Cathy Small - Ethnographic Ethics

Ethnographic Ethics

Cathy A. Small is a cultural anthropologist, with a Ph.D. from Temple University, and currently a Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University. Her ethnographic work, including her book "Voyages" (1997, Cornell University Press) about Tongan islander immigration to the U.S., has focused on understanding long-term social change. Dr. Small’s journey in ethnographic studies has expanded to the South Pacific. In the region more than 100 universities have adopted her book "Voyages". Her works were even selected by Pacific Studies for scholarly review. Small used the anthropological methodology of participant observation to study the contemporary life and practices of American university students. During a leave of absence from teaching, during the Fall of 2002 at the age of 52 she enrolled as a student at Northern Arizona University, signing up for a standard first year range of courses. So as to more closely understand first year students' emotional, social and academic experiences, she moved into the student dorms and sequestered herself from family and friends. Two weeks before the date of her publication for this book, there was an article in the New York Times, because people had figured out she was going by a different name the whole time she was attending this school. Small attended class, completed homework, and participated in student activities. For one year, Small took classes, hung out in the student lounge (where she once got busted by the R.A. for drinking beer), participated in pickup volleyball games, and asked her fellow students a lot of questions. She also conducted interviews with her peers to get a closer look into the lives of other college students living on campus.Using the name “Rebekah Nathan,” the main focus of her book was to prove that college campuses are not a total unity and do not have a sense of community, but rather the social life is more controlled by ego centered networks or self selected peoples. During her stay at Northern Arizona University she collected her data need to write her book My Freshman Year by taking numerous surveys visually to see what races of people sit with each other to add to her central idea of how a social life actual is. When asked, she described herself as a writer interested in seeing what university was like.Dr. Cathy Small began Pipeline NAU, a program with the support of university adminis­tration and the help of committed faculty members. Approximately half of her interlocutors figured out she was a professor of anthropology at NAU. Small obtained informed consents from students she wanted to quote, although in her book she never identified them by name. She used the pseudonyms 'Rebekah Nathan' and 'AnyU', to protect the students and her university. Her intention was to offer enough ambiguity to provide privacy to her interlocutors while they were still in school. By the end of the year, Cathy had come to the conclusion that "ego-centered networks" are present all over university campuses.

However, New York Sun journalist Jacob Gershman reviewed the book just before it was released, and correctly suggested to which university and professor the pseudonyms referred. The book consequently became the subject of a media frenzy. It sparked numerous debates about the ethics of 'going undercover' in research, and Small's own career motives for writing the book.

In 1997, Dr. Cathy Small was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for 1998 and 1999 to model and simulate Polynesian social systems. Cathy Smalls or known to some as “Rebekah Nathan” also received the American Anthropology Association/Oxford University Press Award for Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology in 2008-2009 academic year.

Using pen names in anthropology has several precedents, including "Elenore Smith Bowen" (Laura Bohannan) and "Cesara Manda" (Karla Poewe), although it does seem to be a female practice. Equally, ethnographic studies of student life have precedents, the most well known being by Michael Moffatt (1989) and Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart. Cathy Small however, was the first anthropologist to attempt to use pseudonyms specifically to protect her interlocutors, while raising the issue of secrecy and ethnographic ethics in an afterward to the same book.

The book also stimulated discussions about the intellectual laziness of university students, and the difficulties of fully engaging in university without adequate financial support. Most students worked while attending school and rather than engaging in political, philosophical social justice or intellectual matters, students prioritized courses that promised to help them repay heavy student loans and spent a lot of time discussing bodily functions.