and geographic and cultural information provided by the communities themselves. These maps combine the information needed for improved management of their lands and natural resources and are valuable for future generations as they document the knowledge of elders of places and sites of historical and cultural importance.
In keeping with the policies of the Bowman Expeditions, the final results are available to the public through the México Indígena web site (http://web.ku.edu/~mexind/index.htm), and in publications and student theses. The original database is safeguarded and housed at the two universities (KU and UASLP). While the final results are publicly available, no personal information is released to anyone outside of the research team. The idea of sharing the final results with the general public was discussed and approved by the communities, and their published maps now are available on the project web site – now even used by community members themselves and soon available in Spanish.

We hope the maps and data will continue to be used as a tool by the local communities in their efforts to maintain control, protect, and manage their ancestral lands. The Zapotec community of San Miguel Tiltepec in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, for example, is using their new standard map in dialogue with government officials to correct an error in the delimitation of their boundary, and to locate their environmental services area. This community held an assembly of comuneros (the maximum authority of the community) on December 13, 2008 for the presentation and approval of the final maps. They listened to an opposing argument by an activist from outside the municipality, and then formally approved the maps and their inclusion on the project’s web site (http://web.ku.edu/~mexind/oaxaca_community_maps.htm); and they implored us to continue helping the community with future projects. We seek no higher endorsement of our work or the AGS Bowman program.

It’s a pity that the month that Culture Matters won the Savage Minds blog award, we’ve been really slow. It’s the end of the semester right before everyone disappears for the summer, and I assume that everyone is either swamped with marking or making exciting travel plans. I have a huge backlog of work and e-mails to answer so I probably shouldn’t be taking the time to post something, but I couldn’t resist because I keep getting distracted from grading by a couple of Wired articles on the Human Terrain System.

We already reported on news coverage of the attack on a Human Terrain Team member, Paula Lloyd, who was set on fire in Afghanistan by a man she was interviewing. Another Human Terrain Team member, Dan Ayala, then reportedly shot her attacker in the head after the attacker was disarmed and fully restrained. Ayala has since been charged with second degree murder and subsequently released on bail and is back in the U.S. (Open Anthropology has a list of links covering the story.)

Of course the attack and the revenge killing raise to a whole new level the debate about the ethics of putting social scientists in the middle of a war, and though I didn’t attend the AAA meetings this year in San Francisco, my sources tell me that this was hotly debated (see Inside Higher Ed for coverage). But all of this has been amply reported on elsewhere, so I didn’t think we needed to write more about it, until a friend and colleague based at SOAS in London sent me to have a look at the comments that have been posted to the Wired articles.

The first is an article by Noah Shachtman reporting on the charges against Ayala. What’s been distracting me from work is the comments that readers posted following the article. If you don’t get sick reading them, it’s actually fascinating to observe how misogyny and homophobia blend seamlessly with the ostensibly “anthropological” statements about local culture.

Misogyny:

“You invade and occupy a country, you better not send girlies with a psych degree to chat with locals”

and

“Afgan is an Islam [sic] country. The dumb-asses let a woman walk around like she owns the f***ing place and interrogate locals. There is no wonder the locals got so pissed off and set her on fire. She shouldn’t have been there in the 1st place. Stupid anthropologist [sic] got what is deserved.”

Homophobia: Shachtman and John Stanton, who has been writing a series of articles critical of HTS, are described as “blow buddies” by one commenter.

Cultural awareness: Many commentators express the view that Ayala’s reaction was culturally appropriate because

“Violence is the only thing people in that region understand.”

My favorite “cultural awareness” genre of comment, though (because I’m writing about stereotypes about Middle Easterners and camels), are the ones that suggest that this isn’t a matter of Geneva Conventions at all — it can just be reconciled by paying the dead man’s family some camels:

“But seriously, local customs would dictate he [Ayala] give the guy’s family some camels or cows and it’s done. So if the point of his team was to work within the local cultural framework, that is the appropriate response. Not an arrest and trial for murder. So lets embrace the local customs, raise some money, and buy some livestock.”

There are actually several comments that more thoughtfully reflect on legal codes that authorize or forbid different kinds of killing during war, but the overwhelming tenor of the articles is one of celebration that the Afghani who set Lloyd on fire was killed. It makes me wonder about the blood-thirstiness of Americans. It’s one thing to understand how a distraught man might kill after seeing his colleague set on fire, and it’s quite another to heroize that.

In other HTS news (they haven’t been getting much good press lately), Wired is also reporting that a Human Terrain contractor has been indicted as a Saddam-era spy.  There’s another series of comments ranging from the thoughtful to the bizarre, and one of the choicest in the “bizarre” category is this one:

“I blame the American Anthropology Association for all the dead and wounded HTS employees, for Ayala’s Human Terrain Murder, and for Montgomery McFate’s hiring of a one of Saddam Husein’s spies. Damn these anthropologists, if they would rise to the call of their patriotic duty and join this program like McFate wanted them to, there wouldn’t be a need to hire people like Issam Hamama or that woman who got set on fire after not realizing the problems with a woman approaching a man on the street (with a gas can) for an interview; anthropologists also wouldn’t have gotten into situations with the IEDs that killed those other HTS members because they’d have a clue about what’s what. Instead, now that the AAA has forbid its members to join McFate’s HTS, they have to hire people with no real experience in the area or whose experience includes spying for Saddam.”

I suppose it’s flattering that “Dr Darpa” (as s/he signs off) thinks that we anthropologists know everything, but it also seems rather cruel to suggest that intelligent social scientists and military personnel are getting killed because they’re not anthropologists so they don’t “have a clue about what’s what”!!

–L.L. Wynn