Anthropology grew up alongside European empires. Ships that carried soldiers and traders also carried collectors and scholars, and much early knowledge about distant peoples was gathered under colonial rule. An honest course in the subject has to look at that history, because the discipline's modern ethics were built largely in response to it.
Science in the service of hierarchy
In the nineteenth century some scholars measured skulls to rank races, and unilineal evolution placed Europeans at the top of a ladder of progress. Living people were sometimes put on display. Ota Benga, a man from the Congo, was brought to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, and in 1906 Ota Benga was put on display in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo. Black clergy in New York led protests that forced his release. He died in 1916. His story shows how the language of science could be used to deny a person's humanity, the exact opposite of what anthropology at its best has tried to show.
Anthropology and colonial rule
In the British Empire, colonial governments often wanted knowledge of local laws, chiefs and land rights so that they could rule through existing leaders. Anthropologists sometimes supplied it. Evans-Pritchard's research among the Nuer of southern Sudan in the 1930s, for instance, was commissioned by the government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan after military campaigns against the Nuer. Fieldworkers were not simply agents of empire: some defended the land claims and customs of the people they studied, and their writing often showed colonized societies as complex and rational. But their access, safety and funding usually depended on colonial power. In 1973 the anthropologist Talal Asad edited Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, a collection that examined how colonial power shaped what anthropologists studied and how they studied it.
Science as cover
Franz Boas raised the alarm early. In a 1919 letter to the magazine The Nation, titled "Scientists as Spies", Boas charged that several anthropologists had used their research as cover for spying for the United States government during the First World War. He argued that this betrayed science and endangered every honest researcher abroad. The American Anthropological Association censured Boas for the letter; it formally rescinded the censure in 2005.
The questions returned. In 1964 the United States Army funded Project Camelot, a social science study of the causes of revolution in Latin America; it was canceled in 1965 after an outcry in Chile. From 2007 to 2014 the Army's Human Terrain System placed social scientists with combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2007 the AAA Executive Board formally opposed the program, warning that the Human Terrain System could put informants at risk and made truly voluntary consent impossible in a war zone. Supporters argued that cultural knowledge could reduce civilian deaths. Critics answered that the people being studied had no real choice about it.
Remains and repatriation
Museums in many countries collected the skeletons of Indigenous people, often taken from graves and battlefields without consent. In the United States, the remains of many thousands of Native Americans sat in storage. In 1990 Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA. NAGPRA requires federally funded museums to return Native American remains and sacred objects to tribes and descendants. A long dispute over a 9,000-year-old skeleton found near Kennewick, Washington, in 1996, which some scientists sued to study, ended after DNA analysis showed links to living Native Americans; the remains were reburied by tribes in 2017.
The studied answer back
People who had long been the subjects of anthropology became its critics and practitioners. The Dakota scholar Ella Deloria worked with Boas on her people's language. Jomo Kenyatta, who studied under Malinowski, published Facing Mount Kenya in 1938 and later became Kenya's first president. In 1969 the Standing Rock Sioux writer Vine Deloria Jr., Ella's nephew, mocked anthropologists who built careers on Native communities while giving little back. Much fieldwork today is collaborative: communities help shape the questions, review the results and share in the benefits.
Ethics today
The AAA's Principles of Professional Responsibility, revised in 2012, list as their first principle the duty to avoid harm to the people studied. Researchers must obtain informed consent: people agree to take part only after they understand the research and its risks, and they may withdraw. Researchers protect identities when asked, are open about who funds them, and make their results available. These rules express a simple idea at the heart of Universal Humanism: the people anthropologists study are ends in themselves, never merely sources of data.
Worked example: a mining company calls
A mining company offers an anthropologist generous funding to study a village that opposes a planned mine. She weighs the AAA principles. Will her findings be used to divide or pressure the villagers? Can they give real consent if they believe she works for the company? She tells the company she will accept only if she may disclose the funder to everyone she interviews, protect their identities, and share her results with the village as well as the company. When the company refuses to let villagers see the report, she declines the project. Her first duty is to the people whose lives her work would touch.