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- Convenors:
-
Erica Weiss
(Tel Aviv University)
Carole McGranahan (University of Colorado)
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- Discussants:
-
Miia Halme-Tuomisaari
(Lund University)
Carlo Cubero (Tallinn University)
- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/017
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Despite the energy and time anthropology invests in its own reflexivity, the ethics of pseudonym use remains mostly unexamined. We will discuss the high ethical stakes that pseudonyms bear for research participants and ethnographers, which we have not sufficiently considered as a discipline.
Long Abstract:
Why do we use pseudonyms? For many scholars the unironic answer is: "I don't know. We've just always done it this way." How is it that we explore the habitus of others, but are unable to recognize our own? That is, despite the energy and time anthropology invests in its own reflexivity, anthropologists have left such as major topic as the effects and ethics of pseudonym use mostly unexamined. In this roundtable, we contend that the use of pseudonyms often has high ethical stakes for research participants and ethnographers that we have not sufficiently considered as a discipline. Real consequences are involved; this is not simply a technical or methodological matter of anonymity.
Anthropology has changed dramatically in the 21st century, including the nature of our fieldwork and professional relationships. As a result, a great deal of our ethical discourse and norms appear anachronistic. The ethical discourse which dominates the discussion of pseudonyms, the protection of human subjects, can often infantilize research participants, while simultaneously reducing our responsibilities to them to a series of bureaucratic precautions. As a result, our performance of these tasks of conforming to "ethics" often become perfunctory and impassive, distanced from our actual fieldwork relationships.
The participants in this proposed roundtable do not converge on a single recommendation or method of determining the need or desirability of using pseudonyms. Rather we will show that the use of pseudonyms is not a neutral technique, but a practice that implicates and reflects our greatest disciplinary values.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Keith Brown (Arizona State University)
Contribution short abstract:
Easy-to-use search algorithms have dispelled the fiction that pseudonyms insulate ethnographers' field-sites or interlocutors from discovery. What can anthropologists learn from others-including "ordinary" citizens with longer experience of living under surveillance-about the ethics of transparency?
Contribution long abstract:
This paper is prompted by exchanges I have had with anthropologist colleagues who continue to deploy pseudonyms, even while acknowledging that their own citation practices and professional candor allow readers to readily decipher the code. "Insiders" (as well as advisors, peers and students) have always been able to peer behind ethnographers' pseudonyms, suggesting their usage has always been Goffmanesque "face-work." If a changed and ostensibly more participatory and accessible culture of knowledge-production and exchange has shifted or blurred the distinction of front-stage and back-stage, then what work do pseudonyms do?
To answer, I additionally draw on the reflections of colleagues in North Macedonia, with whom I work on issues related to people's past relationships with a security apparatus that enlisted citizens as informers. In a context where my work is translated, read and discussed, I do not use pseudonyms for people--in part because the state assigned its informers pseudonyms--or for places, largely because my work focuses on their distinctive characteristics, rather than presumptive generalities. I am also informed by the practices of oral historians (including Trevor Lummis and Svetlana Alexievich), who anticipate the future use and value of their work being amplified by preserving the context of its production, and acknowledging the emotional and intellectual investments of their interlocutors. By drawing on the insights of these practitioners, as well as on theoretical discussions over ethnography as invention as opposed to discovery, the paper seeks to advance cross-disciplinary learning and exchange around the ethics of rapport-building, respect and credit-sharing.
Sara Bonfanti (University of Genoa)
Contribution short abstract:
Only through a continuous bargaining of how far our interlocutors’ identities ought to go public, building on the (always skewed) reciprocity which is embedded in the field, anthropology could stretch its much claimed ‘reflexivity turn’ towards a more egalitarian engaged scholarship.
Contribution long abstract:
This argument starts by re-interpreting the use of pseudonyms in anthropology as a different practice than other anonymization procedures. As per formal definition (EU-GDPR 2016), pseudonymous personal data is still personal data, since inadvertent breaches to ‘additional information’ can lead to the identification of the individuals concerned. Besides, pseudonyms ought to be more than a laconic note in ethnographic works, bearing the mark of a sustained collaboration between researcher and researched, of which the fictional element is part-and-parcel.
As a critical migration scholar, and dedicated ethnographer of mobility experiences with South Asian diasporas, I will briefly expose my predicaments in coming to terms with pseudonymization: beyond routinary requirements imposed by funding agencies, after due negotiations with my informants case by case. Whether collecting life-histories, making participative ethnographic films, or co-authoring peer-reviewed articles, I argue that there is no one-size-fits-all to the quandary of ‘alter-naming’ our research participants. Contradictory benefits and perils can emerge both from concealing and exposing the factual identities of those who co-produce ethnographic knowledge with the anthropologist in the field.
At a time when the (social) media and ‘big data’ storage put at stake any given protocol, I hold no conclusion. Instead, within this roundtable, I wish to discuss my provisional conviction that it is only through a continuous bargaining of how far our interlocutors’ identities should go public, building on the (always skewed) reciprocity which is embedded in the field, that anthropology could stretch its much claimed ‘reflexivity turn’ further, towards a more egalitarian engaged scholarship.