Unknown date Unknown author

Lingua franca -- November 1997

SPIES LIKE US

WHEN SOCIOLOGISTS DECEIVE THEIR SUBJECTS

By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
THEY CALL THEMSELVES GUINEAMEN. For more than two hundred
years, they and their forebears have fished, hunted, raised livestock on,
and otherwise made their living from a broad peninsula of marshland
in a corner of the Virginia tidewater region, where the York River meets
the Chesapeake Bay. Although many Guineamen now work outside the
peninsula, a large number still ply the traditional Chesapeake
waterman's trade, generating a distinctive local culture centered
around the outboard skiff, Ford pickup, rubber wading boots, snap-
brim cap, and plug of tobacco.

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When I visited them one afternoon this past summer, members of two
Guinea families were sitting in the yard in front of their trailer homes.
When I explained to them why I was there, they began jeering and
trading jibes. The target of their mockery was not another local but
Carolyn Ellis, a sociologist at the University of South Florida, whose
prizewinning 1986 book about the Guineamen, Fisher Folk (Kentucky),
transformed her in their eyes from a beloved outsider and frequent
guest into a traitor.

For nine years, from 1972 (when she was an undergraduate at the
nearby College of William and Mary) to 1981 (when she completed her
doctoral dissertation at SUNY Stony Brook), Ellis spent her weekends
and summers researching a "kinship network" among a particular
group of Guinea watermen. Her theory was that the Guineamen lacked
the external social mechanisms--strong churches, economic
cooperation, a sense of community beyond the extended family--
necessary for them to prosper. The conclusions of the book were not
flattering to the region, which already had a reputation for white-trash
backwardness and marshland criminality.

In her writing, Ellis used pseudonyms to conceal her subjects'

identities--a standard practice in sociology. Guinea became
"Fishneck," and members of the local families she described were
given plausible-sounding made-up names. But that didn't stop her
words from causing hurt. Ellis's "Fishneckers" were often illiterate,
obese, poorly dressed, and ignorant of basic hygiene. "Scarcity of
plumbing meant baths were infrequent," she wrote. "That combined
with everyday work with fish produced a characteristic fishy body odor,
identified by outsiders as the 'Fishneck smell.'" What most riled the
fishing families who had taken Ellis into their homes, fed her meals,
and let her stay over on many nights, however, was that she never once
let on that she was using them for sociological research. "I thought she
was nice," fumes one Guinea woman whose family hosted Ellis often
over the years. "But she turned out to be a liar."

SOCIOLOGISTS have argued over the propriety of deceptive research for

decades. But in 1995, the debate took a decidedly heated turn. In April
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of that year, Ellis published a remorseful essay in the Journal of

Contemporary Ethnography enumerating the ways she had deceived
her subjects. And her essay, which provoked much discussion among
her colleagues, was not the only controversial confession that year: The
American Sociologist published a far less remorseful account by a
sociologist who some felt had used deceptive techniques to research
police interrogation procedures. Finally, this spring, after two years of
raging debate on the topic, the American Sociological Association (ASA)
approved a set of stringent new ethics guidelines for professional
conduct

More starkly than ever before, these events illustrate the

degree to which the profession is caught in an uneasy bind
between fulfilling research objectives and honoring ethical
obligations. Sociological deception can take many forms,
some more subtle than others, but all equally entangled in
moral dilemmas: A researcher might not tell his subjects that he is
using them for research purposes; or he might misrepresent the
motives of his research; or he might violate a pledge to keep the
identities of his subjects fully anonymous. In recent decades,
researchers have practiced these forms of deception, and each has been
earnestly defended and attacked within the profession. Ellis's behavior,
it turns out, was unusual but not unique; in some ways, her deception
was simply easier to see because--as she herself admitted--it was so
blatant.

ACCORDING to her confession in the Journal of Contemporary

Ethnography, Ellis secretly tape-recorded conversations with her
Fishneck subjects, eavesdropped on their small talk, and coaxed data
out of them while pretending to be visiting socially or doing favors,
such as writing letters, baby-sitting, and driving them to doctor's
appointments. "Initially, I told a number of the Fishneckers who knew I
was a college student that I was writing a paper on fishing," she writes.
As the years passed, nearly everyone forgot about the college
connection, until finally, Ellis writes, "I was just Carolyn coming to
visit."

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When he read her essay, veteran sociologist Herbert J. Gans of

Columbia University was concerned. He wrote Ellis a reproving letter.
"I told her that I'm old enough to be her Dutch uncle and that what she
did was wrong," says Gans. "She told people she was their friend. I told
her, 'Yes, you use friendly methods, but you're always a researcher. You
arrange to tell people every so often, I'm not your buddy. I'm a
researcher.'"

Ellis agrees that she committed a sociological sin, and she said so with
admirable candor in her essay--albeit after she had published her
book, received a prize for it from the ASA, and won tenure at the
University of South Florida. Still, she's convinced that deceiving her
subjects was indispensable to her project's success. "I know I did them
an injustice," she says from her Tampa office. "But I couldn't have
done the study any other way. My study was predicated on my getting
close to them, and if you're constantly reminding people that you're
not one of them, you can't do that. They're afraid of the IRS, and I
didn't want to make people suspicious of me."

Unlike Ellis, a significant number of sociologists who have engaged in

deceptive research remain unrepentant. This group insists there is
nothing unethical about deceiving one's subjects to a greater or lesser
extent in the name of scientific research. Those who defend deceptive
techniques claim subterfuge is sometimes the only way to elicit
information from deviant and marginal groups--or from socially
powerful groups that can otherwise justify secrecy. Defenders of
deception typically use a cost-benefit analysis: If the deception doesn't
hurt anyone very much and the payoff in data is high, covert research is
worth doing.

Richard Leo's essay in the Spring 1995 issue of The American

Sociologist made precisely this argument--in defiant, provocative
language. Leo, then an assistant professor of sociology at the
University of Colorado, boasted that he "consciously reinvented" his
"persona" in order to gain admission into police interrogation rooms
for research on his UC-Berkeley dissertation. Leo's larger point was
that sociologists should have an evidentiary privilege--like doctors and
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lawyers--so they are not obliged to testify in court about what they see
and hear in the field. But what struck many of his readers was his
ardent defense of certain deceptive techniques. Leo declared that he
had feigned conservative views (support for the death penalty,
opposition to abortion and homosexuality) and had described his
intimate relations with women in the same crude language he heard
the cops use. In describing the ideological mask he had donned in order
to study the ways officers question suspects, Leo proudly compared
himself to "confidence men who wish to set up their marks." Leo's
article had a crusading tone: He depicted police forces as deviant
groups analogous to criminal gangs who broke laws (in the case of the
police it was the Miranda rule and other constitutional protections) and
required extreme measures to infiltrate.

Leo's essay provoked an angry counterblast from the eminent Yale

sociologist Kai Erikson, who accused him of engaging "in a degree of
deceit that is more widely known in espionage than in social research."
As a graduate student during the 1950s, Erikson's own ethical
standards had been less rigorous. He had applied for, but failed to
receive, a position on a team of undercover social investigators led by
the sociologist Leon Festinger whose mission was to infiltrate a
doomsday cult by lying about their professional identities and
pretending to be believers. (The project resulted in a famous 1956 book
by Festinger and two colleagues, When Prophecy Fails.) Soon after,
Erikson changed his views about deceit and took an absolutist stance
against it, a position he has held ever since. His arguments are both
ethical and practical: It is morally wrong to lie, and it also tends to
distort research. (By assuming a false persona, for instance, the
sociologist forecloses opportunities to collect more complete
information through direct questioning.)

Yet, as even Erikson was forced to acknowledge, Leo's case hardly

constituted the most egregious example of deceptive fieldwork. After

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all, Leo had informed the police department (in a city

that he calls "Laconia") that he was a sociologist,
and he had provided the officers with an accurate
written description of his project. However, he also
cut his hair short, shaved off a budding beard, and
put on a coat and tie before he headed for the
station--which for him was decidedly out of
character. He might simply have been following the
dictate of Erving Goffman, who declared in his 1959 sociology classic,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, that everyone is always role-
playing and there is no such thing as one's true self. "I didn't lie to
them about my views," insists Leo, who now teaches at UC-Irvine. "I
just didn't try to argue with them when they raised the question of
abortion or homosexuality. They'd say, 'You're not against the death
penalty, are you?' And I'd just laugh. I know I gave the impression that I
agreed with them. I just wanted them to think I was a normal person.
From their point of view, a normal person was a conservative."

Of course, it is possible that Leo, a self-identified Berkeley graduate

student in sociology, fooled no one on the Laconia force with his Joe
Sixpack impersonation. "These guys have fantastic bullshit detectors,
if you'll pardon my French," says Robert Jackall, a sociology professor
at Williams College who spent more than five years prowling crime-
ravaged precincts with New York City detectives as he researched his
latest book, Wild Cowboys (Harvard, 1997). Jackall maintains that he
did not need to use deception to go where he wanted, including
interrogation rooms. "I just adopted the persona given to me by the
police," he says. "They dubbed me the professor. They were teaching
me, and they loved the symbolic reversal. I didn't have to penetrate
anything."

Leo's response is that Jackall, a middle-aged tenured professor at a

well-endowed liberal arts college, had time and job security on his side,
which enabled him to dispense with deception, whereas he, Leo, a
penniless doctoral candidate working on a law degree at the same time,
could not afford to spend more than the five hundred hours he gave to

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his fieldwork in Laconia. "I was a full-time student in my twenties, and

I just didn't have that kind of time," says Leo. "I had to get inside those
interrogation rooms."

But many of Leo's colleagues aren't buying this kind of reasoning. The
Leo-Erikson debate, which continued through several issues of The
American Sociologist, resulted in a panel discussion on the morality of
deceptive research when the thirteen-thousand-member ASA met for
its annual convention in August 1996. Then, this past May, the ASA
voted in favor of a new code of ethics that specifically addressed
deceptive research techniques for the first time. The new protocol
requires sociologists to obtain their subjects' informed consent "when
behavior of research participants occurs in a private context where an
individual can reasonably expect that no observation or reporting is
taking place." Further, it explicitly bans tape-recording and
videotaping without subjects' permission, as well as the use of assumed
identities. Despite its hard-hitting rhetoric, however, the ethics code
contains a loophole: A sociologist may obtain a waiver (from his
university or the ASA) for all these constraints.

AFTER the publication of Fisher Folk, Carolyn Ellis was wholly

unprepared for her subjects' backlash. She hoped that the Guineamen
would never learn of the book's existence. Although she traveled
annually to the tidewater to update her research and to visit friends
among the residents, she kept mum about her monograph. "They can't
read," she says. "I never took the book to them. I didn't know how to
deal with it, and I hoped they would never see it."

Perhaps she underestimated the literacy rate in Fishneck. (In Fisher

Folk, she puts it at 50 percent.) She certainly underestimated the wrath
of Victor Liguori, one of her former professors at William and Mary. A
specialist in maritime sociology, Liguori has spent thirty years or so
working on a still-unfinished magnum opus about Guinea. He knows
many residents on the peninsula, and it was he who introduced Ellis to
her first Guinea contacts, as part of his custom of taking interested
students with him on his research excursions. Ellis sent Liguori a copy
of Fisher Folk upon its publication--with an acknowledgment of his
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help, for he had shared his research notes with her. What happened
after that is a matter of some dispute.

Ellis contends that Liguori, perhaps in a fit of

professional jealousy because she had poached on his
academic preserve, read the most damning passages of
Fisher Folk aloud to the Guinea unlettered, suppressing
everything positive she had to say about them and
generally stirring up trouble. In her 1995 article, Ellis gave Liguori a
pseudonym, "Professor Jack." Comparing him to a Pentecostal
preacher on a Bible-thumping binge, she speculated: "Was he envious
because he never finished his manuscript? Was any of his outrage
justified? Or had he gone mad?" Liguori maintains that several
Guineamen had obtained copies of the book, and others--who heard
about it--contacted him and asked him to send them particular
sections. Most of the Guineamen, he insists, read the book on their
own--and then "went ballistic."

In any event, a friend eventually tipped off Ellis that several Guineamen
were upset about her book, and she hastened to the marshes to beg for
forgiveness. According to Ellis, after some angry exchanges about
factual errors, geographical discrepancies, and broken confidences,
nearly all her favorite Fishneckers forgave her. Liguori, however,
contends that the Guineamen are unlikely to pardon Ellis so quickly.
"One woman came up to me a month or two ago and asked, 'Is it true
that she had bad things in there about the girls?'" Liguori told me in
September. "And I still can't take one of my students into the marshes,
especially if she's a young, attractive woman. Someone would say, 'Is
she going to be another Carolyn Ellis?'" The Guineamen aren't the only
ones who may be permanently shaken. Ellis herself hasn't done any
fieldwork since completing her book. Her remorseful 1995 essay is
representative of the work that has occupied her for the last twelve

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years: auto-ethnography--in which the subject is primarily the

sociologist herself.

MODERN American sociology dates back to the 1920s, when the field,
just beginning to get its bearings in this country, was regarded as a
dubious European import. At the time, the discipline's stronghold was
at the University of Chicago, where Robert Park eschewed the largely
theoretical musings of his European predecessors--such as Max
Weber--in favor of fieldwork based on long-term observation of one's
subjects as they engage in social interaction. In Park's day, the
possibility that a researcher at a local pub or political meeting might
disguise his identity was virtually unthinkable.

Indeed, the ethics of deceptive research did not become a controversial

topic in the profession until 1958. The occasion was a massive Cornell
University study of participatory democracy in a local community and
its unanticipated spin-off book, Small Town in Mass Society, co-
written by a former project employee, Arthur J. Vidich. The project sent
teams of graduate students into Candor, NY, pop. 2,500, to gather
statistics. Vidich moved to Candor in order to oversee data collection
and supply a friendly human face that would encourage village
residents to cooperate with the survey. Now a professor emeritus at
New York City's New School for Social Research, Vidich says that
Cornell even advised him to join a local church. Although he had no
interest in religion, he gamely taught Sunday school.

As part of the study, Vidich was also supposed to gather material for a
more qualitative analysis of Candor's social structure. When he was
hired, his supervisors showed him the code of ethics they had drafted.
Vidich read it but "found nothing in it," he says today, "that related to
the practical exigencies of day-to-day fieldwork. The code of ethics
was a statement of intent, not a guide to conduct." (There was no
provision for a participant observer like Vidich himself, for example.)

After living in Candor for two and a half years, he took a job in Puerto
Rico, and, together with Joseph Bensman, another sociologist, used
what he had learned to write Small Town.. The book, which referred to

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Candor by the pseudonym "Springdale" and read like a Sinclair Lewis

novel, exposed the political machinations of a clique of Springdale
businessmen who ran the town behind its facade of folksy democracy.
Springdale was supposed to be proudly self-reliant and scornful of
urban ways, but Vidich and Bensman pointed out that the town relied
heavily on federal and state intervention and was pervaded by mass
culture. As they elaborated Springdale's political and social structure,
Vidich and Bensman described specific townspeople and the roles they
played. Although the sociologists did not use anyone's real name, it was
clear to everyone in Candor who these figures were. The book became a
local best-seller, à la Peyton Place--and a source of general outrage
among residents. Vidich was hanged in effigy, and the village's Fourth
of July parade featured a float carrying an image of him bending over a
manure spreader.

For many years afterward, sociologists, who feared that Vidich's

conduct had jeopardized the field's newfound respectability, argued
over whether he had done anything wrong. On the one hand, everyone
in Candor knew he was the field director of a Cornell research project.
On the other hand, many Candor residents might have thought (and
been encouraged by Cornell to think) that the project consisted solely
of the field-workers' demographic survey.

In the end, sociologists failed to resolve the ethical questions that

Vidich's course of action raised. "You have to remember that things are
never quite all they seem," says Jackall, a close friend of Vidich's.
"Research subjects are also trying to use the research for their own
agendas and aggrandizement. People simply forgot that [Vidich] was a
researcher." Vidich himself remained unrepentant. In a 1964 essay
(reprinted in later editions of Small Town), he railed against imposing
ethical restraints on social scientists. "It would be dangerous for the
freedom of inquiry," he wrote, "if the formalized ethics of bureaucracy
prevailed or predominated in all research."

THE deception debate shook the profession a second time in 1970, and
this time the fallout left permanent damage--at least in one well-
regarded sociology department. That year, Laud Humphreys, an
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Episcopal priest-turned-sociology graduate

student at Washington University in St. Louis,
published Tearoom Trade, a study of
homosexual encounters in men's rooms (called
"tearooms" in gay slang) at public parks. To
gather data for his doctoral dissertation on
rest-room sex, Humphreys pretended to be
gay, and assumed the role of voyeur and
"watchqueen"--or lookout--for the police. He
also wrote down the license-plate numbers of
participants in order to obtain their names and addresses. Then he
waited a year, disguised his appearance, and interviewed about fifty of
the tearoom regulars at their homes (sometimes in the presence of
their wives and children), on the pretext of administering a social
health survey. His descriptions of this second encounter made it
possible that many of the men and their families would recognize
themselves once the dissertation was published as a book. Humphreys
cited situation ethics--the application of rules of conduct on a case-
by-case basis, a popular topic at theology schools during the late
1960s--as a justification for his modus operandi. The controversy over
Humphreys's covert techniques ultimately spelled the end of sociology
at Washington University. There was talk of revoking Humphreys's
doctorate, and one well-known member of the department, Alvin
Gouldner, delivered a blow to Humphreys's head that hospitalized him
overnight. As a result, Gouldner was stripped of his title, Max Weber
Research Professor of Social Theory. The sociology department never
recovered from the demoralization brought on by the Humphreys
incident, and, in 1989, the university disbanded the program.

Alarmed by increasing reports of unethical research practices on

campuses, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)
issued a stern report on sneaky bio-medical and behavioral research in
1978. The report came in the wake of the St. Louis scandal and adverse
publicity over the filmed experiments that Yale psychologist Stanley
Milgram carried out between 1960 and 1963. In his most famous work,
Milgram told volunteers they were participating in a learning

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experiment in which they would "punish" (by means of remote-

control electric shocks of ever increasing voltage) students in another
room who failed to match word pairs correctly. The shocks were
imaginary; Milgram was actually testing the volunteers' willingness to
follow orders, which many of them did punctiliously. Milgram's film of
his experiments, grainy black-and-white footage aptly titled
Obedience, depicts its unwitting subjects as analogous to Nazi
concentration-camp guards. It is shown to this day in many
undergraduate classrooms.

The HEW report led to federal regulations requiring all scientists who
use government funds to conduct research on human beings to clear
their procedures with institutional review boards or human-subjects'
committees at their universities. The boards are supposed to ensure
that subjects give informed consent and to approve any exceptions to
this rule. (Richard Leo, for example, got permission from UC's Human
Subjects' Committee for his dissertation research on police forces.) The
new ASA ethics code advises sociologists seeking waivers of its
informed-consent and deceptive-research guidelines to clear their
projects even when they are not using federal money.

THE CREATION of human-subjects' committees and the ASA's ethics

protocol may force researchers to think twice before using deceptive
techniques on a project. But neither innovation addresses the bigger
questions that have dogged sociologists for years: When is deception of
subjects permissible in social-science fieldwork? Should it ever be?

"We do cost-benefit analyses to justify deception," says Yale's Kai

Erikson. "But most often it's we who get the benefit and they who pay
the cost. There have been sociologists who have gone into religious
groups or Alcoholics Anonymous. We don't know how much harm it
does to research subjects. There are some people who say, 'I'm doing it
for the sake of science.' They're doing it for themselves. One of the
things that I've noticed is that people who disguise themselves are
always looking at groups less powerful than they are. If a doctor
pretends to be a patient, that's all right, we say. But if a patient
pretends to be a doctor, he'll get arrested."
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Erikson's observation clearly applies to Ellis's relationship with the

generally less educated, rural Guineamen, but not all researcher-
subject relationships favor the more powerful party. Before starting to
work on Wild Cowboys, for example, Robert Jackall published Moral
Mazes (Oxford), a 1988 study of managerial ethics at a large (and
pseudonymous) chemical-manufacturing company. Jackall ran into
trouble starting his research because thirty-six corporations had flatly
turned down his request to study ethics on their premises. As a
desperation measure, he worked with a public-relations expert to
devise a project description that would sound acceptable to a CEO.
Eventually, he found his way into a chemical company that encouraged
him to study the effect of chlorofluorocarbon regulation on corporate
practices. Jackall took a crash course in chemistry from a fellow
Williams professor, and he was soon inside the corporate doors asking
questions about ethics.

His findings appeared first in a 1983 article in the Harvard Business

Review and later in his book. Jackall concluded that the main "ethic"
governing managerial practice was self-interest: protecting one's
derriere and furthering one's career. He also found that organizational
life was indeed a maze, a thicket of never-ending status jockeying and
euphemistic doublespeak. (He included a glossary of job-performance-
evaluation lingo, in which "quick thinking" meant "offers plausible
excuses," and "requires work-value attitudinal readjustment" meant
"lazy and hardheaded.") Jackall started receiving phone calls from
managers deep within the company (and other companies)
congratulating him for his acuity, but the top dogs demanded to know
why he had been allowed on the premises. "All the managers had to do
was pull my proposal out of the file and say, 'We thought he was here to
study chlorofluorocarbon regulation,'" explains Jackall, adding that
what looks like deception can sometimes be part of an elaborate
linguistic code in which no one is really fooled and nearly everyone is
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satisfied--not least because there is always someone else to blame for

the researcher's unflattering revelations.

Nonetheless, Kai Erikson maintains that deception of any kind is bad

for the profession. "It jeopardizes the reputation of all the rest of us
when some of us sneak around," he says. "And it's also very poor
research." In her 1995 essay, for example, Ellis conceded that some of
her book's ribald facts about the Fishneckers' sex lives might have been
tall tales. There are other, more horrifying stories of deception gone
awry: sociology graduate students who checked themselves into mental
hospitals or joined cults--only to discover that the people they were
observing were other sociology graduate students.

After infiltrating the UFO cult that evolved into Heaven's Gate, Robert
Balch, a sociology professor at the University of Montana, came to
conclusions similar to Erikson's about the morality and practicality of
undercover research. Ironically, Balch's concern was not about unfairly
harming his subjects but about inadvertently helping them advance an
ethically dubious cause. In 1974, he became intrigued by the flying-
saucer-obsessed organization, which he thought might be linked with
the disappearance of twenty young people in Oregon. The following
year, he and a graduate student approached members of the group as
researchers with some general questions. When the cult refused to
cooperate, Balch and his student spent two months posing as members,
traveling with the cult from town to town in the West as it promoted its
beliefs to susceptible crowds. "We were expected to do things that we
didn't want to do," Balch recalls. One evening he was obliged to
promote the cult to an audience of ninety people. On another occasion,
he found himself talking to a couple who had driven thousands of miles
looking for the UFO group. "They had a kid," Balch recalls, "and I had
to tell them, 'If you join the group, you have to leave your kid behind.'
That was enough to persuade them not to join--but what if they'd
decided to give up the kid?"

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As undercover investigators, Balch and his student were subjected to

the same unwritten rules that bound everyone else in the cult: no idle
socializing (all references to one's past life were forbidden). "We had to
take notes in the bathroom stalls, so we had to get up early and write
them down on little scraps of paper," says Balch. "I came away with the
feeling that it wasn't ethical, and it wasn't the best way to get accurate
information. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything, but on every
other study that I've done, I've identified myself as a sociologist."

In the end, despite troubling experiences using deceptive techniques,

few sociologists believe in hard-and-fast bans on covert research.
Erich Goode, a sociology professor at SUNY-Stony Brook who sat on the
ASA's deceptive-research panel in 1996 with Erikson and Leo, says that
the decision boils down to a trade-off: "Less-than-complete honesty
versus getting the information. Do you announce up front that you're a
sociologist, say, when you're studying drug dealers?" Goode believes
social scientists should be free to make the trade-off at their own
discretion. Accordingly, he has not sought federal funding (with its
accompanying constraints) for one of his favorite covert research
projects: placing bogus personal ads in order to study the sociology of
mate selection. In one experiment, he placed four different ads in four
different publications, two purporting to be from women seeking men
and two purporting to be from men seeking women. To do this, he
invented four personae: a beautiful waitress, an average-looking
female lawyer, a handsome taxicab driver, and an average-looking
male lawyer. One need not be a sociologist to guess the breakdown of
the nearly one thousand responses, the majority from men, that Goode
received (and tabulated in several scholarly articles). The beautiful
waitress was the overwhelming favorite for male respondents; women
preferred the average-looking male lawyer (but not by so great a
margin). Originally, says Goode, "I tried to do this kind of research
aboveboard. I wrote to a couple running a newsletter focusing on
personal ads and explaining that I was a sociologist, but I got no reply."

GOODE'S attitude--that the knowledge gained can sometimes justify

the deceitful means--may not dominate the profession today, but it

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represents a powerful challenge to absolutists like Kai Erikson. And it

represents a faction of sociologists who are unlikely to be content with
the ASA's stringent professional guidelines or with guilty, after-the-
fact conversions like Carolyn Ellis's. As for Ellis, she has switched her
main appointment at South Florida to communications (although she
has retained a joint appointment in sociology). Her current projects fall
under the rubrics of either auto-ethnography or "emotional
sociology"--a brand-new subfield in which, as she describes it, the
"emotionality of the researcher" plays a central role in the study.

In her recent essays, Ellis puts many of the emotional

events of her life on display, including her abortion
and her brother's death in the Air Florida crash of
1982. In 1995 she published her most ambitious piece
of auto-ethnography to date, Final Negotiations
(Temple). Nearly twice as long as Fisher Folk, the book
is a grim, often poignant account of her tempestuous nine-year-plus
relationship with Eugene Weinstein, the late chairman of the SUNY-
Stony Brook sociology department. Weinstein was already dying of
emphysema when Ellis met him in 1975 at a faculty party, where he
passed her a toke and a kiss even though he had arrived with another
woman. He had a tangled marital and romantic past (he and Ellis
collaborated on an article on jealousy in open relationships). Two
months after their marriage, in 1985, he died.

Ellis's book chronicles many details that might seem too tragic or
intimate for other writers: LSD trips, sex with an oxygen tank in the
bed, Weinstein's gradual mental decline, and his painful difficulties
with elimination during his last days. Besides being fearfully ill,
Weinstein was a demanding, complaining patient who could not stand
to be alone. Ellis gritted her teeth and endured it--and then told it all in
her book. Weinstein, she says, fully supported the project.

The sociologist who once practiced her profession by telling the secrets
of people she had deceived in order to get close to them is still telling
secrets. This time, however, the secrets are mostly her own or belong
tothose closest to her. For Ellis, auto-ethnography is a solution to the
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ethical quagmire surrounding deceptive research. But many

sociologists are likely to find it an impractical one. Is researchyng
oneself instead of observing others rather too high a price to pay for
ethical purity?"

Charlotte Allen is a contributing editor of Lingua Franca. Her book, The

Human Christ: The Misguided Search for the Historical Jesus, is
forthcoming from The Free Press.

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