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Arienne M. Dwyer
ideal circumstances scientific research has thus contributed to both cultural
and economic development.
4.2.
Organization
Though an entire chapter could be written on project organization, we will
restrict ourselves to two brief remarks on management. The first is
time
management. Building a cooperative work team is much more time-
consuming (but also more rewarding) than working alone. Allow three
times as much time as you estimate for a project of any size. Secondly, a
linguistic research project entails both data and personnel management.
While under older colonialist models, outsider-researchers would typically
be responsible for both, the experience of diverse cooperative research pro-
jects has shown that the more local partners manage both data and person-
nel, the more likely it is that these community members consider them-
selves genuine shareholders in the project. And if local partners consider it
their own project, then it has a much greater chance of being self-sustaining
and self-perpetuating after the external funding runs out. Thus, if appropri-
ate to the local situation, make sure that local team members with a talent
for organization are actually managing the project; make sure that they
have mirror archives of any annotated data archived elsewhere.
5. Conclusions
There is… an inherent contradiction…, namely that we have predefined the
issues … in a non-aboriginal context. The concepts of intellectual property
and heritage resources arise out of a way of viewing the world that either
excludes or is antithetical to that of many First Nations and therefore pre-
cludes a real understanding of aboriginal culture and society.
(Marsden 2004, by permission)
Clearly, a grasp of the legal requirements for both the researcher-consultant
relationship (informed consent) and for the data produced and analyzed
(e.g. copyright and access) is important for any project. Such requirements
are complex since they involve a web of participants subject to laws often
of more than one country. But it is the attentiveness to ethical issues which
can determine a project’s success. If the researcher is an outsider, the real
challenge lies in learning and mediating between at least two ethical sys-
Chapter 2 – Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis
61
tems: that of the researcher, and that of the community. Only with an un-
derstanding of both systems – and this applies equally to outsider-
academics
19
and insider-community members – can ethical and honorable
behavior be determined and evaluated.
Notes
1. References to unpublished papers and web resources on ethics and rights are
listed at the end of this chapter.
2. The following adage is useful if raffish: assume makes an ass out of u and me.
3. For example, in the dominant legal systems of Europe and North America, it is
often assumed that a speaker owns the rights to a translation of her text, yet in
fact she usually does not, if the translation was done by someone else. (The
speaker must first of course be asked permission to publish the translation.) In
an aboriginal context, the concept of data “ownership” itself may not even ex-
ist.
4. Cf. Kenan Malik’s 2000 article “Let them die” Online:
http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/die.html
.
5. The DoBeS groups, for example, have used both normative and non-normative
solutions: for fieldwork, many individual teams relied on the non-normative
list method. At the same time, participants in the pilot projects developed an
overall ethics and rights framework for not only fieldwork teams but including,
importantly, the archivist and the end users. A summary of the rights issues
they identified is Hiß 2001; a later, amended version appeared as Wittenburg
2001–2004.
6. Annotation solely in linguistic transcription and/or very theoretical linguistic
tiers (e.g. prosody and syntax) would be impractical for the vast majority of
speaker-community members. If other tiers are included (e.g. a practical or-
thography tier and a translation into the major regional language), however, the
additional inclusion of linguistics-oriented tiers is not at all problematic.
7.
The American Sociological Association’s statement reads in part:
(a) Sociologists do not use deceptive techniques (1) unless they have deter-
mined that their use will not be harmful
to research participants; is justified
by the study’s prospective scientific, educational, or applied value; and that
equally effective alternative procedures that do not use deception are not
feasible, and (2) unless they have obtained the approval of institutional re-
view boards or, in the absence of such boards, with another authoritative
body with expertise on the ethics of research.
(b) Sociologists never deceive research participants about significant aspects of
the research that would affect their willingness to participate, such as
physical risks, discomfort, or unpleasant emotional experiences.