MARILYN STRATHERN University of Cambridge

Dont eat unwashed lettuce

C O M M E N T A R Y

s all inquiry in socialcultural anthropology informal inquiry of a kind? Rena Lederman and her colleagues (this issue) have done anthropologists singular service in extending the ways in which we might wish to think about our discipline. In taking up the phenomenon of audit creep, they bring to the fore an important dimension of anthropological work. This is the extent to which interaction with interlocutors is always a matter of negotiation. So not all inquiry is informal, perhaps, but all inquiry that engages human subjects over a period of time. Fieldwork! For time introduces an informality into interaction through the simple fact of biographical disclosure: Peoples biographies become available to one another. Or to put it otherwise, and more familiarly, it is through their relations with others that anthropologists understand relationships. Relationships always have a touch of informality to them, if only because of the dependency through which each person nds the other already a social agent with his or her own agenda. If nothing is more important than the capacity people have to relate to one another, anthropological eldwork further teaches us the ethics of the open subject: to accept responsibility for the social life of an other, as a social person (Battaglia 1999:133). In turn, persons acquire a responsibility to keep one anothers relational capacities and faculties alive. People have to take responsibility, Debbora Battaglia writes, for any act that socially diminishes or kills the connective potential of another, as if of oneself (1999:133). As persons acquire these responsibilities, they are also, of course, limited by their own and others ability or willingness to discharge them. And if one way of taking care is through acknowledging other peoples dignity by enacting ones own, when anthropologists act as anthropologists, it must be through what they practice; by emulating the discipline in their own practices, they reveal the discipline in others (Jean-Klein and Riles 2005). We need to constantly reappraise those practices, and to this end the articles in this forum are a most signicant contribution.

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 532534, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic ISSN 1548-1425. C 2006 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/ rights.htm.

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So what has this to do with institutional review boards (IRBs)? I have deliberately shifted into a register that talks of persons and relations rather than human subjects. The forum accounts highlight the extent to which along with audit creep goes a creeping paralysis in the way we view other people (people othered through the process of communication). I take my cue from the observations with which Lederman opens. Fieldwork, she writes, is all about embedding oneself in ongoing social situations not designed by the investigator. When she says that informality marks those moments when research and daily life are inextricably mixed, she has redescribed an effect of relationality in all kinds of anthropological engagements. What audit creep throws upand specically in the context of IRBsis the way in which that relationship is itself likely to be embedded in social situations not dened by the parties themselves. And the realization can be unwelcome. For the IRB outlaw (after Jack Katz), being forced to talk about human subjects instead of persons can seem intellectual torture. In recent years, commentators on administrative systems in higher education, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, have sought the means to rst imagine and then talk about the oppressive nature of ethical protocols and best-practice regulation. Virtually an impossibility, of course: I have already enrolled the term responsibility in a positive vein. I cannot, or at least not without some very heavy-duty contextualization, then turn around and critique responsibility as one of those values enunciated in defense of a regime of audit and accountability. The articles here do an immense service in opening up the intellectual resources available to us to think about the institutionalization of overenthusiastic best practice. Research at home blurs the lines between life and work in the most evident of ways. And it is research at home that is most likely to attract the attention of the protectors of human subjects. It is when that research is unfunded that wonderful ironies enter in. This is evident in Daniel Bradburds account, which shows clearly that the creep is also the result of institutional protection. Human subjects are, as it were, the front line of human institutions (as organizations, corporations, etc.) driven by the need to protect themselves, above all, it would seem, for nancial reasons: They must protect themselves against the risk of costly reprisals. In short, the bottom line is that what needs protecting is money. I am deeply reminded of a seminar on intellectual biological and cultural property rights held in Port Moresby almost a decade ago at which the concept of property carried with it the very need to legislate for its protection. So the discussants were beguiled into admitting, rst, that culture was analogous to property of a kind and, second, that it therefore needed protection. When researchers gain funds that carry with them all kinds of rubrics for proper nancial management, they are one step further into the web spun by the protector of money.

Audit and accountability regimes started out life as modest commercial tools to that end. One might have thought that unfunded research, in which the risks are taken by the researchers, would escape the net. Yet, of course, their whole status as researchers, and recognition of the value of what they do, is still to a large extent imparted by the institutions to which they belong. They still act out an institutional agenda. It is because people have goals that they enroll others in their own agendas. By the same token, these ends can become a problem for others. They cannot be cleansed of impurities. Moreover, whatever empathy they show, anthropologists have no business imagining that they share their subjects ends; rather they should take charge of their own (Jean-Klein and Riles 2005). I borrow further from Annelise Riles (2004) the point that the other question for the anthropologist is how to cultivate the means of taking care of one anothers capacities. This is a matter of the quality of engagement, not a matter of protection. Paul Rabinow has seen all this coming a long time. Nevertheless, I remain with my Melanesianist colleagues. Intersubjectivity is the state of being human as biologically social beings because persons cannot but help engage others in the process of becoming themselves (Toren 2002:188). Karen Sykes talks of how she realized that, in making a decision to reside in a particular place, she became responsible for her hosts well-being, too. She observes of anthropologists that they take responsibility for their [own] ignorance (Sykes 2005:2) by raising difcult questions. In scholarship, more generally, skepticism or a premise of doubt, a condition of vulnerability, or openness is a way of assuming this responsibility. Closure should not come too quickly. As a New Irelander from Papua New Guinea asked Sykes (2005:215), what did she have to forget just to write it all down? Persons: These are the anthropologists human subjects. Freedom, on which Richard A. Shweder dwells, is another and most interesting issue; here, I would stress, rather, the fact (I mean fact) that persons do not exist outside of relations and relationships. Fieldwork is a daunting undertaking, but it would be a mistake to try to triumph over it (Sykes 2005:220). Or to try to protect oneself from relations. Dont eat unwashed lettuce was a piece of colonial medical advice still being meted out to aspiring eldworkers in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and its corollary quickly followed: And dont shake hands with the natives. [audit (culture), accountability, human subjects]

References cited
Battaglia, Debbora 1999 Towards an Ethics of the Open Subject: Writing Culture in Good Conscience. In Anthropological Theory Today. Henrietta Moore, ed. Pp. 114150. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Jean-Klein, Iris, and Annelise Riles 2005 Introducing Discipline: Anthropology and Human Rights Administrations. PoLAR, Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28(2):173202. Riles, Annelise 2004 Property as Legal Knowledge: Means and Ends. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (n.s.) 10(4):775 795. Sykes, Karen 2005 Arguing with Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift. London: Routledge.

Toren, Christina 2002 Comparison and Ontogeny. In Anthropology, by Comparison. Andre Gingrich and Richard Fox, eds. Pp. 187203. London: Routledge. Marilyn Strathern Department of Social Anthropology University of Cambridge Free School Lane Cambridge CB2 3RF United Kingdom ms10026@cam.ac.uk

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