Survey of Peers in Fieldwork Highlights an Unspoken Risk

摘要

It was standing room only at 8:15 a.m. last Saturday in a session on ethics at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in Knoxville, Tennessee. The talk had nothing to do with traditional problems facing anthropology, such as respecting cultures or sharing data. Instead, it focused on how researchers treat each other. The speaker, Kathryn Clancy, a bioanthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, had troubling data to share: A survey of her colleagues' fieldwork experiences revealed a high incidence of sexual harassment. The abuses ranged from subtle gender exclusion to sexual assault. The victims were mostly female, and the perpetrators were mostly senior researchers, sometimes the victim's own fieldwork mentor.