Paradoxes of “Consent” to the Practice of Fieldwork

In this essay I will deal with a few of the ethical issues generated in the conduct of that variety of social reseach termed variously as fieldwork, participant observation or ethnography (R.H. Wax, 1971). After some general review of what occurs during fieldwork, I will turn to the notion of consent, since this notion has become a central requirement of the systems which regulate research that involves "human subjects." My discussion is intended to challenge and therefore add depth to the ethical critique of scientific research, since much of that has been developed with biomedical research as the model, and yet, as will become apparent, the ethical issues generated by fieldwork are so different. For many audiences, a convenient exemplar for "fieldwork" would be the research investigations of Margaret Mead as reported in her books on Samoa and New Guinea, or of Bronislaw Malinowski (Wax, 1972) in his set of books on the Trobriand Islanders. Their accounts convey an image of the solitary anthropologist encountering and then living intimately within a community of "Stone Age" people. Isolated from the conveniences of Euro-American technology and from the society of other "civilized" beings (generically "white"), the anthropologist learns and participates in an exotic way of life and then returns to report to colleagues and the literate public. The contemporary view of fieldwork differs in several respects. Exotic communities isolated and insulated from the technological West are decreasing in numbers, and such as are encountered are really often more refugees than aboriginees. Moreover, anthropologists have altered their directions of interest and have come to concern themselves with the linkage between the community studied and the exterior world, rather than seeking to reconstruct in their writings the fabric of original and "uncontaminated" life. Moreover, other anthropologists have joined with some types of sociologists in using fieldwork methodologies to study the communities, groups and organizations of modern civilized societies. Among the entities so studied have been gangs, prisons, mental asylums, factories, small towns, schools, ethnic-religious communities and governmental agencies. The social groupings which may profitably be studied by fieldwork methodologies are limited. In some sense they must each be bounded wholes of a size such that they may be encompassed by the research vision of a single person or a small research team. One form of limitation then is the number of persons: fieldwork seems ideally suited to deal with a natural whole of a few hundred or few thousand persons: thus, a school, but not an urban school system; a village, but not a metropolis; a military encampment, but not the defense establishment of a nation state. By judicious selection and random sampling, fieldwork can be adapted to the study of moderatesized entities, such as small cities, industrial organizations, or other hierarchical associations. Another restriction to the entities that may be studied by fieldwork is that of communication, interaction and association. As the interaction among persons becomes attenuated, limited and specific, fieldwork becomes less appropriate. It seems natural to use fieldwork to study the way of life of a small exotic community (such as traditional bands of Eskimo or of Bushmen). However, the observational studies of homosexual interactions in a "tearoom" (Humphreys, 1970) or of the exchanges between cabdrivers and their fares (Davis, 1959), are methodologically (and ethically) so different that it seems confusing to group them together with the studies by Malinowski or Mead. Entities adaptable to being studied by fieldwork tend to be bounded wholes whose members share something distinctive in the way of culture, language or dialect, ceremonial, moral code and social organization. The task of the fieldworker is to enter into the matrix of meanings of the