Four anthropologists, Elise Edwards, Ann Elise Lewallen, Bridget
Love and Tomomi Yamaguchi, draw on their fieldwork experiences in
Japan to demonstrate collectively the inadequacy of both the Code
of Ethics developed by the American Anthropological Association
(AAA) and the dictates of Institutional Review Boards (IRB) when
dealing with messy human realities. The four candidly and
critically explore the existential dilemmas they were forced to
confront with respect to this inadequacy, for the AAA 's code and
IRBs consider neither the vulnerability and powerlessness of
ethnographers nor the wholly unethical (and even criminal)
deportment of some informants. As Jennifer Robertson points out in
her Introduction, whereas the AAA 's Code tends to perpetuate the
stereotype of more advantaged fieldworkers studying less advantaged
peoples, IRBs appear to protect their home institutions (from
possible litigation) rather than living and breathing people whose
lives are often ethically compromised irrespective of the presence
of an ethnographer. In her commentary, Sabine Fr hst ck, who
incurred ample experience with ethical dilemmas in the course of
her pathbreaking ethnographic research on Japan 's Self-Defense
Forces, situates the four articles in a broader theoretical
context, and emphasizes the link between political engagement and
ethnographic accuracy.
This book was previously published as a special issue of
Critical Asian Studies.
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