Embedding Ethics Shifting Boundaries of the Anthropological Profession

by Meskell, Lynn; Pels, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781845200466
• ISBN10: 1845200462
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-04
• Publisher: Berg Pub Ltd

Summary

Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise.Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes--from new forms of intellectual and cultural ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls.

Author Biography

Lynn Meskell is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University.

Peter Pels is Professor in the Anthropology of Sub-Saharan Africa, University Leiden, The Netherlands.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
Participants at the 2002 Wenner-Gren Symposium	ix
Introduction: Embedding Ethics
Lynn Meskell and Peter Pels	1	(28)
Part 1: Rethinking Ethics
1 Your Body, My Property: The Problem of Colonial Genetics in a Postcolonial World
Jonathan Marks	29	(18)
2 The Promise and Perils of an Ethic of Stewardship
Alison Wylie	47	(22)
3 "Where There Aren't No Ten Commandments": Redefining Ethics during the Darkness in El Dorado Scandal
Peter Pels	69	(32)
4 Anthropology's Malaysian Interlocutors: Toward a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Anthropological Practice
Joel S. Kahn	101	(22)
Part 2: Relocating Ethics in Current Research
5 Sites of Violence: Terrorism, Tourism, and Heritage in the Archaeological Present
Lynn Meskell	123	(24)
6 Pain, Politics, and the Epistemological Ethics of Anthropological Disciplinarity
Pradeep Jeganathan	147	(22)
7 Situational Ethics and Engaged Practice: The Case of Archaeology in Africa
Martin Hall	169	(28)
Part 3: Exemplars and Warnings
8 A Science of the Gray: Malthus, Marx, and the Ethics of Studying Crop Biotechnology
Glenn Davis Stone	197	(22)
9 The Morality of Exhibiting Indians
Craig Howe	219	(20)
10 Documenting Ethics
Don Brenneis	239	(14)
11 Solid Histories for Fragile Nations: Archaeology as Cultural Patrimony
Rosemary A. Joyce	253	(22)
References	275	(36)
Index	311