Ethnographic responsibility

Michael Herzfeld’s exposé on how bureaucratic interpretations of ethics risk stifling ethnographic engagement and methodological creativity is timely and poignant. Regulatory approaches to research ethics vary significantly according to national and disciplinary contexts. In the Netherlands, the focus is on research data management and scientific integrity. I see this from the privileged point of view of an appointed national committee member for Scientific Integrity in Research Data Management in the Social Sciences. Since last June, I have participated in meetings, discussing what data archiving for scientific integrity might mean, particularly for social and cultural anthropologists and qualitative fieldworkers in the social sciences. The existing Guideline for the archiving of academic research for faculties of behavioural and social sciences in the Netherlands (DSW 2022), issued in 2018 and revised in March 2022 by the Council of the Deans of Social Sciences in the Netherlands (DSW), has received diverse and even contradictory critique as some social scientists find it too broad and vague, while others find it restrictive and overburdening, particularly for those working with qualitative and mixed field methods, or in collaboration with other disciplines and professions. While a distinction between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ is not clear-cut, there are fundamental disagreements amongst social scientists on whether data should be stored at all, with some maintaining that all research data must be kept forever and in its entirety on a repository that is separate from the fieldworker. This is to preserve data integrity and to be able to evidence from it, if needed, the researcher’s integrity. Notorious fraud and data manipulation cases for scientific publications have historically directed Dutch discussions of ‘scientific integrity’ in this direction but need not lead to a ‘one size fits all’ (Labib et al. 2023)

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• Ethnographic responsibility

  Open Access•M Herzfeld•Anthropology Today•2023

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