ABSTRACT
Discussions of ethics in relation to research participants, the profession and governments became a central concern in anthropology during the 1960s, when the Vietnam war and the role of anthropologists in military intelligence operations, and the US government-sponsored Project Camelot in Latin America precipitated a thorough reexamination of the role of science in society (Wax, 1987; Akeroyd, 1984). As a result, many professional societies, including the Society for Applied Anthropology, the American Anthropological Association and the British Sociological Association, developed specific codes of conduct during the 1960s and 1970s. Discussions pertaining to ethical behaviour and revisions of codes of conduct continue to this day. Akeroyd (1984) sees this change as a reflection of a continuous shift in power relations between social scientists, sponsors, citizens and governments following:
• broad changes in the social, economic, administrative, legal and political contexts and constraints of social research;
• the institutionalization and professionalization of social scientific research; and
• a growing recognition that knowledge is ‘not only a source of enlightenment but also of power and property and, therefore, it entails the power to both harm and to benefit those studied’ (Akeroyd, 1984, p134).
