Now im going to Walk out the gate and pick up some dinner.

I’m living for the next couple of months in a still semi-rural banlieu outside Beijing.
And shopping for vegatables by the side of the highway. My host is building a pleasure garden in a gated compound with a smokestack on the horizon. Two modern buildings, one designed by ai wei wei and one post and beam and ceramic tiled roof in the traditional manner, with logs cut an joined by a man with a table saw and an ax. If I were a photo journalist I’d be having a field day. The high tension power lines in the “backyard” are a sight. But the workers and the peasants I meet everyday are not data points. After a month or so I may ask permission to take some portraits of the farmers selling their produce or the food venders who gather along the road at the end of the day. Or the gatekeeper and his wife. To journalists people are zoo animals. These people are poor (but a lot less so than they used to be) but they deserve respect no mre or less than anyone else.
At the center of the ethic of anthropology is that of one person talking to another. That’s the moral foundation of the field, or at least it is suppposed to be, and it is supposed to weigh heavy on the mind of the human “researcher”. I’d vote to bypass the benefits of scientific objectification in the study of ourselves, in favor of the constant return to the moral and ethical question of conversation among equals; even equals who are in so many ways not.

The unethical part was Humphreys’ getting the person in the police or DMV or whatever to disclose the identities of these men. They may not have expected privacy, but they were assuming anonymity. And they were doing nothing to disclose their identities.

Indeed, it is widely considered to be one reason the Wash U Sociology Department no longer exists.

I believe you mean, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

/pedant

It takes some effort, but sadly, I probably can imagine—better than I’d like.

“I realized only much later, by having affairs with NAAFA women, I became entangled in the emotional complexities such affairs entailed, making my job of gathering information problematic.”

“I suppressed the idea that sleeping with my subjects was an inherently tricky proposition.”

I’ve been asked how Humphreys responded to the offer. He says in the manuscript (as reported by the biographers) that he turned it down.

Joel—I’d hoped that someone who was at the ASA session would describe it in the comments section. So far that hasn’t happened. Can you imagine what the effect would have been in 1974?