ABSTRACT
The El Dorado scandal not only displays how anthropologists commonly draw the boundaries between ethics and scientific expertise but also uncovers, through its discursive excesses, the common and rather ethnocentric assumptions on which these boundaries are based. One of the more interesting features of the initial reaction to the Turner/Sponsel memo was the American Anthropological Association’s profession of weakness with regard to censuring colleagues who might have violated its ethical code. The exteriority of ethics to anthropological research practice is paralleled by the boundary between “the public” and anthropology’s “interior” expertise. The El Dorado scandal shows that this boundary no longer shields anthropology’s expert operations from the public-if it ever did. Anthropology has always been characterized by contradictions of a global nature because its locus of authority rarely coincided with the locus of research and the latter was, more often than not, situated outside the sovereign jurisdiction of the researcher’s nation-state.
