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by Robert V. Kemper and Anya P. Royce
Robert V. Kemper is Professor of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, USA 75275 and Anya P. Royce is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA 47405. They have previously collaborated on studies of Mexican urbanization and fieldwork, and have taught together a course on “Peoples of Mexico.” In 1997, this article appeared in Human Organization 56(4):479-483.
Key words: ethics, long-term research; Mexico
Issues involving ethics, justice, and human rights have become increasingly important for social anthropologists carrying out research in Mexico. Given the demands of indigenous and rural populations for fair treatment, the recent transformation of agrarian laws, the implications of NAFTA, the problems associated with migrants to the United States, and the reports of governmental corruption from the highest to the lowest levels, now is a significant moment to begin a conversation about the ethical obligations of all anthropologists working in Mexico.
We address these ethical issues from the perspective of our long-term involvement, as foreign scholars, in Mexican anthropological research. Both of us have been doing fieldwork in Mexico since 1967. Kemper's work (e.g., 1976, 1995) has been conducted with the people of Tzintzuntzan in the state of Michoacán, as well among their migrants in the Federal District, Mexico, Jalisco, and Baja California, as well as the states of California, Illinois, and Washington in the United States. Royce's work (e.g., 1975, 1991) has been focused on the Isthmus Zapotec community of Juchitán, Oaxaca, and, to a lesser extent, those Juchitecos residing in Mexico City. We offer our views in the context of our experience in working with local communities, professional anthropological colleagues, governmental officials, and the broader Mexican public.
The Role of North American Anthropologists in Mexico
Throughout most of the twentieth century North American social anthropologists have carried out significant research in Mexico: from the pioneering studies carried out in the 1920s and 1930s by individual scholars such as Robert Redfield in Tepoztlán and Elsie Clews Parson in Mitla, through the governmentally mandated work in the 1940s by the Institute for Social Anthropology (Smithsonian Institution) — involving scholars such as George M. Foster, Ralph L. Beals, Isabel Kelly, Donald Brand, and Robert C. West — to the university-based projects of the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Stanford University in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1970s literally hundreds of Mexican communities, rural as well as urban, indigenous as well as mestizo, have been the focus of field studies conducted by North American anthropologists. Sometimes, the research programs have involved collaboration with Mexican professors and students; more often, the North American scholars have worked independently. In both cases, however, the resultant publications have had a permanent impact on the Mexican anthropological literature.
In this context, we are just two of hundreds of North American (and other foreign) anthropologists doing research in Mexico. Indeed, it is important to remember that, among U.S. social anthropologists, Mexico is by far the most important foreign country for research purposes. This is significant, especially given the relatively small numbers of professional-level social anthropologists in Mexico. On the other hand, very few Mexican anthropologists have carried out research in the United States, even though Manuel Gamio provided a model for such investigations more than sixty-five years ago with his well-known studies of Mexican migrants in the United States. This imbalance in anthropological research between our two nations carries with it a unique ethical dimension: it obliges individual anthropologists to try to make the balance. Here we offer several ideas of how appropriate professional reciprocity can be achieved in the context of long-term research.
General Principles for Anthropological Ethics:
the North American Experience
Ethical issues have long figured prominently in the experience of U.S. anthropologists in Latin America. We remember the famous case of the “Boas censure” after World War I, related to his charges that some anthropologists were spying in Central America. In the 1960s, the notorious Camelot Project, involving “counter-insurgency” in the Andean highlands, again raised questions about what constitutes legitimate anthropological involvement in Latin America. Even the activities of the Summer Institute of Linguistics personnel in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America have affected the course and perception of social anthropology.
Since the 1960s, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has developed a series of statements on ethics, generally referred to as “Principles of Professional Responsibility,” with six distinctive domains of professional responsibility:
(1) responsibility to people whose lives and cultures anthropologists study;
(2) responsibility to the Public;
(3) responsibility to the discipline;
(4) responsibility to students and trainees;
(5) responsibility to employers, clients, and sponsors;
(6) responsibilities to governments.
The Preamble of the A.A.A. “Principles of Professional Responsibility” acknowledges that the interaction between these six is "varied, complex, sensitive, and sometimes difficult to reconcile." This is especially true when conducting long-term studies as foreign scholars in Mexico.
In a similar fashion, the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) has a “Statement on Professional and Ethical Responsibilities” which also offers six points to guide our professional behavior:
1. To the people we study we owe disclosure of our research goals, methods, and sponsorship....
2. To the communities ultimately affected by our actions we owe respect for their dignity, integrity, and worth....
3. To our social science colleagues we have the responsibility to not engage in actions that impede their reasonable professional activities....
4. To our students, interns, or trainees we owe nondiscriminatory access to our training services....
5. To our employers and other sponsors we owe accurate reporting of our qualifications and competent, efficient, and timely performance of the work we undertake for them....
6. To society as a whole we ow the benefit of our special knowledge and skills in interpreting sociocultural systems....
The perspective of our own anthropological training helps us, in fact, to understand and be sensitive to ethical issues. From George M. Foster (1969), well-known for his more than fifty years of research in Mexico, we understand the importance of dealing with three interacting cultural domains: the community and the nation, the profession, and the bureaucracy. Understanding these domains and the changes that come with time and personnel is crucial. So too are the changes that come as we ourselves progress from untried fieldworkers to more seasoned scholars.
Responsibilities to the People and their Communities
Our most important responsibility is to the people and the communities who have allowed us to spend time with them. At a minimal level, we must “do no harm”, even inadvertently, by our presence and by what we say and do. We are concerned about problems of confidentiality and preserving anonymity for those who wish it. We have always been sensitive to these issues, even to the point of using pseudonyms (and carefully selected photographs) of such individuals. Unlike some scholars, we have not attempted to disguise the communities where we work. Tzintzuntzan and Juchitán have played distinctive and important roles in Mexican history, and their people would have been disappointed had we hidden their identities.
We both have permanent residences with families in our communities (Kemper also has a second home with a migrant family in Mexico City). We keep clothes, field equipment, and other necessary items there for our frequent returns. We participate socially and financially in civil and religious events, and act as community “members” in many settings. On the occasion of the 40-day mass for the dead of her Zapotec grandmother, Royce learned that it was both possible and culturally appropriate for her to be at once an anthropologist documenting the days of mourning and to be a member of the family. Unlike anthropologists who come to a place for a single, short-term field project, we are invested in social relationships lasting across generations. We have access to knowledge about intimate affairs within the community. We must be all the more careful about what we record in our fieldnotes as well as what we publish in professional journals, especially those with significant distribution in Mexico.
From time to time, members of the community may seek access to materials in our archival collections. For example, several times Kemper has been asked to look up a person’s birthdate so that that individual could then go the appropriate archive to have a copy made. Royce’s inventory of the parochial archives is a reference for local priests and parishioners. We are an important source of cultural memory, and some arrangement of our materials must be made that will benefit these communities while not jeopardizing the rights of individuals. This is both a problem in “intellectual property rights” (see Greaves 1994) and an issue in the preservation of the anthropological record (see Silverman and Parezo 1995).
Another serious ethical responsibility to the people we study involves the changing views of authority in ethnographic reporting. Especially where anthropologists have worked among the poor and marginal sectors of a society, the problem exists as to how the voices of the members of these sectors can be heard. As anthropologists, “we must be mindful of being open to seeing alternate ways of being and to listening to voices we have thus far ignored. This is the critical matter of participation” (Royce 1995:6). Our long-term participation in communities like Tzintzuntzan and Juchitán of necessity requires changes of us and of them. In the process, we learn about sharing authority and responsibility with members of the communities who now function more and more like long-term “colleagues.” Royce is fortunate to have a Juchiteca “sister” who is a colleague in every sense of the word with whom she shares drafts of articles and speeches.
A consequence of this changing relationship with our communities is the need to publish the results of our research in ways that are more accessible to their members. One of the reasons why Kemper elected to publish the Spanish-language version of his monograph (1976) on the Tzintzuntzan migrants in Mexico City in the government-sponsored series SepSetentas was its wide distribution and low cost. Similarly, Royce’s study (1975) of identity and class in Juchitán was published through the Instituto Nacional Indigenista — with the result that it has always been available to interested Juchitecos. Both of us endeavor to publish in ways that make it easier for the increasingly interested populations of Tzintzuntzan and Juchitán to share in the fruits of our mutual labors.
Responsibility to the Public
The public is, in fact, several, and has become more diverse as long-term involvement has led us to a broader range of topics than the ones that initially drew us to the field. These publics include interested readers in Mexico and in the United States as well as people within the communities in which we work.
By virtue of his groundbreaking work in Tzintzuntzan, Foster (1948, 1967) had already drawn attention to this community. Kemper underlined this focus and took it beyond the community’s limits with his work on migrants to Mexico City. That issue, rural-urban migration, and its attendant issue of adaptation to an urban setting, has been of interest to the educated Mexican public since Lewis’s (1959) controversial work on the anthropology of poverty.
Miguel Covarrubias, in his Mexico South (1946), wrote a very accessible account of the remarkable peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo has painted them. Add to that the publication by Zapotec intellectuals of a literary magazine, Neza, beginning in the 1930s, followed by Neza Cubi and more recently Gu'cha'chi Reza, all of which have had a substantial distribution. As a result, Royce's work, found an interested public. That interest has increased dramatically, in Mexico and the United States but also in the international community. Increased activity on the part of indigenous groups and their supporters for recognition, the regional and national prominence of Juchiteco politicians, the international fame of Juchiteco painter Francisco Toledo, and the mistaken but persistent view of Isthmus Zapotec society as a "matriarchy" rather than a social system based on complementary and equally valued roles all have contributed to the fascination. The visibility of this part of Mexico has also attracted journalists and filmmakers whose work reaches a much wider public than the work of scholars. Knowing that what these non-anthropologists produce may be the only source that most members of the public will ever see or read, we must face the ethical issue: to what extent are we responsible for seeing that they are reasonably well-informed? And this must be our ethical imperative: to fight against inappropriate and stereotypical representations of their lives and cultures.
Responsibility to our professional colleagues
U.S. anthropologists working in Mexico have mastered Spanish as a tool of communication. Some also learn one or more indigenous languages, depending on the field site. For instance, Royce has learned Isthmus Zapotec because of the importance of its use in the daily lives of the people of Juchitán, whereas Kemper has not learned P’urepecha because he started his work among migrants in Mexico City and because fewer than seven percent of the people of Tzintzuntzan are competent in speaking it.
We must anticipate the disposition of substantial archives of fieldnotes, ethnographic census data, photographs, videotapes, and other materials. The originals of these materials will likely be deposited at our respective universities in the United States. Kemper has contemplated leaving copies of much of the Tzintzuntzan archival materials at the Colegio de Michoacán in Zamora, where he has had a long-term professional affiliation. Royce has no similar institutional setting available to her in Juchitán. Some materials might logically be housed in the Casa de la Cultura of that city; at a minimum, both her Zapotec colleague and the Casa de la Cultura have copies of all published work.
Because Kemper has spent a great deal of time doing research in Mexico City, he has become well integrated into the professional community of Mexican anthropology. This has been more difficult for Royce, as it is for most scholars who work at great distances from the capital. Moreover, since the establishment of the Colegio de Michoacán in Zamora in the late 1970s, Kemper has had the good fortune to be involved as a visiting professor on a regular basis. We believe that, if the opportunities are available, we have an ethical responsibility to offer our services for teaching and consulting.
At the invitation of Professor Angel Palerm, Kemper taught a seminar in Urban Anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in 1970 while he was still a graduate student himself. He repeated the seminar in 1980 when he once again spent the entire academic year living in Mexico City. More recently, from 1990 to the present, he has offered intensive courses at the Colegio de Michoacán. He has also served on thesis committees and has lectured at several institutions.
The distance of her field site notwithstanding, Royce has also participated in the professional community of Mexican anthropology. She has been a part of regional conferences on the Isthmus, presenting papers and being a member of round tables. As the number of Zapotec and Mexican students who work on such topics as the language and culture of Juchitán and the Isthmus Zapotec increases, she has read and commented on their work.
A final comment about the discipline: North American anthropologists need to learn the history of Mexican anthropology, which is rarely included in courses offered in the United States. This means understanding not just theories and methods, but also appreciating the struggles and conflicts in which anthropologists have been involved (e.g., the 1968 student revolts).
Responsibility to students and trainees
The involvement of student fieldworkers can be important for foreign anthropologists involved in long-term research. It may determine the continuity of a project beyond one’s lifetime. We have had different experiences with students in our respective communities, but these illustrate the range of possibilities for student training and involvement.
Juchitán has not always been the easiest of field sites for students, not because of the Juchitecos — who are unfailingly open and hospitable — but because of political issues which frequently have brought the army and other government elements into the city. Any decision to bring students to Juchitán, therefore, has to be carefully considered.
In 1982, under the auspices of a collaborative grant to Indiana University and University of Illinois, Royce brought five students into the field. Initially, they all worked on the project of this grant, comparative household strategies. Subsequently, four students did independent research on their own projects. It was an ideal way to get beginning fieldworkers situated in Juchitán as they worked together. By the time they began their own research, they were familiar with the city and with the people most central to their research. The students ranged from an advanced undergraduate who wrote a senior Honors thesis on pottery, to a Master’s level student whose completed thesis was on women's use of herbal medicine related to childbearing, to two Ph.D. students whose theses documented the hammock-making industry, on the one hand, and the association of flower symbolism and women, on the other. The fifth student focused on the household strategies project. In addition, one of Royce's colleagues, a bioanthropologist, joined the group. She had come to Juchitán with Royce in the summer of 1978 to work in the parish archives on a project about fertility and social structure. These student and collegial projects expanded greatly what we know about Juchitán; they went far beyond what one scholar could hope to accomplish. In the same way, Royce continues to work with students and other professionals who select Juchitán as a place to do their research.
Kemper first came to Tzintzuntzan while a graduate student under the supervision of George Foster. Although Kemper has not taken students from his own university to Tzintzunztan, students from Mexican and other institutions have become part of the growing research “team” connected to Tzintzuntzan.
For instance, in 1980, with funds from a Ford Foundation grant, three Mexican anthropology students worked as interviewers with migrants in Mexico City as well as in Tijuana and California. In that same year, a German anthropologist did part of her dissertation research about ceramic production in Tzintzuntzan. Later, in 1990, several students of Professors Stanley Brandes and Leo Chavez (from the University of California at Berkeley and at Irvine, respectively) were involved as census takers and interviewers in the Tzintzuntzan project. Independently, a Canadian anthropologist did part of her dissertation research about fiestas and tourism in the community in 1990-1991. In addition, a Mexican anthropologist at the University of California at Irvine is doing her dissertation research (1992-1996) on the familial and economic aspects of life among the Tzintzuntzan migrants in Orange County, California. During 1991-1993, Professor Jack Rollwagen worked in Tzintzuntzan and among its migrants in Mexico City, Chicago, and Tacoma to produce a series of videos, the first of which was issued in 1992. In the summer 1997, an ethnoarchaeologist did research in the village on ceramic use. Currently, a medical anthropologist from the University of California at San Francisco is finishing his dissertation research on chronic diseases among the elderly in Tzintzuntzan. In all cases, these scholars have been assisted in their fieldwork in the community (or among its migrants) in the context of the on-going work. Kemper has shared basic demographic and other data with them and asked in return that they provide copies of their reports for the project files.
Thus, the Tzintzuntzan project, which began as a student-training enterprise directed by George Foster in 1945, has been “open” to the involvement of students from numerous institutions in Mexico, the United States, and beyond. Foster has always made it clear to the villagers that Tzintzuntzan is their community and that he does not control the decisions made by other student and professional anthropologists to come there. Kemper has followed this “open” policy and promises to sustain it into the future — with the objective that, eventually, someone else will assume responsibility for the project.
Responsibility to employers and sponsors
Neither Royce nor Kemper have been employed formally in Mexico during our years of fieldwork. Our employers have been, and continue to be, our respective universities in the U.S. Nor have we had any formal clients or sponsors in Mexico. We write final reports to the agencies that have supported our research, but, otherwise, no limits are imposed on our work.
In contrast to our experiences in Mexico, we have done research in other countries under contract to agencies to which we were responsible to fulfill certain “terms of reference” (i.e., contractual obligations) in exchange for consulting fees and per diem expenses. When foreign anthropologists undertake such contracted research in Mexico, whether funded through governmental agencies or through the private sector, the critical ethical obligation is to make an open and honest examination of the compatibility of the agency goals with our principles of professional responsibility. When the interests of funding agencies and the people we study are (or appear to be) in conflict, anthropologists must make difficult choices, even to the point that if the conflict cannot be resolved, “the anthropological work should not be undertaken or continued” (Preamble to A.A.A. Principles of Professional Responsibility).
Responsibilities to governments
Most U.S. social anthropologists come to Mexico on tourist permits valid for 90 to 180 days. Since we work in Mexico on a non-lucrative basis, the tourist permit seems to be the most appropriate mechanism for dealing with governmental requirements. Indeed, the few times when our funding sources (e.g., Fulbright Fellowships, co-sponsored through a bilateral arrangement between the governments of the U.S. and Mexico) encouraged us to seek “official” visa status, it turned out to be much more trouble than it was worth!
Although we currently do research in Mexico without direct obligations to the governments of Mexico or the U.S., we are always aware of their significant role in anthropological research in Mexico, especially in the funding and publishing of research. For both of us, our early research was funded by U.S. government agencies (NIGMS for Kemper and NIH for Royce)and our monographs were published in Spanish through Mexican government institutes housed within the Secretaría de Educación Pública.
Conclusion
Poised at the end of one century and ready to begin the next, we encounter ethical concerns about individual rights juxtaposed with the demands of community and common purpose. If we are to move toward a world in which dignity and justice are the right of the last and the least, we must be open to seeing alternate ways of being and to listening to voices which we all too often have ignored. As anthropologists, we have learned from societies able to articulate common goals and identity while honoring the diverse talents of their members. We have shared the lives of peoples whose values and behaviors, while different from our own, have a beauty and integrity that allow them to create and sustain materially and spiritually satisfying ways of life. We have also seen those lives threatened by the encroachment of other agendas which do not permit a dialogue where all parties are heard. We have sometimes found ourselves caught up in conflicting ethical responsibilities and have had to rely on our own judgment to resolve the conflicts. Here we have offered our own experiences and thoughts about our long-term work in Mexico as a way of promoting a much needed, wider conversation about ethical issues for social anthropologists.
Let us commit ourselves as members of the international community of anthropologists — whether at work in our own nations or in other countries — to an ongoing dialogue in which we listen as carefully as we speak.
References Cited
Covarrubias, Miguel
1946 Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Foster, George M.
1967 Tzintzuntzan: Mexican Peasants in a Changing World. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
1969 Applied Anthropology. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Foster, George M. (with Gabriel Ospina)
1948 Empire’s Children: The People of Tzintzuntzan. México, D.F.: Smithsonian Institute, Institute of Social Anthropology (Publication No. 6).
Greaves, Tom, ed.
1994 Intellectual Property Rights for Indigenous Peoples: A Source Book. Oklahoma City: Society for Applied Anthropology.
Kemper, Robert V.
1976 Campesinos en la ciudad: gente de Tzintzuntzan México, D.F.: Secretaría de Educación Pública (Series SepSetentas No. 270).
1995 Comunidad y Migración: el caso del pueblo de Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán, 1988-1994. Relaciones 61/62:133-148.
Lewis, Oscar
1959 Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books.
Royce, Anya Peterson
1975 Prestigio y afiliación en una comunidad urbana: Juchitán, México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Serie de Antropología Social No. 37).
1991 Music, Dance, and Fiesta: Definitions of Isthmus Zapotec Community. The Latin American Anthropology Review 3(2):51-60.
1995 A Just Community: Social Implications of NAFTA. Paper presented at the Congreso Internacional sobre Los Impactos del Tratado de Libre Comercio en la Educación. Puebla, Mexico: Universidad Madero.
Sydel Silverman and Nany J. Parezo, eds.
1995 Preserving the Anthropological Record. Second Edition. New York, NY: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Inc.