Nancy Scheper-Hughes and the Question of Ethical Fieldwork

In 1974, Nancy Scheper-Hughes traveled to a village in rural Ireland which she later nicknamed â€Å"Ballybran† (Scheper-Hughes 2000-128)). Her findings there led her to publish Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland in 1979, in which she attempted to explain the social causes of Ireland’s surprisingly high rates of schizophrenia (Scheper-Hughes 2000:128). Saints was met with a backlash of criticism from both the anthropological community and the villagers who had served as her informants. The criticism eventually led to Scheper-Hughes being expelled indefinitely from the village in which she had worked (Scheper-Hughes 2000:118) and raised serious questions about the ethics of anthropological inquiry. In this essay I will argue that Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ fieldwork in Ireland was fundamentally unethical on the grounds that she morally wronged her participants through her fictionalized representation of them, and that she did not seek their informed consent. That being said, she was also committed to structural analysis, which is distinctly lacking in twenty-first century anthropological inquiry. Nancy-Scheper Hughes has often been criticized for morally wronging her informants in a variety of ways, including breach of privacy, deception and misrepresentation (Schrag 2009:140). These attacks did not come until much later, however, and the initial complaints against her work were centered around her conclusions, which were perceived to be based on faulty methodology including drawing conclusions without sufficient data to support them, and misreading her informants’ reactions to her book (Messenger 1982:14). The villagers themselves were upset that she had misrepresented them, remarking that she had violated local codes of hospitality (Scheper-Hughes 1982:13), portrayed nothing but the â€Å"negative† aspects of Irish rural life (Scheper-Hughes 2000:119) and formed their individual identities into fictional characters in her efforts to conceal them (Scheper-Hughes 1982:13). Though perhaps well-intentioned, Scheper-Hughes’ attempt to conceal the identities of her informants resulted in forming them into scattered, fictional characters, according to the villagers themselves (Scheper-Hughes 1982:13). In this the villagers are justified, as she hid reality by burying it within archetypal representations which led to a misrepresentation of her informants. It turns reality into a caricature, calling into question the validity of her portrayals and therefore the basis of her entire analysis. Moreover, it is unfair to the informants themselves because it gives credit for words spoken by real people to fictional characters. At best, Scheper-Hughes’ attempt to protect the individual privacy of her informants backfired and warped their identities into something false and grounded in the misrepresentation of reality; therefore, criticism from the villagers regarding her â€Å"scattering† of their identities are indeed warranted. Clearly, Scheper-Hughes wronged her informants by fragmenting their words and contributions, and by giving credit to false identities when it was actually due to real ones. One informant actually remarked that â€Å"[she] just didn’t give us credit† (Scheper-Hughes 2000:119). And yet despite her efforts to conceal the identities of her informants by disguising them as fictional characters, they were still able to identify themselves and each other (Schrag 2009:150). Since the primary purpose of identity concealment is to keep an informants’ secrets intact by hiding them from community members, the fact that the villagers in Ballybran were able to re-construct each others’ identities in her published work shows that she did not properly protect confidential information, and therefore did not put the interests of her participants first. The anthropologist has a moral duty to protect the secrets of her informants once divulged, especially when publishing them, no matter when and where the research was carried out. As Schrag asserts, this is simply the best way to treat them as humans and not repositories of knowledge (2009:145). Scheper-Hughes clearly attempted to do this by subjecting her informants to anonymity; if she had not, the villagers would not have been angry about their fragmented identities and scattered words. It is clear, however, that she failed in this attempt, as the villagers were still able to recognize the pieces of themselves in her ethnography (Scheper-Hughes 2000:150). It is not necessarily unethical to publish community and individual secrets; indeed without them good ethnographic work would not be possible, especially when investigating such hypothetical situations as illegal activities as a result of oppression and structural inequalities. However, it is important to obtain and disclose such secrets under clear ethical guidelines. Informed consent is and was at the time of Scheper-Hughes’ fieldwork an important aspect of ethical research. Scheper-Hughes was criticized by Irish anthropologists for not obtaining the full and informed consent of her participants before conducting her research, and this criticism is warranted (Callahan 311:1979). It is clear from the villagers’ reactions when she returned to Ballybran some years later that this is in fact true. Scheper-Hughes herself remarked that many felt betrayed by her book, and that they initially had no idea what she would publish (Scheper-Hughes 2000:148). Schrag argues that part of informed consent should be to communicate honestly the research objectives of the ethnographer, which Scheper-Hughes did not do (2009:138). If she had done this to the fullest extent possible, the villagers would not have been shocked and hurt by her conclusions. Proper informed consent should incorporate an agreement between the researcher and their participants which makes clear that whatever is disclosed to the ethnographer is fair game for publication. That being said, obtaining such consent can be a point of contention in anthropology, since it means that not only does the participant have to consent to a full disclosure of their personal information, but the ethnographer has to also consent to the possibility that not all desired information will be available for analysis and publication. This consensual agreement must be part of any ethical fieldwork, and it is clear that Scheper-Hughes did not adhere to it. Since informed consent was already an established convention when she conducted her research–as evidenced by Eileen Kane’s criticism of her lack of it (Messenger1982:14)–even a relativist critique in this case would be fully warranted and justified. It is true that obtaining proper informed consent from informants means that not all information will be available to the ethnographer; however, this does not necessarily mean that good ethnographic work cannot be accomplished. If the goal of the ethnographer is to locate structural violence and subsequent inequalities–which I will argue later that it should be–than these would in theory be apparent without needing to obtain or divulge personal secrets to a large degree. Moreover, sincere attempts could be made to not reveal the identity of the informants who do confess intimate details without resorting to scattering and dismantling them. Whole identities could be kept secret by not publishing revealing facts about an individual which are not strictly necessary to the collection or presentation of data. Multivocality is certainly important, but if direct quotes, elaborate descriptions and background information are kept to a minimum it would serve the double purpose of concealing identity without fictionalizing it; therefore, the failure of Scheper-Hughes to keep identities in tact while also preserving the integrity of information provided within the strictest confidence serves as a lesson to all anthropologists as to the necessity of full and proper informed consent. Keeping multivocality to a necessary minimum would also allow the ethnographer to do a more â€Å"objective† structural analysis, which is distinctly lacking in postmodern ethnography. Though it is important to protect the privacy of the individual on their terms through informed consent, it is also important to conduct quality analyses of structural inequalities with the objective of promoting the common good. One thing that can be said about the work of Scheper-Hughes is that she was committed to pinpointing the social causes of schizophrenia in rural Ireland, which ultimately pointed fingers not at the villagers themselves but at the economic and social hardships that prompted them to act out a certain amount of psychological violence on their children (Scheper-Hughes 2000:123). Schrag criticizes Scheper-Hughes for committing what he calls â€Å"inflicted insight†; that is, forcing the villagers to realize painful truths about themselves that they did not ask for or anticipate (2009:151). I argue that this is not necessarily a breach of morals, and depends largely on the time and place in which the research is being conducted. If the inflicted insight is coming from a psychiatrist and is being offered to an individual under the strictest codes of patient confidentiality, then to break that code would be a severe breach of morality. Schrag is right claim that inflicted insight in a psychiatric environment is entirely different from that in a social context (2009:153). The former deals strictly with an individual, whereas the latter deals with truths about structural violence which are embedded within society at large and are not necessarily apparent from the inside. In such cases, I argue that it is the moral obligation of the ethnographer to point out the causes of structural violence, and simply doing so could prompt action within the community itself to correct inequalities or systematic oppression. No action can be taken against a problem unless the cause is clear and this is sometimes hard to realize when one is immersed within one’s own cultural framework. The anthropologist, as a human–and therefore moral being–has a duty to seek out social reproductions of violence and form opinions about them. One cannot be too relativistic in one’s work, and if the anthropologist takes a stand on one side or other it has the potential to call others to action as well. This is one thing that Nancy Scheper-Hughes did well, as exemplified by the fact that when she returned to Ballybran years after her initial research was carried out, one villager admitted that the young mothers had been more inclined to show tenderness to their children since the publication of the book, almost as if to spite her conclusions (Scheper-Hughes 2000:136). Clearly some action had been taken to reverse what Scheper-Hughes had concluded was one of the primary causes for schizophrenia; that of parental disinterest in their children (2000:131). Whether or not her conclusions were correct, she made them in the spirit of the collective good, and they prompted some internal change from the villagers themselves. This is more than any postmodern ethnography has managed to do, and therefore the final lesson that anthropologists can take away from the case of Nancy Scheper-Hughes is that an ethnography can be a powerful tool for change; however it must be researched and written in an ethical way, one which adequately addresses and takes a stand on structural violence. In conclusion, I have argued that Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ fieldwork in rural Ireland was fundamentally unethical because she portrayed her informants as fictionalized caricatures and did not seek their full informed consent, which morally wronged her participants. That being said, she did pursue an analysis of structural violence which prompted some small action in her host community after her book was published, a noble end which anthropologists have lost sight of in the postmodern era. Though her fieldwork led to her eventual expulsion from Ballybran and continues to undergo scrutiny by the anthropological community, it is nevertheless an important case study in the necessity of strict ethical standards when working in the field. Its situation within a lost doctrine of structuralism also makes it important for future anthropologists to examine as an example not of art for art’s sake, but as a voice for the common good.