Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists have long complained about the methodological straightjackets implied by the “governance” norms that review boards or equivalent bodies seek to enact. As this paper explores, the introduction of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (2018) may have aggravated such a situation.

Paper long abstract:

Since institutional review boards and similar bodies became institutionalized, anthropologists have complained about the straightjackets implied by the regulations those bodies seek to enact. Although anonymity, confidentiality and consent play a central role, the basic issues are methodological and epistemic. Critics have noted that the evaluation processes devised by science governance bodies suit the hypothesis-testing designs and randomized clinical trials of biomedical research. Didier Fassin’s asking “The end of ethnography as collateral damage of ethical regulation?” encapsulates anthropologists’ worries. Margaret Strathern’s apparently obvious remark of 2006, “Persons […] are the anthropologist’s human subjects” is a rejoinder to the bureaucratization of “ethics.” While in the 1960s, this term could evoke anthropologists’ social responsibility, four decades later it meant compliance with regulations about “human-subject research.” And when in 2018, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) replaced the notion of “human subject” by that of “data subject,” it went a step further. Its goal is to safeguard individual privacy as potentially affected by providers of “goods and services,” or by the gathering and handling of large-scale personal data. But GDPR applies everywhere, and its norms and language have been incorporated into the “ethical” assessments of anthropological research projects. So much so that the question, “Is anthropology legal?” has been used to underline GDPR’s impact on anthropological knowledge-making. This paper outlines and discusses such a situation.