Ethics without the Ethics: The Institutionalized Committees and the Question of Integrity

Reviewing the Takhayyul Team’s long journey of ethics approvals by various institutional bodies, this paper questions the ethics of such protocols for native scholars. It questions several issues formerly addressed by anthropologists, highlighting the intimate rapport required for ethnographic field research to be ‘untranslatable’ into the particular language often expected in research ethics forms. Following written conversations between the institutional ethics committees and the team members’ reports, it then reflects on the limits of research ethics and questions those limits in relation to the nativeness of the researcher and conducting research in the Global South.