Ethical issues of anthropological research: community control over publishing of research results

Abstract

In the article the author asks the questions about the ethical feasibility of social and anthropological research, necessary and optimal level of involvement of enrolled subjects to the work of the researcher, up to the evaluation of its results. The point of departure for the author’s reflections is the experience of the anthropologist Alan F. Benjamin of his work with a Jewish community in Curacao. The author proposes a list of criteria to be met in order to make the involvement of enrolled subjects into the research effective and reasonable.

Literature

1. American Anthropological Association (2009), Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, available at: www.aaanet.org (accessed 20  April, 2011).
2. Barnes, B. and Bloor, D. (1982),  Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge, Rationality and Relativism, Vol. 63, Issue 3, MIT Press, pp. 21–47.
3. Benjamin, A.F. (1999), Contract and Covenant in Curacao  in King, N. M. P., Henderson G., and Stein J. (Ed.),  Beyond regulations: ethics in human subjects research, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
4. Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) (2010), CITI test, The CITI Program, University of Miami, available at: www.citiprogram.org (accessed 20  April, 2011).
5. Cushma, P. (1990), “Why the self is empty: Toward a historically situated psychology”, American Psychology, 45(5), pp. 599–611.
6. Emanuel, E., Wendler, D. and Grady, C. (2000), “What makes clinical research ethical?”, JAMA, Vol. 283, No. 20.
7. Kuhn, T.S. (1996), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
8. Scheper-Hughes, N. (2000), “Ire in Ireland”, Ethnography, Vol. 1 (1), SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, pp. 117–140.
9. Scheper-Hughes, N. (2001), Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics: mental illness in rural Ireland, University of California Press.