Rena Lederman
February 29, 2024
My ASA Chat excerpts and summarizes my contribution to the November 2023 American Ethnologist Forum, “What’s the good of anthropology?”. For the paper in full, see: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/amet.13229.
That paper concerns a dilemma faced in practicum courses and in helping students represent anthropology’s distinctive research style to research ethics committees mostly comprising mainstream social-behavioral scientists. In my experience, the quality of anthropological research that attracts students is its realism—its rooting in anthropologists’ sustained relationships with persons and circumstances wherever they actually are. Students are captivated by the possibility of engaging in meaningful ways with people whose experience moves them. However, from a conventional social-behavioral science perspective, being with and learning from people on the latter’s terms and in conditions not controlled by the researchers, is incoherent as science (and, in that sense, unprofessional and unethical). Dominant social-behavioral research styles sacrifice realism for replicability by creating special-purpose settings to enable systematic hypothesis-testing and reproducible findings. Realism is also devalued in research ethics reviews, which treat replicability (not realism) as the social-behavioral research standard.
My references to “mainstream” and “conventional” social and behavioral science rest on field research of a different kind from the work I carried out in Papua New Guinea in the late 1970s–early 1990s. While the first couple of decades of my research career were devoted to Melanesianist field research and teaching, I have spent a larger fraction of the past three decades reflecting comparatively on anthropological research values and practices in relation to those of our disciplinary neighbors in the humanities and social/behavioral sciences. Much of that reflection was accomplished as a university and disciplinary citizen serving on committees and other bodies as the only anthropologist among experts in those neighboring disciplines. In addition to reading published and unpublished sources of various kinds, my comparative disciplinary understanding derives from practical, engaged experience serving on those bodies—including post-doctoral fellowship committees, an IRB, various funding agency subcommittees, national-level commissions evaluating research ethics oversight practices themselves, and more.
Rena Lederman (PhD Columbia; Professor, Princeton): At Princeton, Dr. Lederman administered the department’s undergraduate program (especially 1980s); she was on the board and executive committee of the Program in Women’s (then Gender and Sexuality) Studies (1980s-2000s), served as Anthropology’s Director of Graduate Studies and was her department’s representative on the university’s Institutional Review Board for a total of 16 years, among other service responsibilities. Dr. Lederman began her scholarly career as a student of Melanesian exchange meanings and practices, gender relations and politics, and historical dynamics and discourses—drawn to Highland Papua New Guinea for its decentralized, participatory political culture; and to anthropological scholarship on PNG and the Pacific as resources for rethinking EuroAmerican assumptions about sociality and about “cultures” as bounded, ahistorical, and shared. Pacific perspectives on cultural boundaries, differences, and transformations continued to inform her thinking as her work shifted during the 1990s and into the 2000s to engage controversy within and beyond anthropology over the public reception of disciplinary expertises. Around 2000 her emergent comparative understanding of disciplinary knowledges became a means for intervening in national and international policy discourse on human research regulation. Much of her time over the past 25 years has been spent intervening in practical and scholarly ways to respond to the panic prompted by international regulatory “hypervigilance” that appeared to threaten ethnographic research disproportionately. Once fully retired in 2024, she plans to return to delayed projects central to her scholarship.