The system of shared values, beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts, transmitted from one generation to the next, that the members of a group use to cope with their world and with each another.
Following from this definition, culture is 'inside' people's minds, involves values, is automatic and it is routine, visible in our behaviors and what we make, and 'embodied' (never separate from us). We can also regularly see that culture has an odd tendency to be at once static and variable. On one hand, culture helps us make sense of rigid institutions, steadfast traditions, beliefs that have endured from ancient to modern times, and centuries-old practices. On the other hand, culture is about what helps us get by in the world and the world is very different than the world of the past. The concept of culture also helps us make sense of generational differences, adjustments, special circumstances, careful negotiations, and even revolutions at various scales. We can describe this consistency yet variability through several 'paradoxes of culture.'
The Paradoxes of Culture
Despite forces of change and controversy, there is something durable and shared about culture, some set of common elements that distinguishes the whole way of life of each society. Even as cultures change through innovation and contact, they often hold on to some of their distinctive features. In the 1980s, some scholars thought that increases in global trade, migration, and technology were transforming all the diverse societies of the world into one uniform global monoculture. In the 2020s, we see that the opposite has happened. In many parts of the world, we have seen a resurgence of cultural identities and explicit efforts to maintain, rehabilitate, and reinvent forms of cultural heritage.
So riddled with contradictions is the concept of culture that some anthropologists have suggested ditching the whole notion altogether and finding some other concept to bind together the four fields in their pursuit of knowledge about humanity. Perhaps such an integrated understanding of humanity isn’t even possible. More productively, though, the contradictions of culture are the most illuminating aspects of the culture concept. Maybe those contradictions are anthropology’s most important contribution to our understanding of humanity. Culture is the whole way of life of a people subject to a set of contradictory forces. These forces constitute four central paradoxes of culture.
Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes
Cultural materials, practices, and ideas are handed down from older to younger members of a culture, giving some degree of continuity to culture over time. However, many factors can intervene in this process of cultural reproduction to subtly alter or dramatically change the elements and aggregates of culture. In some contexts, younger people either fail to precisely learn the culture of their elders or deliberately reject those cultural lessons. Through travel and trade, people learn about other ways of doing things, and they take these ideas back to their own cultures, trying them out to see how they might improve their own ways of life. Accidents and deliberate experimentation introduce new possibilities. People may simply get tired of doing things one way over and over and thrill at some refreshing style or craze.
We can identify four main mechanisms of cultural change. These four mechanisms overlap and interact as the history of a culture unfolds over time. Diffusion is the movement of an element of culture from one society to another, often through migration or trade. Friction occurs when two or more elements of culture come into conflict, resulting in alteration or replacement of those elements. Innovation is the slight alteration of an existing element of culture, such as a new style of dress or dance. Invention is the independent creation of a new element of culture, such as a new technology, religion, or political form.
Some cultural inventions are so successful that they transform the whole way of life of a people. Consider the information technologies that have reshaped American life since the 1970s, such as computers, the Internet, and cell phones. These tools have changed the ways Americans communicate, work, learn, shop, navigate, and entertain themselves. Diffusing through trade, these inventions have transformed cultures all over the world in diverse ways. In many societies, modes of interacting through communication technologies come into conflict with norms for interacting face-to-face, creating friction between the two realms. Where the movements, behavior, and social relationships of young women are tightly controlled, for instance, mobile phones allow women to secretly make new friends, explore new topics of conversation, and engage in behavior their elders might not sanction.
Culture Is Bounded but Mobile
Because many elements of culture are shaped by environmental forces, trading opportunities, and local histories of settlement, culture becomes associated with territory. But because of the mobility of people, objects, and ideas, culture rarely stays within the boundaries of any society; rather, it wanders restlessly along lines of travel, communication, conquest, and trade.
Figure 3.14 This fabric shop displays a number of colorful wax print patterns. Although wax print fabrics are now associated with Africa, the wax print technique actually originated in Indonesia. (credit: “National Colors” by Miranda Harple for Yenkassa.com/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Certain integrated sets of things, practices, and ideas cluster in certain places. Take a look at the cloth in the figure above. This kind of cloth is quintessentially African. It’s called wax print, and indeed, clothing made of wax-print cloth is very popular in many parts of Africa. Wax-print cloth is industrially produced cotton cloth with intricate designs and bold colors. In most African countries, a vast selection of designs and brands of wax prints can be found in any market. Rather than buying ready-made clothes in clothing shops, people more often purchase cloth in the market and take it to a seamstress or tailor to be made into the garment of their own choosing. Many wax-print designs are symbolic, serving as a means of nonverbal communication for the people who wear them.
This example and many others like it make it difficult to answer the question "Whose culture is it?"
Though iconically associated with African dress, wax print actually originated in Indonesia, derived from local techniques for making batik cloth. Batik is made using wax to draw designs on plain cotton cloth that is then immersed in a dye bath. When the wax is melted off, the design remains against the background of color. When the Dutch colonized Indonesia in the 1700s, Dutch merchants were impressed with the beauty of local batik and sought to use their own methods of mass-produced block printing to imitate the vibrant colors and elaborate designs of Indonesian cloth.
In the 1880s, Dutch and British merchants introduced their own mass-produced wax prints to people in their African colonies, particularly along the west coast of Africa. Dutch wax cloth was enthusiastically embraced by Africans, who began to infuse certain patterns with social meanings. With independence in the mid-20th century, many African countries developed their own wax-print textile industries using designs developed by local artists.
Exemplifying the cultural paradox of locality and mobility, wax-print cloth is culturally embedded in African culture while carrying a complex history of global trade, appropriation, and colonial domination. In the context of global power relations, the mobility of culture poses questions about who has the right to claim or use elements of culture diffused from elsewhere. As part of the process of cultural immersion and participant observation, many cultural anthropologists adopt the dress, diet, gestures, and language of the peoples they study while they are conducting fieldwork. Often, anthropologists bring their love of these cultural elements back to their home societies and continue to use and practice them to show their appreciation for the cultures they have studied. However, some people may find it unsettling to see a white Euro-American anthropologist wearing an African wax-print dress—or a silk sari from India, or an ornately woven lliclla cape from Peru.
If someone is using cultural items as a way of honoring that culture, many people would think it’s perfectly fine. If someone is wearing items from another culture as a form of humorous costume, such as a sports mascot or Halloween costume, most people would find that offensive. An even more serious problem emerges when a person uses or claims cultural elements from another society in order to make a profit. What if, for instance, someone from the American fashion industry copied a wax print motif such as Sika wo antaban, using the design for American clothing, housewares, or art? The elements of culture, both material and nonmaterial, constitute the intellectual property of the people of that culture. Claiming or using the elements of another culture inappropriately is called cultural appropriation.
Culture Is Consensual but Contested
In any society, people interact using a set of assumptions about the sorts of behavior and speech considered appropriate to certain people in certain situations. That is to say, culture is consensual; through their words and actions, people agree to a certain way of doing things. Culture includes conventionalized roles, behavioral norms, and shared ideas for framing situations.
For example, imagine that someone in the United States has just graduated from college and is looking for a job. What should that person do? In the United States, it is common to spend time crafting an impressive résumé, using a specific form of technical language that accentuates the quality of a person’s skills and experiences while demonstrating their educational background. A recent graduate would likely post this linguistic masterpiece to a job search website.
For many people in China, such a strategy would seem very rudimentary and even grossly inadequate. Seeking opportunities for education, employment, and business, people in China frequently rely on a cultural system known as guanxi. Informed by Confucianism, guanxi refers to gifts and favors exchanged among people in wide social networks based on mutual benefit. Guanxi is based on family ties but also includes relationships formed in schools, in workplaces, and even among strangers who meet at parties or through mutual friends.
Personal connections can be just as important as, if not more important than, the language or qualifications of a person’s résumé. While Americans emphasize the importance of job-search techniques, personal connections also play a role in securing employment in the American context, particularly in highly paid, competitive industries such as software development and finance. In many societies, people prefer to work with people they trust. Rather than hiring a random stranger, many prefer to hire someone recommended by a trusted friend or business partner. In guanxi relationships, relations of trust are established through the exchange of gifts and favors over time.
But what if the people who are hired in competitive industries are the ones who deployed their strategic social connections and not necessarily the ones who are most skilled, talented, or otherwise best suited to the work? What if people use their guanxi networks to obtain special privileges, such as government licenses or social services? Does guanxi facilitate and rationalize bribery and other acts of corruption? In 2012, the Chinese government launched an ambitious campaign against corruption among government officials. More than 100,000 people have been investigated and charged with corruption, including many high-ranking government officials, military officers, and senior executives of state-owned companies. Guanxi illustrates how culture can be generally taken for granted but also highly controversial. Many other cultural norms are also widely accepted but challenged and resisted by certain groups who are disadvantaged or limited by those norms. Gender roles are a good example, as are norms of sexuality and marriage.
Culture Is Shared, but It Varies
Culture is widely yet unevenly shared among members of a group. Different members in a society have different perspectives on their shared culture. Among elites, the use of Chinese guanxi (or American “networking”) might seem to be a more personal and trustworthy process for making things happen. But for people who lack access to elite networks, these cultural norms may seem to be an exclusive and unfair tool of class oppression.
Consider the many versions of "home." People in different subgroups and regions who otherwise belong to the same 'culture' can live in structures of different shapes and sizes that are made of different materials. And yet, the members of a culture do share a common set of assumptions about home. Home is where we live, where we sleep, and most often where our family lives as well. Even with such diversity, people in a society have a common image or ideal of home.
The four paradoxes all illustrate how culture operates as a force of stability in a society while also generating forms of constant alteration, adaptation, and change. As culture is mobile, controversial, and variable, some elements are always in the process of transformation even as other elements are maintained and reinforced. Over time, people reinterpret their cultural norms and practices and sometimes even reject them altogether in favor of some other way of thinking or doing things.
This paradoxical view of culture points to the dynamic tensions of people living in groups. Societies are collectivities of individuals, families, regional groups, ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, political groups, and so on. Culture provides a way for people to live and work together while also allowing for the expression and performance of distinctive differences. Rather than breaking down, culture responds to pressures for change with adaptation to new conditions. (This sounds positively evolutionary!) The paradoxes that make culture seem impossible also make culture flexible and durable. In an era that combines increasing polarization with an urgent need for cooperative change, perhaps we need culture now more than ever.
Historical Context for Studying Culture
To see how these paradoxes are actually helpful to anthropologists, it is useful to have some historical context for how the discipline has approached different versions of these paradoxes since the beginning. From the early days, anthropologists have focused more or less on 'structures' and/or the 'everyday' lives and practices of the people they studied.
People throughout recorded history have relied on storytelling as a way to share cultural details. When early anthropologists studied people from other civilizations, they relied on the written accounts and opinions of others; they presented facts and developed their “stories,” about other cultures based solely on information gathered by others. These scholars did not have any direct contact with the people they were studying. This approach has come to be known as armchair anthropology. Simply put, if a culture is viewed from a distance (as from an armchair), the anthropologist tends to measure that culture from his or her own vantage point and to draw comparisons that place the anthropologist’s culture as superior to the one being studied. As we have seen, this point of view is also called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is an attitude based on the idea that one’s own group or culture is better than any other.
Early anthropological studies often presented a biased ethnocentric interpretation of the human condition. For example, ideas about racial superiority emerged as a result of studying the cultures that were encountered during the colonial era. During the colonial era from the sixteenth century to the mid–twentieth century, European countries asserted control over land (Asia, Africa, the Americas) and people. European ideas of wrong and right were used as a measuring stick to judge the way that people in different cultures lived. These other cultures were considered 'primitive,' which was an ethnocentric term for people who were non-European. It is also a negative term suggesting that indigenous cultures had a lack of technological advancement. Colonizers thought that they were superior to the Other in every way.
An example of anthropological writing without the use of fieldwork is Sir E. B. Tylor’s 1871 work Primitive Culture. Tylor, who went on to become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896, was an important influence in the development of sociocultural anthropology as a separate discipline. Tylor defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” His definition of culture is still used frequently today and remains the foundation to the culture concept in anthropology. Despite the accuracy of this sort of defintion, many nineteenth-century anthropologists still believed that cultures evolved through distinct stages. They labeled these stages with terms such as savagery, barbarism, and civilization. These theories of cultural evolutionism would later be successfully refuted, but conflicting views about cultural evolutionism in the nineteenth century highlight an ongoing nature versus nurture debate about whether biology shapes behavior more than culture.
Elaborating on Tylor’s scheme, American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan subdivided each of these three stages into an even more elaborate model and proposed a mechanism for moving from stage to stage. Morgan focused on technology as the primary driver of cultural evolution. New and better ways of making things, according to Morgan, resulted in new patterns of social practice and thought. Advanced technology was associated with advanced civilization.
Armchair anthropologists were important in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the late nineteenth century because their work did ask important questions. Their problems came in from where they got their answers. These scholars were not directly experiencing the cultures they were studying. Their questions could ultimately only be answered by going into 'the field.'
Disagreeing with the way of thinking of Tylor and Morgan, anthropologists such as Franz Boas argued that there is no single line of cultural evolution but that each culture changes according to its own unique historical trajectory. Moreover, cultures evolve not in isolation but in constant interaction with one another. Rather than focusing on technological changes within a culture, Boas highlighted the diffusion of material objects, practices, and ideas among cultures in complex relations of trade, migration, and conquest.
Common among all of these early anthropological ideas of 'culture,' however, is the recognition that cultures did change over time—and yet there were observable 'snapshots' which could be studied as culture. For the latter group (Boas etc.), in some sense, the history of a culture was as much a part of its present description and this would lead to the concept of holism we looked at in the beginning. Further, to best understand a present culture, one needed to rely on ones own observational data and understanding; given the paradoxes of culture, any culture was simply too complex to fully understand from second-hand narratives.
The armchair approach changed when scholars such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead took to 'the field' and studied by being participants and observers. As they did, fieldwork became the most important tool anthropologists used to understand the “complex whole” of culture.
Once it came about, participant observation fieldwork became the most important tool anthropologists used to understand the “complex whole” of culture.
Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, was greatly influenced by armchair anthropology but used more innovative ethnographic techniques, and his fieldwork took him "off the veranda" to study different cultures. The off the veranda approach is different from armchair anthropology because it includes active participant-observation: traveling to a location, living among people, and observing their day-to-day lives.
Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, 1915–1918
Malinowski's The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) was considered the first modern ethnography and redefined the approach to fieldwork. Malinowski lived with Trobriand Islanders and observed life in their villages. By living among "islanders," Malinowski was able to learn about their social life, food and shelter, sexual behaviors, community economics, patterns of kinship, and family.
Malinowski “went native” to some extent during his fieldwork with the Trobriand Islanders. Going native means to become fully integrated into a cultural group: taking leadership positions and assuming key roles in society; entering into a marriage or spousal contract; exploring sexuality or fully participating in rituals. When an anthropologist goes native, the anthropologist is personally involved with locals. In The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski suggested that other anthropologists should “grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realize his vision of his world.” As you can likely imagine, the practice of going native presented problems from an ethical point of view. Participant-observation is a method to gather ethnographic data, but going native places both the anthropologist and the culture group at risk by blurring the lines on both sides of the relationship.
The discipline of cultural anthropology developed somewhat differently in Europe and the United States. Many European anthropologists were particularly interested in questions about how societies were structured and how they remained stable over time. This highlighted emerging recognition that culture and society are not the same.
European anthropologists developed theories of functionalism to explain how social institutions contribute to the organization of society and the maintenance of social order. Bronislaw Malinowski believed that cultural traditions were developed as a response to specific human needs such as food, comfort, safety, knowledge, reproduction, and economic livelihood. One function of educational institutions like schools, for instance, is to provide knowledge that prepares people to obtain jobs and make contributions to society. Although he preferred the term structural-functionalism, the British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown was also interested in the way that social structures functioned to maintain social stability in a society over time. He suggested that in many societies it was the family that served as the most important social structure because family relationships determined much about an individual’s social, political, and economic relationships and these patterns were repeated from one generation to the next. In a family unit in which the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays home to raise the children, the social and economic roles of both the husband and the wife will be largely defined by their specific responsibilities within the family. If their children grow up to follow the same arrangement, these social roles will be continued in the next generation.
Structural functionalism focused more on how the various structures in society reinforce one another. Culture is not a random assortment of structural features but a set of structures that fit together into a coherent whole. Common norms and values are threaded through the family structure, the economy, the political system, and the religion of a culture. Structural functionalists conceptualized culture as a kind of machine with many small parts all working in tandem to keep the machine operating properly. While recognizing the value of this approach, contemporary anthropologists have complicated the mechanistic model of culture by pointing out that the various elements of culture come into conflict just as often as they reinforce one another. The holistic approach to culture as an integrated system is derived from this important theoretical foundation.
Claude_Lévi-Strauss [Source: UNESCO/Michel Ravassard via Wikimedia Commons]
In a different sense, the term "structure" can refer to patterns of thought embedded in the culture of a people—that is, conceptual structure. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) pioneered this approach, sometimes called French structuralism. Lévi-Strauss considered culture to be a system of symbols that could be analyzed in the various realms of culture, including myths, religion, and kinship. In these realms of culture, objects and people are organized into symbolic systems of classification, often structured around binary oppositions. Binary oppositions are pairs of terms that are opposite in meaning, such as light/dark, female/male, and good/evil. For example, kinship systems are varied and complex, but they are fundamentally structured by oppositions such as male versus female, older versus younger, relation by blood versus relation by marriage, and one of us and not one of us. Lévi-Strauss examined myths as well, showing how the characters and plots emphasize binary oppositions. Consider the many European folktales featuring an evil stepmother (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty), a character that combines the opposition of good versus evil with the opposition of blood relation versus relation by marriage. Lévi-Strauss argued that myths operate as public arenas for conceptually pondering and processing the fundamental categories and relations of a culture.
In the twentieth century, functionalist approaches also became popular in North American anthropology, but eventually fell out of favor. One of the biggest critiques of functionalism is that it views cultures as stable and orderly and ignores or cannot explain social change. Functionalism also struggles to explain why a society develops one particular kind of social institution instead of another. Functionalist perspectives did contribute to the development of more sophisticated concepts of culture by establishing the importance of social institutions in holding societies together. During the development of anthropology in North America (Canada, United States, and Mexico), the significant contribution made by the American School of Anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the concept of cultural relativism. As a reminder, this is the idea that cultures cannot be objectively understood since all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture.
The participant-observation method of fieldwork was a revolutionary change to the practice of anthropology, but at the same time it presented problems that needed to be overcome. The challenge was to move away from ethnocentrism, race stereotypes, and colonial attitudes, and to move forward by encouraging anthropologists to maintain high ethical standards and open minds.
Franz Boas, One of the Founders of American Anthropology, 1915
Recall that Franz Boas, an German-American anthropologist, is acknowledged for redirecting American anthropologists away from cultural evolutionism and toward cultural relativism. Because he was a trained scientist, he was familiar with using empirical methods as a way to study a subject. Empirical methods are based on evidence that can be tested using observation and experiment. Boas is often considered the originator of American anthropology because he trained the first generation of American anthropologists including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Alfred Kroeber. Using a commitment to cultural relativism as a starting point, these students continued to refine the concept of culture.
Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934) emphasized that culture gives people coherent patterns for thinking and behaving. She argued that culture affects individuals psychologically. Benedict was a professor at Columbia University and in turn greatly influenced her student Margaret Mead, who went on to become one of the most well-known female American cultural anthropologists. Mead was a pioneer in conducting ethnographic research at a time when the discipline was predominately male. Her 1925 research on adolescent girls on the island of Ta‘ū in the Samoan Islands, published as Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), revealed that teenagers in Samoa did not experience the same stress and emotional difficulties as those in the United States. The book was an important contribution to the nature versus nurture debate, providing an argument that learned cultural roles were more important than biology. The book also reinforced the idea that individual emotions and personality traits are products of culture.
Ruth Benedict (1936)Margaret Mead (1954)
Alfred Louis Kroeber, also shared the commitment to field research and cultural relativism, but Kroeber was particularly interested in how cultures change over time and influence one another. In The Nature of Culture (1952), Kroeber examined the historical processes that led cultures to emerge as distinct configurations as well as the way cultures could become more similar through the spread or diffusion of cultural traits. Kroeber was also interested in language and the role it plays in transmitting culture. He devoted much of his career to studying Native American languages in an attempt to document these languages before they disappeared.
Boas and his students added to definitions of culture by emphasizing the importance of enculturation, the process of learning culture. Benedict, Mead, and others established that culture shapes individual identity, self-awareness, and emotions in fundamental ways. They emphasized the need for holism, approaches to research that considered the entire context of a society including its history.
Though theories of unilineal cultural evolution have been largely abandoned, some anthropologists are still interested in discovering regular patterns that might govern how human cultures change over long periods of time. In the 1950s, American anthropologist Julian Steward developed an approach called cultural ecology, recognizing the importance of environmental factors by focusing on how humans adapt to various environments. Steward’s approach showed how humans in each environmental zone develop a set of core cultural features that enable them to make a living. Central to each cultural core are ways of getting or making all the resources necessary for human survival—in particular, food, clothing, and shelter. Similarly, anthropologist Marvin Harris developed a theory called cultural materialism, arguing that technology and economic factors are fundamental to culture, molding other features such as family life, religion, and politics.
By the late twentieth century, new approaches to "symbolic anthropology" put language at the center of analysis. Later on, Clifford Geertz, the founding member of "postmodernist anthropology," noted in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) that culture should not be seen as something that was “locked inside people’s heads.” Instead, culture is publicly communicated through speech and behavior. Culture, he concluded, is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.” This definition, which continues to be influential today, reflects the influence of many earlier efforts to refine the concept of culture in American anthropology.
Definition: Culture (according to Clifford Geertz)
An historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which [humans] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.
What is common among these many approaches to the culture concept is that they are each a way to make analytical sense of the paradoxes it seems to contain. In the next section, we will look more closely at participant observation as an approach. For now, it is worth noting that given the complexities and sometimes delicate topics a 'culture' often entails (violence, death, sex, struggles for power, and so on), studying people and, ultimately, telling stories about them—regardless of if you are interested in their static forms and shared ideas, changing practices and new perspectives, or both—comes with its own set of ethical challenges.
Ethical Issues in Truth Telling
As anthropologists developed more sophisticated concepts of culture, they also gained a greater understanding of the ethical challenges associated with anthropological research. Because participant-observation fieldwork brings anthropologists into close relationships with the people they study, many complicated issues can arise. Cultural relativism is a perspective that encourages anthropologists to show respect to members of other cultures, but it was not until after World War II that the profession of anthropology recognized a need to develop formal standards of professional conduct.
The Nuremberg trials, which began in 1945 in Nuremberg, Germany and were conducted under the direction of the France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, prosecuted members of the Nazi regime for war crimes. In addition to military and political figures, physicians and scientists were also prosecuted for unethical human experimentation and mass murder. The trials demonstrated that physicians and other scientists could be dangerous if they used their skills for abusive or exploitative goals. The Nuremberg Code that emerged from the trials is considered a landmark document in medical and research ethics. It established principles for the ethical treatment of the human subjects involved in any medical or scientific research.
Many schools adopted principles from the Nuremberg Code to write ethical guidelines for the treatment of human subjects. Anthropologists and students who work in colleges and universities where these guidelines exist are obliged to follow these rules. The American Anthropological Association (AAA), along with many anthropology organizations in other countries, developed codes of ethics describing specific expectations for anthropologists engaged in research in a variety of settings. The principles in the AAA code of ethics include: do no harm; be open and honest regarding your work; obtain informed consent and necessary permissions; ensure the vulnerable populations in every study are protected from competing ethical obligations; make your results accessible; protect and preserve your records; and maintain respectful and ethical professional relationships. These principles sound simple, but can be complicated in practice.
A serious and complicated incident illustrating ethical concerns in anthropologist is research conducted among the Yanomami, an indigenous group living in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Venezuela. Starting in the 1960s, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel, a geneticist, carried out research among the Yanomami. Chagnon was investigating theories about the role of violence in Yanomami society. In 2000, an American journalist, Patrick Tierney, published a book about Chagnon and Neel’s research which contained numerous stunning allegations, including a claim that the pair had deliberately infected the Yanomami with measles, conducted medical experiments without the consent of the Yanomami, and that Chagnon had deliberately created conflicts between Yanomami groups so he could study the resulting violence. These allegations were brought to the attention of the American Anthropological Association, and a number of inquiries were eventually conducted. Chagnon steadfastly denied the allegations. In 2002, the AAA judged him to have misrepresented the violent nature of Yanomami culture and caused them harm. In 2005, the AAA rescinded its own conclusion, citing problems with the investigation process. Chagnon was never definitively pronounced guilty nor exonerated. Years later, debate over this episode continues. The controversy demonstrates the extent to which truth can be elusive in anthropological inquiry. Although anthropologists should not be storytellers in the sense that they deliberately create fictions, differences in perspective and theoretical orientation create unavoidable differences in the way anthropologists interpret the same situation. Anthropologists must try to use their toolkit of theory and methods to ensure that the stories they tell are truthful and represent the voice of the people being studied using an ethical approach.
