The mention of “IRB” in many an anthropological setting in the United States is likely to elicit sighs, groans, and widespread expressions of exasperation. To U.S.-based colleagues and students, IRB has come to mean much more than “institutional review board.” To many, the acronym signals an intrusion in the practice of anthropological research and a submission to a biomedical conception of “human-subject research.” read more »Yet U.S. colleges and universities now basically require those doing any research with living human beings (that is not just public discourse or public spectacle) to obtain approval from a university IRB before starting the “research.” Most anthropological fieldwork may end up slated for “expedited” review, but little about the process of obtaining approval feels expedited, and much of it leads otherwise ethically minded anthropologists I know to turn against the IRB process altogether.

     Frequently, an IRB questions an anthropologist’s proposed field methods and not just those affecting the privacy and safety of the researcher’s interviewees, interlocutors, or sources. In fact, most anthropologists I know have stories to tell about their experiences (or their graduate students’ experiences) with the IRBs at their own institutions, and these range from “unbelievable” and “funny” to “exasperating.” In one case, an IRB asked a doctoral candidate to submit a Spanish-language version of an “interview schedule” she proposed using in the South Pacific, for fieldwork in a country that is anything but Spanish speaking.

     Yet the issues raised by IRBs are intellectual as well as practical, ethical, institutional, and political, and they require engagement more than compliance, dismissal, surrender, or disbelief. For example, should researchers (especially ethnographers) not ask what happens when people are conceptualized as “human subjects” and how we balance the good with the bad effects of that conceptualization? Should we also not ask what it is in contemporary U.S. society, the workings of bureaucratic regulation, and the expanding “audit cultures” in certain other countries that is turning people into “human subjects”? The social, political, economic, ideological, and cultural consequences of doing so warrant our collective and careful attention. Questions also surround the goals of the IRB process and how they stack up against long-standing anthropological practice and goals. Does “informed consent” really translate into “human-subjects protection”? Might the ethical position in the IRB process not, in fact, be too limited rather than too stringent? More fundamentally, what counts as research, what counts as data, and what counts as the “period of research”? Does social research valued by social, cultural, and linguistic anthropologists really have a beginning, middle, and end? Does imposing such temporal definitions on anthropological research not alter a great deal of it?

     I offer the first of two AE Forums here as a contribution to discussion and debate of these issues. I have to thank Princeton anthropologist Rena Lederman for the initiative she took when she proposed and chaired a panel on IRBs at the 2005 American Ethnological Society (AES) Spring Conference in San Diego in which she brought several anthropologists and a qualitative sociologist together to discuss the implications for sociocultural anthropology and qualitative sociology of the deepening institutionalization of IRBs on U.S. campuses. That session so piqued my interest (and intrigued at least one associate editor of AE) that we worked to bring the substantive and lively format of that discussion to the pages of this journal. Readers will note that the core of this AE Forum is not one article but, rather, four articles (by Rena Lederman, Dan Bradburd, Jack Katz, and Richard Shweder) preceded by a substantive introduction written by Lederman in her own editorial capacity. But the now-standard form of an AE Forum is still evident. Included here for our collective debate, response, and enlightenment are eight commentaries—half from U.S.-based colleagues (anthropologists Stuart Plattner, Deborah Winslow, and Don Brenneis and legal scholar George Annas) and half from colleagues in other national locations, including Brazil (Gustavo Lins Ribeiro), France (Didier Fassin), England (Marilyn Strathern), and India (Nandini Sundar). All were sent the four “core” articles and the introduction. Lederman wrote the rejoinder in her own voice, but after some consultation with Bradburd, Katz, and Shweder.

     A second lively AE Forum takes Viranjini Munasinghe’s provocative article “Theorizing World Culture through the New World: East Indians and Creolization” as its springboard and includes wide-ranging commentaries by colleagues in Spain (Verena Stolcke), Sweden (Ulf Hannerz), England (John Tomlinson), and the United States (Deborah Thomas, Aisha Khan, Daniel Segal, Pauline Strong, and Vicente Diaz) as well as Munasinghe’s rejoinder. At stake is the travel-worthiness of “theory,” in general, and “creolization,” in particular. Calling for greater attention to historical specificity, Munasinghe also prompts readers to look for the unwitting complicity of many contemporary theorists and writers with a particular national (or societal) self-understanding that reproduces problematic patterned exclusions. This AE Forum—both Munasinghe’s article and the commentaries and the rejoinder that accompany it—can be read at two levels, the first focusing on the travel-worthiness of social and cultural theories with wide currency today and the second on the particular conceptual, ideological, and political work done (often invisibly) by invocation of terms implying mixture, for example, creolization, hybridity, syncretism, transculturation, and mestizaje.

      Included as well in this issue is Catherine Lutz’s 2005 AES presidential address—“Empire Is in the Details”—extended for publication and illustrated with eye-catching images, including Lutz’s own photo of Filipino soldiers in Manila that we have chosen for the cover. Paired with Lutz’s call for much more anthropological fieldwork on the shape and workings of the current “U.S. empire” operating within and across many national borders is an engagingly provocative article by Nina Glick Schiller, Ayse Çaglar, and Thaddeus Guldbrandsen that urges scholars to rethink the way we approach and write about immigration. The product of research in Germany and the United States on religious communities and immigration, “Beyond the Ethnic Lens: Locality, Globality, and Born-Again Incorporation” argues for breaking out of the methodological habit of studying “ethnic cultures” as a way of studying immigration. It also serves as a useful reminder of the advantages of collaborative work and substantive engagement across national and intellectual boundaries.

     Finally, this issue includes a special grouping of articles by Mark Goodale (“Reclaiming Modernity: Indigenous Cosmopolitanism and the Coming of the Second Revolution in Bolivia”), Susan Paulson (“Body, Nation, and Consubstantiation in Bolivian Ritual Meals”), and James Ellison (“ ‘Everyone Can Do as He Wants’: Economic Liberalization and Emergent Forms of Antipathy in Southern Ethiopia”), for whom neoliberalism is a key analytic frame. Their analyses vary—from a focus on inherited status differences to reflections on youth culture or food—but all document and illuminate current local, domestic, and national politics (in Bolivia and Ethiopia) that could otherwise be easily misread. Two of these articles (Goodale’s and Paulson’s) concern “indigeneity,” picturing people as simultaneously cosmopolitan and indigenous in ways not typically seen in print. The third (Ellison’s) so vividly traces the impact of neoliberalism on a largely urban setting in Ethiopia that readers will have little difficulty agreeing that it makes perfect sense for people with higher inherited social rank to adopt the public status of a veteran but long-stigmatized population. As in Lutz’s article, in this section, readers will find accompanying materials—striking visual images and culinary recipes—that enhance appreciation of the authors’ arguments.

      I am proud to bring this packed, heady, provocative, and timely issue of AE to our worldwide readership.

VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ
EDITOR

[foreword, IRBs, bureaucratic regulation, academic freedom, creolization, methodological nationalism, revolution, neoliberalism, cosmopolitics]