Anthropology News • April 2010

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Rethinking Anonymity in AnthropologyA Question of Ethics

Shannon May UC Berkeley

A year ago, two Papua New Guinean men, Hup Daniel Wemp and Henep Isum Mandingo, filed a $10,000,000 defamation lawsuit with the Supreme Court of New York against Advance Publications, publisher of The New Yorker, and Jared Diamond, author of an article that named both men as protagonists in a tribal blood-feud that would take three years and 29 murders to resolve. This case, amended in October 2009 to a suit claiming $45,000,000 in damages and alleging 24 false passages in “Vengeance Is Ours,” sparked fiery debate among anthropolo-gists about ethical ethnographic methods, and in particular the importance of protecting infor-mants’ identities through the normalized practice of using pseudonyms to ensure anonymity.

It was widely argued on websites such as www.stinkyjour-nalism.org (from the Art Science Research Laboratory, ASRL) and the anthropologists’ forum www. savageminds.org that Diamond’s data collection was seriously flawed, and that Diamond had been irresponsible and broached anthropological ethics by not protecting Wemp and others’ iden-tities. Yet if Diamond had changed Wemp and Mandingo’s names, then fact-checkers working for the ASLR’s Media Ethics Project could not have disproven his claims, and tens of thousands of people would continue to think that a pig running in a garden in Papua New Guinea led to a tribal war involving 4–6,000 people, and that a chauf-feur for the World Wildlife Fund had masterminded it all. Ironically, it is only through Diamond’s breach of the accepted practice of anonymizing his sources that his sources were able to confront his use of their lives, and Diamond could be derided by his scholarly peers as a “generalist” who did not adhere to proper methodological practice.

I highlight this case in hopes that it will spark a longer, deeper conversation in the discipline about how some of its long-

enshrined practices relate to our own claims to authority and exper-tise. Is the methodological prac-tice of changing the names of one’s sources always ethical? Or can it also do harm? If anonymity is justified through its use in protecting sources from danger, what of an ethical obligation to allow sources to respond to and refute us? Why is anthropological knowledge often constructed in a way that only allows for debate among anthropologists, and even then rarely over the “facts,” as the identifying names of individuals, institutions and places have been changed? Is this truly always only for the purpose of protecting our

“human subjects,” or is it also about protecting ourselves?

Looking at the differences between anthropological and journalistic practice is illustra-tive here, and in fact plays a role in Diamond’s defense. The only comments that Diamond and The New Yorker have publicly made on the case were to Science in May 2009, where their defense of the article took a surreal turn. In response to the claim of defama-tion, The NewYorker’s editor David Remnick and Diamond defended themselves by saying that his work was not science:

[They] insist that such anthropolog-ical criticisms are irrelevant, because Diamond was working as a journalist for a popular magazine, not as an anthropologist writing a scholarly article. …Says Diamond, “Everyone knows that The New Yorker is not a scientific publication; it’s journalism.” That’s why he used the names Wemp gave him, he says. “In journalism, you do name names so that people can check out what you write.” Remnick agrees: “Journalistic practice differs from scientific practice in a number of ways,” he says, “and this seems to be one of them.”

The implication of their defense, which Science allows to stand unquestioned, is that if knowledge is classed as journalism it does not matter if it is not factual as long

as “people can check out what you write.” The implied corollary is that the authority of scientific knowledge arises from a practice of anonymizing sources: if it is science (eg, anthropology), it is de facto factual because pseudonyms establish authority by disabling the possibility that details can be refuted.

An Issue of Bravery?Perhaps I am sensitized to this difference between journalism and anthropology more than some other anthropologists because my dissertation “field site” became an internationally heralded ecological development project while I was

still in the midst of living on-loca-tion and engaging with residents, local and national government officials, and various designers of the development project. As I was still meticulously coding names and worrying about how to accu-rately represent my fieldwork while protecting anonymity, Newsweek, the BBC, and dozens of other media outlets were using the real names of all the key stakeholders, the loca-tion, residents and myself; William McDonough and Dai Xiaolong, Huangbaiyu and Shannon May. It was only because journalists used actual identities that I could refute many of the false, factual claims being made by the development agency to the press.

If the journalists had followed anthropological practice, and renamed Huangbaiyu “High Mountain Village” and given McDonough and Dai pseudonyms, then no one would have been able to fact-check whether or not “High Mountain Village” was indeed a successful prototype for the re-development of China’s 600,000 villages into ecological show-cases. But because Huangbaiyu remained Huangbaiyu, and everyone remained himself or herself, debate rather than a solil-oquy can be heard as to what actu-ally happened in this Northeastern mountain valley and what it portends for the future of ecolog-ical development and social equity.

C O M M E N T A R Y

Long before I left Huangbaiyu, I had to make the choice as to whether I would make my own dissertation a soliloquy, or be brave enough to treat the hundreds of people who made my research possible not only as a means to my PhD and the foundation of my claim to authoritative knowl-edge, but as individual persons to whom I owed the opportunity to respond—to contribute to and question the claims to knowledge that I made based on their lives. With those who weren’t already “public figures,” I had conversa-tions about the costs and bene-fits of being named. Shouldn’t the ethical concerns that underlie the principle of informed consent continue beyond research imple-mentation to knowledge produc-tion? Can we have an ethical rela-tionship with those upon whom our anthropological knowledge, our books and our careers are based if we assume that it is always best, or encourage them that it is always best, that they not be named in our work?

A Call for DiscussionIn his essay “What is Enlighten-ment?” Immanuel Kant opined it is the “laziness and cowardice” of “such a great part of mankind” that makes it “so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians,” providing “understanding” to the people, rather than engaging with them in its debate. The extent to which one of anthropology’s enshrined methodological prac-tices may be contributing, either through unintentional laziness or intentional cowardice, to the role of anthropologists as “guardians” that limit rather than enlarge the development of public reason is worth deeper thought than it has been given by the discipline. But as Kant wrote, “[i]t is so easy to be immature,” particularly when maturity would require thinking through how a disciplinary policy that is often held up as neces-sary for the protection of others, is always also one that shields us from scrutiny.

This is the lesson immanent in Writing Culture that anthro-pology has been loath to accept even twenty years on. To produce knowledge about someone without it being possible for that person to reflect on it and respond

See Ethics on page 13

April 2010 • Anthropology News

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At present, the prestige and cred-ibility of science are under attack, newspaper science reporters are facing the budget axe in the shifting world of print media (Jones, 2009, Losing the News), and public understanding and knowledge of the scientific process is stagnant at best (see www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10/pdf/seind10.pdf ). Thus it behooves archaeologists, when in the public eye, to hear Mooney’s call and explain how their eureka moments and the implications of these discoveries fit into multigen-erational webs of debates, ques-tions, research designs, and inter-pretive alternatives that convey the beauty (and occasional warts) of the scientific process at work.

Gary M Feinman (gfeinman@fieldmuseum.org) is curator of Mesoamerican anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago. He has directed long-term archaeo-logical field projects in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Shandong, China. His research interests include compar-ative studies of leadership, cooper-ation and inequality, preindustrial economics, and the recursive rela-tions between humans and envi-ronments over time.

to it is analytically timorous and ethically negligent. The price paid for seeking knowledge—what Paul Rabinow calls “the question of scientific and ethical asceticism” in Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary—is the burden of not wantonly indulging one’s own authority, and hiding unnec-essarily behind methodological artifice. Of course there will be instances in which the redaction of sources’ names is critical to keeping them from harm, but it is time that anthropology as a disci-pline had an open discussion of the harm caused by preventing our sources from questioning our findings.

Shannon May is a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at UC Berkeley. She has conducted fieldwork throughout China and in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work engages anthropological problems of governance, development, citi-zenship and community. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

Ethicscontinued from page 10

as in any other; no good comes from axe-grinding reviews. Yet, to stick with this pair, neither Dennett nor Pinker shies away from a good debate, so why shouldn’t anthro-pologists who disagree with their frameworks swing back at their theories of reductive biology? The ideas in these books matter to public discourse; anthropological voices in response to them may come from reviewers as well as from book authors themselves.

Cost and CollectivityWhat about costs to reviewers, even outside of loading a schedule already swollen with teaching, research, community activism, consulting and scholarly publishing with one extra respon-sibility? I began public-eye book reviewing only after the award of tenure, indeed after my promo-tion to full professor. This wasn’t a calculated move on my part, but there’s no denying it may have been to my benefit. Some books I have reviewed, including a few by

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anthropologists whose work I admire and teach, were so confu-sion-filled and error-riddled that I panned them even as I wished I hadn’t had to do so. I doubt it made me any friends, a social networking cost that job- or grant-seeking anthropologists may wish to consider.

What makes an anthropology book worthy of journalistic atten-tion? Much needed is a wider pool of anthropologists willing to weigh in on this question, and willing also to entangle them-selves in public media with ideas of science and society, power and hierarchy, stasis and change, human and animal, as they come to us through books.

Barbara J King is chancellor’s professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary. Her monthly book column is at Bookslut.com. She writes occa-sional pieces for the Times Literary Supplement (London). Her latest book is Being With Animals: Why We Are Obsessed with the Furry, Scaly, Feathered Creatures Who Populate Our World (Doubleday).

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