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 In addition to reading published and unpublished sources of various kinds, my comparative disciplinary understanding derives from practical, engaged experience serving on