Ethics Forum

Rob Borofsky

Hawaii Pacific University
Center for a Public Anthropology

Ethics is often about framing.  Was someone shot for a justifiable reason or murdered?   Is America a country striving for equality or encouraging inequality?  Should anthropological ethics center on “doing no harm” or should they focus on both parties – fieldworkers and their informants – positively benefiting from their relationship?

Neither the original Hippocratic Oath nor the modern version mentions “do no harm.”  The phrasing from Epidemics, I,II is:  “As to disease make a habit of two things — help, or at least, to do no harm.  The phrasing “first, do no harm” likely derives from Thomas Inman, a nineteenth century house surgeon.  Why anthropologists should focus on “do no harm” in their code of ethics – rather than on helping others – seems at first glance puzzling.

To clarify what I am getting at, let’s turn to a well-known case.  Napoleon Chagnon was accused of harming the Yanomami by describing them as fierce and writing that they lived “in a state of chronic warfare.”  During the heated debates over establishing a protective Yanomami reserve in the 1990s – one was established in 1992 – military opposition used such statements to argue for establishing a set of small broken up reserves rather than one large one.  The broken up reserves would, not incidentally, have allowed considerable gold mining in Yanomami territory – just what the larger reserve sought to prevent.

Most anthropologists emphasized the Yanomami were less violent than Chagnon depicted, a position supporting Yanomami efforts for a large reserve. Was Chagnon bringing harm to the Yanomami by emphasizing their violent behavior?

We might start answering this question by asking whether such assertions mattered to the Brazilian military.  During the military’s time in government, it tortured hundreds of Brazilians, including the current president, Dilma Rousseff.  I suspect few would argue that, if Chagnon changed his position regarding Yanomami violence, the military would have followed suit and supported a large reserve.

Intriguingly, we do not really know how violent the Yanomami actually were.  Chagnon used extensive fieldwork and a host of detailed statistics to support his position.  Tierney (2000), relying on other data, took the opposite stance.  But neither side made their data publicly available so others could check them.  We simply have their numbers, not the details that would allow others to confirm one position or the other.  No one – to my knowledge – ever suggested that the Yanomami were in a state of chronic warfare during the 1990s.  They had been “pacified” by then.  The argument over Yanomami violence was about some vague past period and hence irrelevant to the reserve controversy.

Given these circumstances, we might ask:  Why did so many anthropologists argued over whether Chagnon’s depiction of the Yanomami violated the AAA’s code of “do no harm.”

Actually, there is a good reason some might frame the issue this way.  It allowed the pro-Chagnon and anti-Chagnon anthropologists