Ethics in the Field

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 Ethics in the Field: Contemporary Challenges, 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 fieldworking 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 place of ethical clearance for anthropologists involved in international health programs. A further, distinctive aim of Ethics in the Field: Contemporary Challenges is to help the development of a transdisciplinary anthropology at the methodological, not theoretical, level.

Chapter 1. The ethical fieldworker, and other problems Jeremy MacClancy & Agustin Fuentes
Chapter 2. Constructing success and controlling information: the place of ethical clearance in international health Melissa Parker & Tim Allen
Chapter 3. Ethical issues in the study and conservation of an African great ape in non-protected human-dominated habitat Matt R. McLennan and Catherine M. Hill
Chapter 4. Are observational field studies really noninvasive? Karen Strier
Chapter 5. Complex and heterogeneous ethical structures in field primatology Nobuyuki Kutsukake
Chapter 6. Contemporary Ethical Issues in Field Primatology Katherine MacKinnon and Erin Riley
Chapter 7. The Ethics of Conducting Field Research: Do Long-term Great Ape Field Studies Help to Conserve Primates? Anna Nekaris & Vincent Nijman
Chapter 8. Studying suffering: the ethics of studying contested illness Susie Kilshaw
Chapter 9. Messy Ethics: Negotiating the terrain between ethics approval and ethical practice Tina Miller
Chapter 10. Key Ethical Considerations Which Inform the Use of Anonymous Asynchronous Websurveys in 'Sensitive' Research Em Rundall
Chapter 11. Covering all bases, or covering our backs? An ethnography of URECs Jeremy MacClancy

Notes on Contributors
Bibliograhpy
Index