Chapter 2 – Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis
37
That these players – individual fieldworkers, communities, research consor-
tia, funding agencies, archives and users – may all be located in different
countries has legal implications for the storage, ownership, transfer, and
publication of the data (see Section 2 below). But more important to the
success or failure of a given research collaboration are the shifting and
highly contextual nets of power and belonging (insider/outsider) between
these players. A research project on any scale would do well to evaluate
both these legal and social relationships in the planning stage.
insider/outsider
insider/outsider
Figure 1. Participants in linguistic fieldwork (adapted from Hiß 2001, Wittenburg
2001–2004)
1.4. Ethical principles
Heritage can never be alienated, surrendered or sold, except for conditional
use. Sharing therefore creates a relationship between the givers and receiv-
ers of knowledge. The givers retain the authority to ensure that knowledge
is used properly and the receivers continue to recognize and repay the gift.
(Daes 1993: 9)
We can outline the following five fundamental ethical principles for lan-
guage documentation:
country
government: national, local
experts: national, local
users
country
(country)
community
consultant
funding
organization
(country)
institution
researcher
institution
archivist
country
user
38
Arienne M. Dwyer
Principle 1: Do no harm (including unintentional harm)
Though inarguable, this maxim requires individuals to specify what “harm”
means in the specific local context. Since research is a kind of prying, pro-
tecting privacy largely concerns deciding which information to protect from
public view. Harm to privacy may come from revealing information that
discredits a person (Thomas and Marquart 1987: 90).
There are, of course, many kinds of inadvertent harm. For example,
publicizing one person’s name might result in embarrassment, whereas not
publicizing another’s name may be viewed as a slight. Moreover, the people
with whom an outsider-researcher associates could be stigmatized by the
community for giving away cultural or even national security secrets, for
example, which might lead to trouble with community leaders or police.
Also, since many researcher-consultant exchanges involve compensation,
unintentional harm can be caused by arousing financial or material envy in
the indigenous community.
Part of fairness is being attentive to relative compensation: what one
person acquires in material or political gains as a result of participation may
cause envy or ill will in others in the community. Such attentiveness re-
quires researching not only what is the appropriate form of compensation
(e.g. money, goods, recognition) and the appropriate amount, but also re-
quires knowledge of project participants’ status in and relationship with the
community (see Section 3.5).
Gifts or payments of goods or money, where culturally appropriate,
compensate for both the expertise of another individual and the inconven-
ience caused him or her. Even where no overt compensation changes hands,
the core participants create a dynamic of reciprocity, whereby the gift of
language knowledge is reciprocated by the researcher in some way, e.g. by
compiling a community course book. After all, the term compensation lit-
erally means ‘hanging together.’ Underlying this equilibrium is the second
principle that we might simply articulate as:
Principle 2: Reciprocity and equity
The research relationship must be consultative, continuously negotiated,
and respectful. Accommodate community input into your research goals,
or, better yet, plan the research collaboratively with the indigenous com-
munity. Re-negotiation of methodologies and goals is a normal part of this
process. Part of the culture of respect is acknowledging that one’s view-
points may not be universally held. The researcher should also respect both
Chapter 2 – Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis
39
the indigenous knowledge system under study
and respect the confidence
and trust of individual participants.
One area of normative ethics that modern researchers generally think of
right away is the idea of “giving something back” to the community. This
notion is not altruistic, but rather reflects the consideration that when re-
searchers enter a community, they disturb it at least temporarily, and also
take data away. Even with compensation, research behavior is nearly al-
ways a lopsided proposition, with clear benefits accorded more to the re-
searcher than the community. Thus, many researchers in recent years have
come to feel strongly that they should additionally compensate communi-
ties with scientific products or even economic development aid. Therefore,
our generic code also includes:
Principle 3: Do some good (for the community as well as for science)
What constitutes a generous act of “giving back” varies greatly depending
on community needs. Such acts are more abstract than mere compensation
for a consultant’s time; they are also never 1:1, in the sense that a re-
searcher can never repay a community for the rich but nonetheless snap-
shot-like view of the culture obtained during a particular field research ex-
perience.
The most common examples of “giving back” include preparing peda-
gogical and cultural materials useful to the community, such as promulgat-
ing an orthography, developing textbooks and primers, making audio CDs,
VCDs and documentary film, and creating picture books on material culture,
e.g. embroidery or architecture.
Principle 4: Obtain informed consent before initiating research
It is critical for the researcher to establish an agreement with data producers
(speakers, singers and/or a community) to record, archive and disseminate
these data. Researchers are ethically obligated to inform data producers of
all possible uses of the data so as to implement the do no harm principle
above. Permission should be recorded in a culturally appropriate form:
written, video or audio-taped. A detailed discussion of the issues and pro-
cedures in informed consent are found below in Section 2.2.1.
Such mandatory contracts certainly encourage researchers to document
permissions. However, in some local situations, unrecorded oral contracts
may be most conducive to mutual trust, though they usually do not fulfil
the legal requirements of IRBs (Institutional Review Boards).