a newsletter ro# Ml no 10

Ethics and Anthropology

The American Anthropological Associ-ation has encountered predictable problems ina precipitous attempt to enforce a system ofethics. With no previous history to drawupon, no accepted code of ethics, no estab-lished review procedures and events patentlymore political than professional, it is nowquite uncertain as to who can rule on whom.Up to this time we do not even have a usefuldefinition of who is an anthropologist andwhether a person must be a Fellow of theAssociation to be so designated In the past,journalists, explorers and armchair sexologistshave called themselves "anthropologists" andour Association has made no effort to disputethem or to indicate jurisdiction

In the past, questions of professionalethics have been little considered, in contrastto questions of professional freedom andprofessorial rights. In general we have takenthe position that anthropologists have freerights of inquiry and investigation, that theyhave the citizen's right to speak freely andpublish freely and we have assumed that theyare ethical.

So any person can claim to be an anthro-pologist, membership in the Association is nota prerequisite for professional employment,we have in fact no mechanism for suspensionor expulsion and it is not at all clear whatanthropological ethics are or should be. If ananthropologist chooses to represent himself asan authority on any and all subiects (intouring the lecture circuit), if his actions areovertly political or deliberately disruptive orif he demands the support of anthropologistsfor political misadventures, we chalk it up to

academic freedom and not to a lapse ofethics.

Now the label anthropologist, which canmean explorer or adventurer, can be used as a

Correspondence

Publication of views in theCorrespondence section does notsignify endorsement of the state-ments by the Newsletter and theAssociation. Correspondents areurged to limit letters to 200 words.The Editor reserves the right to cutletters submitted.

cover for other actions that are less investi-gative than political. Even purely anthro-pologic knowledge can become military in-formation given the need, the moment andthe crisis. We do deplore the name of anthro-pology being used by intelligence teams be-cause their masquerade makes our fieldworkmore difficult or even impossible. Yet, wehave repeatedly urged that anthropologist'sfamiliarity with foreign situations or withsituations in our own country should be moreused in making political decisions and militarydecisions and we have regretted that the ad-vice of competent anthropologists was nottaken when we enlarged our commitments inIndoChina

If we chose to rule on ethics, we must firstbe certain that we can do so with effective-ness which means some operational controlover who is accepted as an anthropologist andover what they may or may not do. Second,we must have a code of ethics beyond theaccepted code of protecting native informantsin our books and professional publications.

We must have procedures to gather facts andt weigh them and to administer them as we do'not now.

All of this constitutes a formidable taskfor we have not been previously willing todefine our jurisdiction, our ethical responsi-bilities or to establish a court of inquiry. I amnot certain that we want to, when one man'spolitics (his personal right) may draw him toattack another man's investigation (again hispersonal right), especially when huntingwitches of the left, or the right or the deadcenter.

But if there is an area of anthropologicalethics we do have to decide who is an an-thropologist, what ethical principles we holdand are willing to enforce, how we can en-force them and whether it is ethical for theAmerican Anthropological Association (whichis not a union) to assume the task.

Stanley M GamCenter for Human Growthand DevelopmentU of Michigan

Censure Clarification

AAA endorsement of the AAUP statementon academic freedom and tenure, and publication of the list of censured institutions,gives worthy support to AAUP efforts onbehalf of the academic world.

However, the severity of censure demandsaccuracy. The St John's University that isunder censure is in New York (OctoberNewsletter, p 11). It must not be confusedwith St John's University (Minnesota), whichhas never been under censure.

David McMahonSaint Francis CollegeLoretto, Pa

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