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 investiga-tions 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 par-ticipates in an exotic way of life and then returns to report to colleagues and the literate public.