Ethnocentric ethics in anthropological research

Sjaak van der Geest

In memory of Yaw Berko

The paper discusses the application of ethnocentric ethical rules in anthropological

research. The ethnocentrism lies in the fact that North American and European definitions
of right and wrong are imposed on anthropological research everywhere in the world.
Apparently and ironically some anthropological committees seem to assume that west-
ern values are universally valid. The paper draws mainly on experiences of the author and
of PhD researchers supervised by him.

[ethics, ethnocentrism, anthropology, research, informed consent, pseudonym, Ghana]

In 1971 I was collecting life histories and some other data from as many as possible
members of an extended family in Kwahu Tafo, Ghana. The main purpose of the research
apart from writing a master thesis was to question the harmonious picture of the Afri-
can family that anthropologists tended to produce at the time (Bleek 1975). A practical
problem I faced was that half of the about 75 adult members of the family were living
elsewhere. Most of these were trading in Accra or another commercial town or farming
in a remote village that could not or hardly be reached by wheeled transport. I was
able to follow up some of these absent members by visiting them or during visits they
paid to the family in Kwahu Tafo. There was however one person, Yaw Berko,1 that I
was unable to catch, because his farming village was far and difficult to find. Stories
from others about him had fed my curiosity. I wanted to meet him. I was lucky: one day,
someone came to tell me that Yaw Berko was in town. He had come for the funeral of his
sister (cousin to be precise) who had died a few days before.
The next day I went to see him. He was mourning. I offered my condolences and
introduced myself. After a short conversation I asked him if I could interview him about
his life and some other matters. He apologised and said he could not talk to me because
he was too upset and sad about his sisters death. I realised that he was escaping me
and insisted on having the interview. After much pressure he gave in. He was too polite

MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011 139

 to stick to his refusal. I managed to have my interview and he reluctantly told me the
story of his life that was as depressing as the death of his sister.

I vividly remember that event and still feel ashamed about my action. Whenever a
discussion arises about the ethics of fieldwork, this memory returns. I consider it one
of my most unethical acts during my fieldwork.
There are other events in my research that have been criticised by some colleagues
as unethical but which I do not regret or regard wrong. This one is from my diary:

My old landlord has two wives who seem to get on well together. It looks a harmonious
polygamous marriage. One night I wake up from a loud noise. Two women are shouting
at one another. The door of my room leaves a big split. Through it I can see one of the two
wives. The old man tries in vain to calm them down. It is difficult for me to understand
what they are saying. It goes too fast and there are many unfamiliar words in it. I hold the
microphone of the cassette recorder in the split of the door and record their conversa-
tion. The next morning my assistant translates it word by word: You with your crooked
ass, You are black and dirty, You better take your bath in the afternoon than in the
evening, You with your cracked heel, and so on.

The quarrel had causes and consequences, which kept me busy the following days. I
had to readjust my understanding of the old mans marriage and to change my some-
what romantic ideas about polygyny.
Two years after my first research I returned to Kwahu Tafo to study sexual relation-
ships and birth control which led to my doctoral dissertation (Bleek 1976). I employed
several dubious methods during that research. One was to find out more about secret
love affairs in the family:

I asked a young boy (about fourteen years old) who lived in the same house, to check
who slept with who in four adjacent houses of the family. In the evenings he hung around
the four houses and observed who entered. The next morning he came to have breakfast
with me and delivered his report about the sleeping partners of the past night. He became
my spy and enjoyed the work. Moreover, he needed the money that I paid him. As far as
I know, noone ever found out about his spying activities.

I was not aware, at that time, of an official ethical code for anthropological research.
But I dont think I needed such a code to realize that my treatment of Yaw Berko was
wrong and unethical and to explain why I thought that my secret recording of the
fighting wives and of the nightly visits of lovers was acceptable. I will return to these
doubtful ethics in fieldwork later on.

In their plea for empirical ethics research in health care, Willems and Pols (2010:
167-168) write that

140 MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011

 Empirical ethics leads to other forms of insight and understanding than predictions and
even if it does lead to predictions, testing these predictions is not always the most impor-
tant way to evaluate the theory. There are more suitable criteria, such as the extent to
which new and surprising concepts are introduced, unexpected connections are revealed,
new ways of seeing and understanding are opened up and the extent to which it helps
people to live with problems and dilemmas in health care.

In this paper I will reflect on a number of ethical decisions in anthropological research

in my own career and that of a PhD researcher and some colleagues. The reflection
will reveal some of the unexpected connections that Willems and Pols refer to.

Ethnocentrism

Over the past three decades or so, anthropology as a profession has become increas-
ingly more conscious of the ethical implications and complications of doing research
and publishing its results. National associations of anthropology in several European
and in the Americas have attempted to design guidelines for correct ethical conduct
during and after research. The most influential is the Code of Ethics from the Ameri-
can Anthropological Association (AAA 2000). I will, therefore, use this code as ref-
erence for my exploration into potential ethnocentrism in the conceptualisation and
application of ethical codes. The AAA code explains in its preamble:

Anthropological researchers, teachers and practitioners are members of many different

communities, each with its own moral rules or codes of ethics. Anthropologists have
moral obligations as members of other groups, such as the family, religion, and com-
munity, as well as the profession. They also have obligations to the scholarly discipline,
to the wider society and culture, and to the human species, other species, and the envi-
ronment. Furthermore, fieldworkers may develop close relationships with persons or
animals with whom they work, generating an additional level of ethical considerations
The purpose of this Code is to foster discussion and education. The American Anthro-
pological Association (AAA) does not adjudicate claims for unethical behavior The
principles and guidelines in this Code provide the anthropologist with tools to engage in
developing and maintaining an ethical framework for all anthropological work.

Speaking about research, the AAA code refers to three parties to whom the researcher
bears responsibility: to the people (and animals) they study; to their discipline; and to
the general public. Focusing on the first (the research participants) the code brings up
six issues that boil down to these three: (1) respect for people (which may imply that
the research is cancelled because it fails to honour the principle of respect); (2) not
harming the safety, dignity or privacy of people (which may necessitate anonymisa-
tion of the respondents); (3) obtaining informed consent. Missing in this list, in my
view, is the obligation to inform the population about the findings and conclusions of
the research.

MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011 141

 I will now discuss four ethical issues which largely coincide with the points I just
mentioned: exploiting or using people for the sake of the research; informed con-
sent; not harming; and sharing research results. The discussion will take the form of
a dialogue with my own research experiences and those of some close colleagues. By
placing the ethical decisions and dilemmas in the real life context of anthropological
research, I hope to capture the empirical and situational character of research ethics.

Duplexity

In an article on ethics and fieldwork, Peter Pels (1999) calls anthropology a profes-
sion of duplexity. Anthropologists, he argues, serve two masters; they have to satisfy
opposing demands. Those different masters or demands change over time and vary
over places but anthropologists find themselves always in a situation where they have
to apply considerable impression management to achieve what they came to do:
(1) building friendly relationships with the people they study in order (2) to collect
the best data that will enable them to write a text that will be appreciated by academic
colleagues, funding organizations or policymakers. Thus duplexity easily leads to du-
plicity, deceit, double-dealing. I agree, anthropologists walk a tight rope; they must
balance between sincere friendship and instrumental friendship (which is not friend-
ship). Going by the title of her article Friendship as methodology, one would think
that Tillmann-Healy (2003) has fallen from that tight rope, but I dont think she has.
She rather argues that the intersubjectivity that is found in friendship provides a firm
base for qualitative research and empathic understanding. Simply said, her message is
not: make friends to get better data, but: carry out research among your friends.
In my own experience, friendship was in yet another way linked to research: friend-
ship developed in the course of doing research, because of the research. Convers-
ing, exchanging personal views and experiences, sharing data and discussing them,
forged mutual appreciation, interest in one another, trust. Assistants who helped me
in the research among older people became friends through our common interest in
the pains and pleasures of growing old. That kind of friendship, which dissolved most
of my duplexity, developed also in my contract with the young boy who reported
over breakfast on the nightly lovers in the family. My growing involvement in family
rumours and gossips, thanks to my anthropological observations, meant both meth-
odological and personal progress.
I am not denying that conflicting demands during fieldwork can lead to ambiva-
lence, discomfort and double standards2 but is that a uniquely anthropological field-
work experience? Of course not. Playing two, three, four roles is a necessity of life in
general. Without impression management no one can socially survive, as Goffman
(1969) has shown so eloquently, whether he/she is an anthropologist, a medical doc-
tor, a teacher, a politician or a shopkeeper.
How respectful the researcher has been towards the participants in the field and
how he handled the problem of duplexity is difficult to verify by others. It is mainly
fieldwork confessions and reflection that show how the researcher associated with the
people in his study. Occasionally a third person reveals certain unethical activities,

142 MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011

as for example happened in the case of Chagnon. Chagnon, who carried out exten-
sive anthropological research among the Yanomam people in Venezuela and Brazil,
was accused of infecting these people with measles for the sake of scientific research
(Thierney 2000).3
Until today people who are visited by an anthropological researcher seldom talk
back and in most cases the only vocal eyewitness of the researchers conduct is the
researcher himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that journals rarely reject an article
because the author is known to have collected his data in a disrespectful manner.

Informed consent

Informed consent is the most concrete ethical rule, which for that reason is most
frequently applied by editors and publishers in judging the ethical correctness of re-
search before publishing. The American Anthropological Association says the follow-
ing about informed consent:

Anthropological researchers should obtain in advance the informed consent of persons

being studied, providing information, owning or controlling access to material being
studied, or otherwise identified as having interests which might be impacted by the
research. It is understood that the degree and breadth of informed consent required will
depend on the nature of the project and may be affected by requirements of other codes,
laws, and ethics of the country or community in which the research is pursued. Further, it
is understood that the informed consent process is dynamic and continuous; the process
should be initiated in the project design and continue through implementation by way of
dialogue and negotiation with those studied. Researchers are responsible for identifying
and complying with the various informed consent codes, laws and regulations affecting
their projects. Informed consent, for the purposes of this code, does not necessarily imply
or require a particular written or signed form. It is the quality of the consent, not the
format, that is relevant (AAA 2000: 3).

The above formulation is liberal enough to allow for adjusting informed consent to
local conditions and type of research. The code does not insist on a written and signed
form, which would be quite out of place and preposterous in most anthropological
research situations. It is the quality of the consent that is important. What this qual-
ity entails can best be illustrated with examples from my own research.
I began this paper with the worst example of my style of interviewing but most
of my interviews resembled normal conversations that often started as conversations
do, spontaneously and informally, with the implicit understanding that both parties
agree, otherwise they would not engage in it. But I also approached people more
formally for a long conversation (or discussion) on a specific subject. I would for
example ask: Can we talk today about how it feels to be an old person? Or: How
you built your house? Nearly all older people enjoyed my visits and were happy that
there was someone who took an interest in what they had to say. I soon discovered
why: it rarely happened that someone came to them with questions about their life his-

MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011 143

tory. One of my dearest quotes is what an old man confided to me: There is no greater
pleasure for an older person than a young person asking a question.4 One older man
was so pleased with my visits that he came to search for me if I failed to visit him. It
would indeed have been absurd to ask him and the other older people to sign a form of
consent, before starting our conversation. It would have killed the occasion and prob-
ably frightened the elder. Zaman and Nahar (this issue) provide striking examples of
this absurdity from their fieldwork in Bangladesh.
Were the elders informed about the purpose of my conversations? I told them but
I am not sure they fully understood and remembered what I had told them. In general,
people in the town knew what I was doing: writing a book about the way older people
live and are respected and they liked that idea.
But there were also occasions that I did not fully inform the people about the pur-
pose of my conversation. It would be odd to do so in situations where a conversation
naturally developed and it would be unwise when telling them would spoil the very
purpose of the meeting. Asking a nurse if she takes medicines home without permis-
sion, would be senseless if I tell her that I am studying informal practices in the hos-
pital. Not informing and not asking consent is more rule than exception if we include
observation. Everything I see, hear, or smell becomes data. It would be ridiculous,
for example, to ask two children (or their mothers) who are fighting for permission to
write down what I observed.
Ethnography is permanent sensitivity, which is impossible to combine with
informed consent. The most incisive reflections on illness and suffering have been
written by authors who were themselves thrown into the depth of pain and uncertainty
and reported on their experiences from that situation. A telling example is Gerhard
Nijhofs (2001) description of his stay in the hospital and slow recovery from cancer.
There is no room and no need for informed consent from doctors and nurses in this
lucid account, as long as their identity is not revealed to the reader. I assume that only
his partner and children, who are easily recognisable, gave some kind of consent to
the publication of his reflections.
An extreme form of no informed consent is research that can only be carried out if
under cover. Asking consent would destroy the very purpose of the research because
it would almost certainly make the research subjects fabricate misleading information.
There are countless examples, many of which involve research into ideas or practices
that are socially disapproved of, such as racism and other forms of discrimination,
dubious selling practices, corruption, theft, violence, etc. Researchers, for example,
posed as mothers of a sick child and asked drug sellers for the best treatment (Tomson
& Sterky 1986; Wolffers 1987) or asked permission from doctors to study patients
without telling them that they would also observed the doctors and nurses (Greenhalgh
1987; Zaman 2005; Zaman & Nahar 2011; Van der Geest & Sarkodie 1998). In all these
cases the ethical acceptability depends on the researchers honest weighing the goal and
the means, a condition that producers of codes of conduct may find far too slippery.
Moreover, the impossibility or the absurdity or the strategic refusal to ask informed
consent, must be balanced by the way the researcher handles his data. I have always
taken utmost care that the identity of the people I studied was kept confidential if that

144 MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011

was what they wanted or if I judged this necessary in all sincerity. I will return to this
later on.
Those who think they have to watch the ethical correctness of anthropological
researchers, may feel that they are losing sight and control of what takes place dur-
ing fieldwork if such subjective and whimsical ethical decisions are practised. The
result is that they look for more concrete and solid criteria to carry out what the AAA
in its preamble says they should not do: to adjudicate claims for unethical behavior.
A telling example of sticking to the code as if it was a law, happened to my once PhD
student Francine van den Borne.
She carried out research on casual sex and condom use among young girls and women
who sexually network in and around entertainment places like bars, bottles stores, and
discos in urban Malawi (Van den Borne 2005). Aware that these women might provide
socially desirable answers, she used as one of her research methods trained and closely
supervised fake male customers to find out how and where women barter sex, whether
they possess condoms and would negotiate for condom use. To their surprise, some
women who negotiated in the bar for condom use, even bought the condoms and carried
them to the room, were willing to accept plain sex. Her research proposal was discussed
by the National AIDS Control Programme and by the Ethical Review Committee of the
Ministry of Health and Population in Lilongwe prior to the fieldwork. The Committee
agreed with the proposal and its ethical implications but was concerned about the fake
clients wasting the womens time and causing them financial losses. If the fake custom-
ers compensated the women for their lost opportunities, the Committee did not have
any ethical objection and provided proxy consent. Committee members were not wor-
ried about the unconsented and fraudulent research method. They were convinced that
the mystery client method was the only method that could provide reliable and contex-
tualised information about the effectiveness of the peer education training method and
gain insights into what is really going on in the process of negotiating for sex. Committee
members, however, felt that the women should not suffer financially from the cheat-
ing because of a research setting. They argued that the country and the Ministry would
benefit from the deception: the research would assess the value of the peer education
method and produce more reliable information on sexual practices in an HIV-infected
society and would thus provide better policy and programme recommendations. Van den
Borne followed their advice and compensated the women for the time they wasted on
her mystery clients.
However, when Van den Borne submitted an article to an international social sci-
ence journal about the background, rational and ethical implication of this method and
about the training and supervision of the male fieldworkers who acted as fake clients,
it was rejected. The anonymous reviewers and the editor considered her method to be a
gross breach of the ethical code. They thought she had misled her informants, which is
never allowed. Not even, it seemed, if this served an extremely important purpose. The
Malawian Ethical Review Committee found her method justified provided the girls and
women were compensated, but what they considered right for their own society was
overruled by an alien code of western scholars. In her reaction to the editor Van den
Borne wrote:

MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011 145

 A straightforward application of those international guidelines [the anthropological
code] remains problematic and is unable to address the tensions between universalis-
tic and relativistic perceptions of ethics when dealing with transcultural research. The
intention of my article was exactly to present those ethical concerns to my international
colleagues and start a discussion. By not publishing this article such a discussion is pre-
vented from taking place. By publishing the article your journal would show its concern
about proper ethical conduct in the field.

But she did not convince the editor I agreed with her defence and was relieved that
her article was eventually published elsewhere after two years and several more failed
attempts (Van den Borne 2007).5 In retrospect, I believe that she could have collected the
same information through her excellent relationship with some of the women. Yet, see-
ing the womens indulgence to clients pressure in actual practice was more convincing
and therefore was likely to have greater policy impact.

Not harming

I always promised confidentiality to the participants in my research. I told them (per-

haps somewhat arrogantly) that they could trust me: what they told me in confidence
would not be revealed to others, whether it was about witchcraft accusations, secret
love, abortion, HIV/AIDS, or any malicious gossip. At the same time I planned to
write about the things they told me, in great detail. The only way to combine these two
opposing objectives was to guarantee absolute anonymity.
It is a good anthropological tradition to give ones informants and their community
pseudonyms, but I soon realized that in this case such a measure would be an insufficient
guarantee of confidentiality.6 Ghanas academic community is like a village. Through
my (the authors) name it would be simple to trace the identity of the town and conse-
quently of the informants. Moreover, two young people from Kwahu-Tafo were students
at the same university where I was completing my master thesis on marriage, inheritance
and witchcraft accusations in one particular family (Bleek 2005). They could easily read
my published accounts in the university library. After giving fictitious names to the town
(Ayere) and the people, I decided I had to hide my own identity as well if I wanted to
protect the people who had told me about their confidential dangerous and shame-
ful experiences. I chose the name Wolf Bleek as a pseudonym for myself.
Using a nom de plume seems to draw ethnography into another genre of writing:
semi-fiction. Laura Bohannans (Bowen 1964) ethnographic novel is a case in point.
The pseudonym, some may think, frees the author from the obligation of ethnographic
precision and rigor. I cannot speak for Bohannan but in my case the opposite was true.
By changing my own name, I was able to maintain many ethnographic details, which
I would have been forced to change if I had published the text under my real name. In
fact, I chose a pseudonym because I did not want to give up the richness of my obser-
vations. Paradoxically, perhaps, my nom de plume helped me to prevent semi-fiction
from sneaking in.

146 MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011

 It is indeed novelists and poets who hide their identity behind pseudonyms, but it is
unusual to do so in academic work.7 Why? Academic work needs to be transparent and
verifiable. Literary authors write mainly about themselves either directly or indirectly.
By using a pseudonym they protect themselves. This may be an accepted practice in the
world of literature, but an anthropologist writing about others is not supposed to do so.
Apparently, protecting others is a less pressing motive for using a pseudonym.
When I tried to publish an article on self-help abortion in Population Studies, it was
rejected because: the editors would like to publish your paper but they cannot
agree to your using a pseudonym. No reasons were given, but one can imagine why the
editors were uncomfortable with an anonymous author: it seemed irreconcilable with
their concept of scientific work. My argument about protecting peoples identities did
not convince them, in spite of the ethical statement cited at the beginning of this note.
After two more failed attempts to have a pseudonymous manuscript accepted for pub-
lication I started to submit my articles without mentioning my use of a pseudonym. It
worked. The results of my research on witchcraft and abortion appeared in international
and Dutch journals and editors and colleagues started to correspond with W. Bleek.
In the course of the correspondence I usually revealed my real name but asked them to
respect the pseudonym in their published work. As it turned out, the pseudonym in no
way prevented me from discussing the content of my work with others and exchanging
views on the social, cultural and moral aspects of witchcraft and induced abortion.8
The irony of my ethical concerns about confidentiality was that the academic world
of publications overruled them and let its own scientific rules prevail: complete open-
ness about identity of the author even if this could harm the participants.9

Sharing results with research participants

My triple disguise (informants, location and author) in Ghana did work.10 Twenty
years later my measure proved still effective. There was no copy of my thesis in a local
library and no one had established a link between my publications and the community.
I should have been content, but I was not. My decision to go into hiding had a num-
ber of consequences that I found both unethical and simply annoying. I had kept the
outcome of my research study from them, for their own good. On the one hand, I had
respected their wish (and the first article of the anthropological ethical code) to keep
delicate information confidential; on the other hand, I had deprived them of the pos-
sibility to read what I had written about them (which, surprisingly, is not demanded
by the anthropological code). They would never be able to talk back. Trying to make
their voices heard by writing about them, I had effectively silenced them. Lairumbi et
al. (2008) rightly comment that informed consent also implies that the participants are
informed about the results of the research. I could not inform them.
When in 1973 I finished my fieldwork in Ayere, I asked the head of the family to
assemble as many relatives as possible in his compound. I took a number of pictures
of the entire group and promised the old man that I would send him a large print of the
picture to hang in his house. The mans reaction was significant: A photograph would be
nice, but the book was more important. I nodded, but knew that I would never be able to

MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011 147

give him the book. There was too much in the book, which would upset him and his
relatives. My concern about protecting peoples anonymity prevented me from giving
them the text, which would betray their identities to other members of the community.
It also prevented me for many years from returning to the town and the people who had
become my friends. I knew that people would ask me where the book was.
Twenty-one years after I had left Kwahu Tafo, I went back to the town to study social
and cultural meanings of growing old. I reasoned that 21 years was a long period and
that things of the past had lost their pungency; the elderly who had been most accused of
witchcraft had all died and the teenagers who had told me about their romantic encoun-
ters and the subsequent pregnancies and abortions were now parents and grandparents.
I brought a few copies of my dissertation along and formally handed them over to the
new head of the family and some others. The head, a former schoolteacher, expressed his
disappointment that the name of the town was not mentioned on the cover or inside the
book and that his name or any other did not appear in the text.
Had I been too concerned? Was my worry about confidentiality an attitude typical of
my own culture with its emphasis on individuality and privacy? Had I made the wrong
decision when I chose not to share the outcome of my research with them because of
confidentiality?
Since, I have written articles and a popularising little book about the elderly of this
rural community. I describe how they spend their days and how they are cared for. The
articles deal with respect and reciprocity, with money, building a house, wisdom, lone-
liness, death and funeral; they also discuss topics that were anonymised in my earlier
research: witchcraft accusations and sex.11 I have changed my policy, however. The name
of the town, Kwahu Tafo, is now boldly mentioned in the articles and so are the names
of the old people with whom I conversed about the pleasures and pains of growing old.
I have made it a rule to dedicate each publication to one of the elders. I want them to be
proud of the fact that their life histories good or bad and their reflections about being
old have been published and are being read by people in different parts of the world. Of
course, the information they provided is less threatening than what their relatives told me
in 1971 and 1973, but also when less favourable things are said by or about them, I do
not hide them. They said they did not like my confidentiality. They wanted to see their
names on paper. Their main worry was that after death they would sink into oblivion. My
writing about them would help them to be remembered.

Conclusion

Are anthropologists subjected to unreasonable and counter-effective ethical rules? Do

they face ethnocentric instructions that are ignorant about local cultural ideas con-
cerning correct and wrong? The answer needs some nuance. Ethical guidelines
proposed by anthropological associations are phrased in such a way that they leave
room to anthropological researchers to act in accordance to local cultural values and
to react reasonably to unpredictable situations in the field. The manner in which these
carefully worded guidelines and suggestions are applied in concrete situations, for

148 MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011

example by editors of journals and books and by evaluation committees of doctoral
theses leaves, however, much to be desired.
The anthropological code of ethics, as formulated by the American Anthropologi-
cal Association (AAA 2000) shows sensitivity to situational variations and does not
impose a judicial type of ruling. The Code wants to provide the anthropologist with
tools to engage in developing and maintaining an ethical framework. But the way in
which some players in the academic powerhouses apply the Code, shows a remark-
able lack of sensitivity to local, social and methodological conditions, up to the point
of acting unethically and potentially harming the participants in the research. The
examples I presented showed the (seemingly) whimsical nature of what is good and
what is bad in research situations. Fundamentalist interpretations and applications of
the ethical code may thus bring about the opposite of what the code wants to achieve
and promote ethnocentrism in the heart of an academic tradition that many years ago
started as a reaction against ethnocentrism.

Notes

The author is a cultural and medical anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam. He has
done fieldwork in Ghana and Cameroon on a variety of topics including sexual relationships
and birth control, the use and distribution of medicines, popular song texts, meanings of grow-
ing old, and concepts of dirt and hygiene. Personal website: www.sjaakvandergeest.nl; e-mail:
[email protected].
I am grateful to Kodjo Senah for his suggestions and for all comments received during the sym-
posium Ethics, Health Care & Anthropology where I presented an earlier version of this paper.
1 This name is a pseudonym to protect his identity. I named him after a character in a famous
Highlife song. Yaw Berko, in the song, was a tragic figure; he had travelled from town to
town, but never found his luck. Yaw Berko died in 2010, at home in Kwahu Tafo.
2 See my chapter on etic and ethic (Bleek 1978: 80-92), and my discussion with Wim van
Binsbergen on dilemmas of instrumentality and friendship in fieldwork (Bleek 1979, 1980;
Van Binsbergen 1979). Wolf Bleek was the pseudonym I used for myself to protect the
identity of the family members among whom I did my research (see further below, and: Van
der Geest 2003).
3 Most of Thierneys accusations were later on proved false and slanderous, but his book did
bring out some other less dramatic dubious practices of the researchers.
4 I see the absence of people asking questions as the core experience of loneliness among
older people in Kwahu Tafo (Van der Geest 2004).
5 This case was also presented in another article (Van der Geest 2003) and discussed in Cash
et al. 2009.
6 The next paragraphs draw on an earlier article on confidentiality and use of pseudonyms
(Van der Geest 2003).
7 I know only a few examples of anthropologists (and sociologists) using a pseudonym: Carl
Withers (James West 1945), Laura Bohannan (Elenore Bowen 1964), and Karla Poewe
(Manda Cesare 1982).
8 The only problem I encountered was when the organizers of a conference invited me to
present a paper and sent me a prepaid air ticket on the name of Wolf Bleek. Having no of-

MEDISCHE ANTROPOLOGIE 23 (1) 2011 149

 ficial nom de plume identity (as artists have) I almost failed to have the ticket changed to my
real name.
9 Interestingly, at the time, the supervisor of my master thesis at the University of Ghana
did not even allow me to use pseudonyms for the town and the informants of my study. It
became a case in the department that I won.
10 To be very exact: I also changed the dates of my research and some insignificant details in
the life histories of a few informants.
11 See for example Van der Geest 2001, 2002, 2007.

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