ABSTRACT
There is today, among many parties and interest groups, a deep concern with the ethics and practice of research which involves human or animal subjects. To some extent, the issues being raised are similar to what anthropologists have long talked about, at least since my own graduate student days during the mid-1960s. However, the present concern has a different context. It is largely driven by an obsession with accountability and auditing which permeates contemporary institutional life in the public sector. Interestingly, this dovetails with, and is also now driven by, postmodern and post-colonial critiques of anthropology which emerged in the mid-1980s. The various practices which have been developed to address these concerns mean that, in theory, all parties can now be satisfied: the institutions through which we practice anthropology (government bureaucracies, universities, funding agencies), our more reflexive-style anthropological colleagues and the people among whom we do research and about whom we write.
