ABSTRACT
Anthropological researchers working with living human communities must obtain the voluntary and informed consent of research participants. Ordinarily such consent is given prior to the research, but it may also be obtained retroactively if so warranted by the research context, process, and relations. Anthropology's ethical turn and greater preoccupation with the circumstances of informed consent is hardly parochial. Potentially contaminating and boundary-transgressing contexts were separated out from ethnographic accounts of largely self-contained social and cultural worlds. Conventional descriptions of ethnography in terms of phases are easy to find, even though descriptions of the specific number, order and duration of the phases vary. The necessity of negotiating this distance between standards and practices is itself in fact a part of how people continue to imagine the unitariness of anthropological practice, particularly in the field. "Free and informed" is often internally linked with a problematic conception of "autonomy and consent".
