Ethics: Practices, Principles, and Comparative Perspectives

Sociocultural anthropology’s best-known writing on professional ethics has focused on high-profile cases and long arcs of crisis-driven controversy that engaged national and cross-national anthropological communities and professional associations. Sociocultural anthropology’s public controversies have involved instances of systematic departure from the informal principle of relinquishing control and of serious straying from the disciplinary ideals of competent sociable engagement, backstage intimacy, and working collaborations. Among anthropologists, “ethics” tends to refer to sociable practices and culturally legible frames for assessing and indexing the “goodness” or “rightness” of human conduct: that is, it refers to the quality of human selves vis-a-vis other persons. A comparative anthropology of ethics might juxtapose academic philosophy’s professional ethics codes and practices with that of neighboring fields, the better to understand their respective social-relational conditions of possibility. Several of anthropology’s most notable scandals have concerned the uses of anthropologists, anthropological publications, and anthropological identities as fronts for counterinsurgency intelligence work.