due today september 3, at 22:00 pacific time

600 words Case study "Anonymity Declined" case, Ethics class (story will be send via private message.

After reading the case studies (I will send you case story, it is very short) assigned for this lesson, choose one or two that particularly interested you and describe what you might have felt and what you would have done in that situation.

Goals for Threaded Discussion

• Begin thinking about the complexities of applying anthropology in the real world.
• Reflect on your own ethical judgments in hypothetical situations related to international development.

Here are some suggestions for dealing with this first (and many subsequent) discussions:

(1) Please use a descriptive subject for your post. For example, instead of giving your post a subject line like "case 3" give a better description like "witness to murder" or "to share meds or not." This will help the instructors and other students figure out the content of your post.

(2) If you are not the first person to post in a discussion, then please take the time to review at least some of the previous posts to help put your comments in some kind of context and to give you an idea of how to proceed. Also, you should try to read all of the posts from the TAs or Professor, as they usually contain instructional material.

(3) For this discussion of ethics, it is a really good idea to think about each of these cases in terms of the assumptions one might make about the context. The cases are very brief and sometimes quite vague -- they leave a lot of good questions unanswered. A reasonable ethical response depends on the assumptions you make about the context of the case. Here are some questions you might ask yourself: Does my response draw on stereotypes for certain groups of people? Does my response consider variation from place to place in common or accepted practices, i.e., do I assume conditions everywhere are like conditions I'm used to?  For example, your response to one of these cases can really depend on your assumptions about how professional and honorable local police are -- you might assume they are almost always professional depending on your experience. In another case, the ethnographer (and you) might have made assumptions about how a poor person might come into possession of used clothes or household items.  (I realize that this note is a bit cryptic without reading the cases, but you will see what I mean as you go through them.) The main point here is that an ethical course of action heavily depends on the assumptions you make about the situation. Once, you begin to question those assumptions (or make an opposite assumption), then you can come to very different ethical conclusions. The exercise asks you to think through these scenarios very carefully.