The James Bond Dilemma - The Ethics of Anthropology and the Structure of the University

In beginning to think about the terms of this project I have met a dilemma, my research group is a social circle in which I participate regularly and have become assimilated in over the past years. But I find in myself a moral disgust at the thought of using people, whether they be my friends or strangers, as my research object as it makes me question my perception of the nature of anthropology. And the role the anthropologist plays as a research gatherer but also a human being within a network of other humans. It feels like a deceptive practice.

As an ethical agent I believe it is necessary to discuss the ethic to ones self. Within my self I have found a deep contradiction in my thought about how I should operate as an agent in the field. For I feel my mind has come to think as the role of an anthropologist as similar to that of a secret agent. But this is only if the agent does not proclaim his involvement in the field of anthropology. If he does proclaim that he is an agent of anthropology he does two things. Announces that he is there to study, compromising the research group. Or in not announcing himself begs the anthropologist to question for the sake of knowledge weather he should act as himself, but think like an anthropologist; which compromises his moral integrity for he then comes to think of all he sees as something of interest or not to his research. When one is working as an insider, an already assimilated member of a group this evokes a strange moral dilemma, as the line between friend and research object becomes muddy.

The slot has not become a problem, as Trouillot argues (Trouillot; 1991). How anthropologists view their field through their history has become a meta-layer of analysis in itself, and thus has been removed from the under layer of the anthropologists thought, and brought it to the fore front of consciousness; into a space that the concepts that colonialism has embedded in our structures can be analysed. We have come to terms with the fact that the loss of “the other” has an implication for the field. But we have moved past it in terms of analysis of the fact that we are individual agents in a network and we can only perceive as much as we perceive, in the frame work that has been built, questioned, and realigned. It is perhaps because of our built perceptions that we like to think of our relation of ourselves to the world in terms of a field site, as we would in terms of our normal dealings with reality. If you walked into a venue, you would instantly refer to yourself as being at that specific venue. And this makes the idea of a field site seem less colonial. The fact is that we think in terms of spacial location, and our relation to other people in terms of locating nouns, even if you were not an anthropologist. Unless one wants to question how we perceive time as linear and spatial, and the dialogue which has developed around these perceptions, then the idea of a field site and the concepts of meaning that surround that do not hold much water in terms of what the problem with anthropology is.

  It is not the trope of “the savage” that is the problem; it is the act of voyeurism which should repel the anthropologist in an ethical dilemma. Not: is it right to study “the other” in terms of a colonial project, for this language is embedded into every part of society, it is an unavoidable part of our landscape, which as it is being realised is being adjusted. But is it right to study other people, as a course of ethics, in the manner that we do. Even if you self-proclaim yourself as an anthropologist in the field it begs the question of whether it is right or wrong to have such a job description. All anthropology seems to be doing is watching and “hanging” with vivid theoretical imagination to justify its being there. Meta – layer built up upon meta-layer. This has not only complicated the world and our perception of it, but has made us lose sight of the true ethic behind anthropology. It is no longer for the project of colonialism. And if it is no longer a product of colonialism what should it be a project of? The project of anthropology seems un-utilitarian; it does not benefit a large amount of people. It seems to have become a project of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and more to the benefit of the individual anthropologist in terms of his quest for excellence within the field of anthropology. But here in lies the flaw in the university structure in which the anthropologist is taught. For it seems like it is not the project of the university to seek the greater good, but the greater knowledge, but even more so now, the greater capital. It has become the project of the individual to seek the greater good, not the institutions which surround him. But the in order for the greater good to be attained, in this case the benefit of people who are not a part of well off society but who are engulfed by it, but have not been assimilated, the project of the university, and the project behind the structures of society as a whole. This is not said as an act of idealism. In the simple act of watching myself as an anthropology student I find the heart of the dilemma faced in the structure we find ourselves in. The anthropologists must find a way to be justified in its (I had a momentary collapse of “he”/”she” dichotomies) studies, the only justifying factor of any action of an ethical nature should be in a nature which benefits people within your given time and space, as an individual that you are. By merely being an anthropologist within a space with no project other than writing a paper involving the deepness of theoretical knowledge that we have evolved, we cannot be justified in our studying of others.