Nancy Scheper-Hughes and the Question of Ethical Fieldwork

In 1974, Nancy Scheper-Hughes traveled to a village in rural Ireland which she later nicknamed “Ballybran” (Scheper-Hughes 2000-128)). Her findings there led her to publish Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland in 1979, in which she attempted to explain the social causes of Ireland’s surprisingly high rates of schizophrenia (Scheper-Hughes 2000:128). Saints was met with a backlash of criticism from both the anthropological community and the villagers who had served as her informants. The criticism eventually led to Scheper-Hughes being expelled indefinitely from the village in which she had worked (Scheper-Hughes 2000:118) and raised serious questions about the ethics of anthropological inquiry. In this essay I will argue that Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ fieldwork in Ireland was fundamentally unethical on the grounds that she morally wronged her participants through her fictionalized representation of them, and that she did not seek their informed consent. That being said, she was also committed to structural analysis, which is distinctly lacking in twenty-first century anthropological inquiry. Nancy-Scheper Hughes has often been criticized for morally wronging her informants in a variety of ways, including breach of privacy, deception and misrepresentation (Schrag 2009:140). These attacks did not come until much later, however, and the initial complaints against her work were centered around her conclusions, which were perceived to be based on faulty methodology including drawing conclusions without sufficient data to support them, and misreading her informants’ reactions to her book (Messenger 1982:14). The villagers themselves were upset that she had misrepresented them, remarking that she had violated local codes of hospitality (Scheper-Hughes 1982:13), portrayed nothing but the “negative” aspects of Irish rural life (Scheper-Hughes 2000:119) and formed their individual identities into fictional characters in her efforts to conceal