[LINK] "Committing Crimes during Fieldwork: Ethics, Ethnography, and “On The Run”"

[rfmcdonald]

Savage Minds' Alex Golub takes a look, from the social sciences perspective, about Alice Grossman's controversial On The Run. I honestly hadn't thought there were such notable differences between journalistic and ethnographic conventions re: truth-checking, though maybe I just hadn't gotten deep enough into the field.

There are still some outstanding issues, of course. One is Goffman’s claim that police checked hospital records looking for people to arrest — something I’d like to deal with later on. Here, I want to focus on the claim not that Goffman was inaccurate in her reportage, but that she broke the law during her fieldwork.

This criticism comes from law professor Steven Lubet. Having loved Goffman’s book, I thought it would be easy to dismiss Lubet’s critique — especially the part where Lubet asked a cop whether details of Goffman’s book were true and the cop is like: “No we never do that to black people” and I was like: “Well I’m glad we got to the bottom of that, since police accounts of their treatment of minorities is always 100% accurate.” But in fact Lubet’s piece is clearly written and carefully argued and I found it very convincing. That said, how much of a problem does it pose to Goffman’s book?

In the appendix to On The Run Goffman describes the death of one of her key informants, and driving around in a car with some guys with guns planning to kill his murders and take revenge. This, Lubet says, constitutes conspiracy to commit murder. But was Goffman’s actions unethical? What does it mean to commit a crime? And does answering these questions say anything new, interesting, and important about ethnography?

Clearly, it’s not prudent to confess to a crime in print. But is it unethical, in general, to break the law during fieldwork? I think the answer is, in general, no. I personally believe that one should follow the laws of the country where you live just on general principles. But there are many cases when anthropologists do fieldwork in places where the laws are clearly contrary their moral intuitions, and to accepted international standards. For instance, Goffman makes a compelling claim that her field site is one of these places.