This paper focuses on ethical dilemmas encountered during the fieldwork process. Questions are raised about the extent to which anthropologists should become involved in, and possibly alter, the experiences of the people they conduct participant observation among. Here it is argued that although much is written about ethics in anthropology, anthropologists do not make explicit clear guidelines concerning the level at which they should become involved in the communities they study. It is suggested that there is currently a divide between those who believe they should retain distance in the field and those who support some forms of local activism or other types of involvement. I present my experience of doing research in Vietnam among children who were at possible risk of contracting the AIDS virus and who, in the aftermath of fieldwork being completed, tested HIV positive. The paper also explores ways in which we can continue to draw on such experiences once we have returned from doing fieldwork.
Introduction
In 1996 I moved to Vietnam to start the fieldwork stage of my doctorate in anthropology. Like countless other research students I prepared myself by reading monographs produced by well-established anthropologists and by attending lectures on research methods. Particular areas of the research process made perfect sense to me. I was in no doubt that the longer I spent in the field the better it would be for any research outcome. I was determined on the advise of one of my supervisors that if I was going to be a ‘real’ anthropologist I should spend at least two years doing fieldwork and using participant observation as my primary research tool.
My biggest concern prior to moving to Vietnam was the role and ethical responsibilities of the anthropologist. Although this topic is covered at length in anthropology literature it was not an issue that seemed to concern many of the academics or student colleagues I came into contact with. As an undergraduate anthropology student I had a close friend who planned to travel the world to do ethnographic research. We would talk long into the night about the role of the anthropologist. But during our heady and somewhat idealistic discussions we repeatedly stumbled over the same fundamental disagreements. These focused on two of his convictions: firstly that successful research could only be achieved if the researcher was completely objective about his research ‘subjects’; and secondly that anthropologists should not get involved in, and therefore ‘spoil’, the events that happened among the people they were observing. Long after we had lost touch and I had returned to university I discovered, to my relief, that most contemporary anthropologists acknowledge that it is impossible to be completely objective during the fieldwork process. I also learnt that I should take into account any influence my particular presence might create in the field. However I was still concerned about, and preoccupied with, the second aspect of our argument: that the anthropologist should not get too personally involved with issues affecting the people they research.
The changing role of the anthropologistThe role of the anthropologist has been seen differently over time according to changing theoretical perspectives. A cultural relativist, for instance, might take a firm stance on not becoming involved with difficult ethical issues at the local level. Others among us continue to challenge this approach, as Parkin indicates:
Changing perceptions on the ethical are sometimes like changing theoretical fashions, indeed are part of them. Protests against female circumcision might once have been regarded as cultural interference, but are now inscribed in post field-work debates on the subject, if not actually directed at the people among whom the fieldworker lived (Parkin 2000:267).
A key strength of the anthropologist is that he or she is able to fit in with peoples' own socio-cultural understanding. Yet Parkin, among others, suggests that while it is accepted to do exactly this while in the field, once we return it is sufficient to challenge some of the practices of the people we have worked among through academic post-fieldwork debate. I cannot reconcile myself to this approach. It seems underhand and contradictory to gather information among people who have openly shared aspects of their lives, while simultaneously concealing concern about certain cultural practices. This approach ignores the influences of Marxist, post-Marxist, post-modern and feminist critiques of ethnographic representation that have successfully sensitised anthropologists to the inequalities of fieldwork-based studies. Such influences have also encouraged anthropologists towards greater accountability to the societies in which they work and to the idea that informants should be more equal partners in the construction of ethnography. Critical anthropologists such as Merrill Singer (1989), Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) and Paul Farmer (1992) have challenged the role of the passive anthropologist and demonstrated by their own actions that it is possible to be both a social activist and an anthropologist. I would also argue that it is impossible to be critical of specific issues without indirectly criticising the people conducting these practices.
Ethics and the role of the anthropologist
My training as a social worker influenced my ethical concerns, which centred primarily on whether it is acceptable for anthropologists to become directly involved in influencing and improving the circumstances of the people who inform their work. As a social worker I was conditioned to ‘jump in’ to try and address the wrong doings of society or to protect people who might be particularly vulnerable. So in many ways I felt sorely unprepared to make the crossover towards adopting an anthropological distance. Having been reassured by my supervisors that I was not expected to be an objective outsider, I still felt doubtful that I would be able to make observations in adverse circumstances and not intervene to avert particular situations if given the opportunity. Becoming a participant observer was never straightforward for me. I was forced to question my position as an ‘observing’ anthropologist under particular circumstances, such as when I suspected boys who informed my research were being drawn into prostitution, or were unable to afford healthcare provision that I could easily organise and sometimes afford for them. On such occasions I did sometimes get involved but could never quite reconcile my activist tendencies with my role of the observing researcher. In Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, Paul Rabinow (1977) reflected on his experiences as a doctorate student and like myself felt under some pressure to subordinate his own ethical standing and simply record the events that he observed.
Purpose of my research
During fieldwork one of my objectives was to look at and compare local peoples' understanding of childhood with that of the employees of international aid agencies. I therefore conducted ethnographic studies of groups of children international aid agencies categorised as living in difficult circumstances: children on the street, children in orphanages, and those who had been placed in reform schools as an alternative to adult prisons. I also incorporated an analysis of the ways in which local children are understood and treated by the different types of aid agencies that create projects to support them. In this way I hoped to do more than observe children’s lives at the local level by also taking into account the impact of global influences. Interviews with, and participant observation among, aid agency workers also went someway towards addressing the sense of unease I felt about being the privileged westerner following in the footsteps of my colonial forefathers: travelling to the other side of the world with the express intention of observing people from a different culture to my own.
The children I spent most of my two year’s fieldwork with, included children who worked on the streets of Hanoi; a group of girls who lived in an orphanage; and boys aged 12-17 years of age who had been arrested and placed in a reform school for a maximum of two years. Over the two years in the reform school (where I did participant observation during English classes, class breaks, and lunch-time periods) I began to notice that some of the children had small lesions on their faces. Some boys in the school smoked opium or injected heroin, and I think it was also likely that some of the boys had sexual relations with one another. Tattooing was of enormous importance to different groups’ identities and it was common practice for the boys to share needles when creating tattoos.
Local beliefs about children contracting HIV
At that time in Vietnam, the AIDS virus was only recognised as a potential problem among a very small segment of the population: adult drug addicts and prostitutes (reflecting the history of how the AIDS virus came to be recognised in the North). In general, children were viewed as innocent of sexual and drug-related practices, so although boys in the reform school shared tattooing needles this was not associated with any risk of contracting the HIV virus. In the mid-nineties it was also much more common to smoke than to inject heroin. It was not until 1997 that boys in the reform school started miming injecting heroin when they were playing around and talking about the high the drug could give them.
I attended the school with an expatriate NGO worker who ran an American international, but locally focused, aid agency. Over time both he and I grew concerned about the skin conditions of some of the boys. As a precautionary measure we finally asked the Vietnamese staff if they could be tested for HIV. The staff members were all members of the police force so their decisions overruled any concerns we might have had. We were refused the opportunity to test the boys because the staff remained adamant that children did not get AIDS. This put us in a difficult position. We could have refused to attend the centre but such a withdrawal would have meant that the police would lose face both in the eyes of the boys and of the international aid agency community. If we had challenged the police in this way it was still unlikely that AIDS tests would have been introduced. Such action on our part would have not only jeopardised our positions in the school, and therefore the support services we were offering to the boys, but would have isolated the children further because at that time no other NGOs were welcome to work there.
In 1999, one year after I left Vietnam, the boys in the reform school were finally tested for HIV/AIDS and tragically 90% of the 180 boys with whom I had done research tested positive for the virus.
When I was told about the outcome for the boys, some of whom I had got to know very well, I was devastated and felt racked with guilt (as incidentally did all the staff in the school). While I had had concerns about the health of some of the children and thought about the possibility of HIV/AIDS I had, like the Vietnamese staff, not been unduly concerned when the boys were not tested for the virus. Although I had shown passing concern about the condition of some of the children’s skin, I had finally concluded that their skin conditions might be linked to the poor quality of water in the school (in fact, once the NGO introduced a sanitised water system many of the skin conditions cleared up). Rather than dwell on the matter I chose to focus on daily events and to stop challenging the authority of the Vietnamese staff. In retrospect it is likely that during that period some boys were spreading the virus among themselves at an alarming and catastrophic rate.
So now, in the aftermath of leaving Vietnam, how do I live with this knowledge? Should I gain comfort from the likelihood that even if I had tried to insist that the boys be tested the Vietnamese staff would have ignored my request? Even though I know that the staff would have taken little, if any notice of my concerns, I now think that I made a mistake in adopting a non-invasive fieldwork approach.
There is a wonderful piece of video art by Bill Viola titled The Reflecting Pool that perfectly sums up my thoughts whilst in the field about the anthropologist’s preferred position. In the video Bill Viola emerges naked from a forest and stands before a pool of water. He leaps up and time abruptly stands still, suspending him in mid-air. From this point on, all movement and change in the otherwise still scene is limited to the reflections and undulations on the surface of the pool. Finally, he emerges from the pool and walks away into the forest. Viola intended that the emergence of the man into the natural environment become a kind of baptism into a world of virtual forms and indirect perceptions. My interpretation however, mirrored my recent experiences as a fledgling anthropologist. I felt that because of the insurmountable cultural barriers, I had spent two years suspended above and slightly distanced from the people I most wished to understand. When a boy who worked on the streets was sick I took him to hospital and organised ongoing medical support. I also put children in contact with aid agency workers who ran relevant support projects. Although I did not behave in a stilted manner and was constantly drawn into the lives of children who informed my research, the most significant event in the children’s lives had nevertheless eluded me.
Weaknesses in mainstream anthropological positions
Like numerous others within our discipline I had already been quite concerned about the ethics of the anthropological position. From my, admittedly inexperienced, standpoint it appeared that the majority of researchers seemed to gather potentially valuable information from the field and to disseminate what ideas they had in a limited fashion: ultimately to add to the academic discourse through writing articles, books, or theses like myself.
The news of the boys contracting the HIV virus forced me to readdress my role and responsibilities as an anthropologist. It was at this point that I became interested in applied anthropology and in sharing my findings with people working in the area of international aid and within different social science disciplines. This approach still has limitations. Practitioners and academics are often suspicious of each other.
In the reform school I felt that I had, in effect, stood by and watched the boys spread the infection. Even worse, one of my central research interests in the reform school had been on the meaning children attached to their tattoos. Tattooing was banned in the school, which made having a tattoo incredibly attractive, and for many of the boys their choice of tattoo represented allegiance to a particular group. Being tattooed also sped up the rate at which the HIV virus spread among the group.
My experience of being a bystander while young boys infected each other with HIV is probably an extreme example of fieldwork encompassing tragic outcomes. Nevertheless it raises questions that should concern any of us who use participant observation as a research tool. While it is common practice to acknowledge that we are all subjective in our research observations at what point, if any, should we be able to meddle in, and ultimately alter, the research environment in which we find ourselves?
Debate on this subject has existed for as long as the discipline itself. When writing home to his tutor during his period of working among the Mailu, Malinowski acknowledged that colonialism was having an impact on the structure of the native society. Yet this did not emerge as a central theme of his thesis, perhaps because some of the funding which indirectly supported his work came from colonial departments. Other anthropologists such as Gluckman, writing about the effect of colonialism on Zululand, were more concerned about examining social situations, but remained, ultimately, interested bystanders. David Parkin's argument, quoted earlier in this paper, that it is legitimate to act as a bystander while doing fieldwork and only enter into debate post-fieldwork, fails to resolve what an anthropologist should do when faced with a particularly difficult situation while still in the field.
Becoming a radical anthropologist
It has become more acceptable within critical anthropology for us to raise the type of questions that preoccupied my fieldwork experiences. I have turned to the seminal work of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, and Merrill Singer to reinforce my conviction that anthropologists should not distance themselves from the experiences of local people. It is also among this group that questions have been raised about the tradition of merely looking at social processes at the local level, without also taking into account the influence of wider global forces (Singer 1989:1200).
Experiences of the boys in the aftermath of contracting the virus
No official information currently exists on the numbers of children infected by the virus (but my findings in one reform school indicate that among some groups of marginalized children, rates are likely to be quite high). The government officially denies that HIV-positive people are being discriminated against. However, the experiences of the children I worked with and local newspaper reports indicate otherwise. One of the street children, Dang, who is one of my key informants had a positive test for HIV in 1999. During police raids on the streets he was often locked up in a correction centre. During one of his many visits he tested positive for the HIV virus. When he returned to the streets word got out that he was HIV-positive and the police hassled him a lot more than before, which meant he found it much harder to make a living selling postcards than he had prior to receiving his diagnosis. In spite of his difficulties he felt he could not return home to his family in the countryside because of the stigma his condition would cause them.
Another boy, Hang, who contracted the HIV virus while in the reform school, was unable to return to his parents’ home when his sentence came to an end. Neighbours threatened to inform on them and jeopardise the family business should he go anywhere near his old neighbourhood. Local perception was still that HIV/AIDS could spread by simply being in proximity to someone with the virus. Hang’s sister became so distraught by the refusal of her parents to allow Hang to come home that she decided to leave home and join him on the streets, rather than stay among her family who she felt had rejected him. Hang’s experience is not uncommon.
Although relations are now re-established with the West, a number of underlying Communist sentiments still inform government thinking. All over Hanoi posters warn people against becoming involved in Western evils (or social evils as they are commonly called). Members of the Vietnamese population are told to avoid drink, drugs, and Western films. People who have contracted the AIDS virus are assumed to have been involved in Western social evils and they are thus the most contaminated of all. There is currently concern that the largest spread of the HIV infection is taking place in correction centres (similar to the one I worked in). This is because since the HIV/AIDS epidemic began the government has adopted a policy of putting any known drug addicts behind bars. On the 25th June 1998 the Vietnam News, a daily Hanoi newspaper, claimed that 70% of 28,000 people with HIV were drug addicts, and that of that number 4,800 were children. On 22nd September 2001 the Vietnam news service reported the head of social affairs in Hanoi as saying that there will be an increase in detention (or correction centres) from 1,000 to 5,000 human capacity. Most significantly he indicated that Hanoian families would be encouraged to send their child drug addicts to such centres for sentences of one to five years. This approach of locking up people with a high likelihood of spreading the HIV virus contrasts with the more supportive measures that many of the local support groups and international aid agencies would like to have put in place, such as street-based drop-in centres where people can go to collect clean needles and condoms and also learn about the use of acupuncture to boost the immune system.
A final case focuses on Chu’ng, a boy who I knew for the entirety of my stay in Vietnam. He had worked on the streets from the age of 14, and like other boys in his group was sometimes sent to correction centres when he could not afford to pay bribes to the police. In 1999 he tested HIV-positive, but realised that he would not be able to afford any type of treatment. The available services focused on preventing the spread of Aids rather than assisting people who were HIV positive. One local Vietnamese NGO offered Chu’ng a chance to join their heroin detox program but could do little for the HIV virus. Chu’ng decided against this in favour of continuing to take drugs because they at least provided him with some form of escape.
Conclusion
I started this paper by questioning the ethical role of the anthropologist in situations such as mine. Having dwelled on this issue I am now convinced that to do justice to my findings they should be shared with audiences outside academic circles. Academics such as Paul Farmer and Nancy Scheper-Hughes have also adopted this practice, but this is very much the exception among anthropologists. Now, more than ever, I wonder if some of us are so preoccupied with gathering information to sustain our academic work that we fail to use our findings to reach wider audiences. Do we go far enough in properly addressing concerns about the ethical role of the anthropologist if we merely bring these concerns back from the field to use in debates in our countries of origin? Shouldn't we be properly exploring them among the very people who practice the acts we have concerns about? Because such dilemmas are unresolved within the discipline (and perhaps within academia in general) I found myself – as a PhD student in the field – lacking confidence and floundering in the face of such uncertainty.
Recently I have taken to asking different audiences, to whom I have presented papers similar to this one, if we can spend time exploring the ethical dilemmas thrown up by my fieldwork experiences. People always show reluctance to do this, and instead focus on other aspects of the paper. Recently an established academic responded to my concerns with the suggestion that I was bordering on becoming an activist. He further suggested that as an anthropologist he found such an activist stance unappealing. The following quote supports his concerns:
Is the dialogue increasingly becoming confrontational? Having moved during the last generation from its initially positivistic activity as "objectively neutral observation" to what is now familiarly called reflexive ethnography we may ask whether fieldworkers have in some cases already moved in the direction of becoming cultural agent provocateurs – thus, for some fieldworkers, the representational crisis has metamorphosed into one of direct action advocacy. As Ahmed and Shore ask does the crisis of relevance rather than representation now threaten the discipline? (Parkin, 2000: 270).
So where does this leave us? Was it wrong of me to take children to hospital when they were sick? Becoming involved in controversial social issues in different cultural settings, particularly those in the South, can also be legitimately associated with a domineering legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism. But does such sensitivity make any form of social intervention unacceptable? Could such involvement, under some circumstances (particularly when one group of people within a society are being victimised from within the country’s own power structure) strengthen the position of the anthropologist?
The work of Scheper-Hughes, Farmer, Singer, and Rabinow demonstrates that I am not alone in having concluded that I should take a more proactive stance. So why do we so rarely acknowledge our interventions and the dilemmas they create in our formal writing? Why do we fail to take some kind of position when we come across ethical dilemmas while doing fieldwork? Perhaps the myth of the neutral observer still prevails. If this is the case then I argue that on the whole we are still taking advantage of the people we study to fulfil our own academic ambitions, instead of displaying a genuine interest in properly and honestly engaging with the issues that are of concern to the subjects of our study themselves.
I realise that my experiences are quite extreme examples of how ethical dilemmas affect our work. But my time in the reform school demonstrated to me that fieldwork is often likely to be rife with ethical problems. Now that the true extent of the children’s rate of infection is known I wish more than anything that I could have somehow convinced the police that it was worth doing HIV tests. In the eyes of some anthropologists such action would have meant I was crossing an unacceptable line between being an anthropologist and becoming a social activist. In retrospect I believe that the social activist route would have been preferable.
References
Farmer, P. (1992). Aids and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. back
Parkin, D. (2000). "Templates, Evocations, and the Long-Term Fieldworker". In Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research, edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James and David Parkin. Oxford: Berghahn Books. back
Rabinow, P. (1977). Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. back
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992). Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. back
Singer, M. (1989). "The Coming of Age in Critical Medical Anthropology". Social Science and Medicine, 28: 1193-1203. back
Rachel Burr completed her PhD in the anthropology of childhood at Brunel University in 2000. Her central interest is in the local interpretation of the rights of the child in countries outside the North. She argues that Western countries' strategy of making each nation state separately answerable for their own success or failure in relation to child rights, ignores the difficulties in dealing with structural abuses that are part of the global system. She proposes that anthropology fieldwork should take into account the impact of globalisation. Rachel previously worked as a social worker and now teaches at the Open University.