Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн

162 страница из 242

Applied medical anthropology has (and needs) a strong ethics core that anchors medical anthropological praxis to appropriate standards of conduct. The complexities of ethnic and cultural nationalism, combined with the excesses and outright abuses of power during both colonial and post-colonial globalization periods have had a powerful impact on anthropologists’ ability to do applied medical anthropology.

Applied medical anthropologists face two complex, interwoven, yet frequently dichotomized ethical challenges that must be negotiated, addressed, and jointly accommodated. These two challenges are the ethics of professional praxis and the ethics of conducting cross-cultural research on health, healing, and medicine within a global multicultural context. The first challenge is to construct and conduct research in an ethical manner by successfully anticipating, addressing, and appropriately applying the numerous, often vague (sometimes culture bound), contradictory, and challenging disciplinary, national, and international ethical rules, guidelines, and treaty obligations surrounding the conduct of science and research. The history of human research is unfortunately littered with the cultural debris of harmful actions on the part of the researchers and their sponsors. Following the principles, guidelines, and laws that protect people from unethical research is a critical requirement for protecting humans from harm at the hands of researchers. An equally important complementary ethical challenge for anthropologists is to conduct their professional activities (teaching, applied practice, and knowledge dissemination) ethically within and across competing social and cultural boundaries. Anthropologists must be particularly ethically vigilant when they are using anthropological theory, knowledge, or praxis that might be a direct (and sometimes even indirect) cause of harm for vulnerable people. People’s lives can be impacted by what anthropologists say and what anthropologists do in their personal and professional capacity.