What are some of the moral dilemmas that face ethnographers?  How would you resolve them?


One of the moral dilemmas discussed was that the ethnographer had knowledge about things that were secret, but he wanted to share with the world, that gangs were not just drug crazed hooligans they were their own organized nations, with networking all over. I think that being let in on secrets and then going and exposing them to the world is a reasonable dilemma, because you do not want to throw the people that informed you of the information under the bus. If i were to resolve this issue I am not exactly sure how i would handle it. Conquergood said that he negotiates, because of "the delicate boundary between respect and sensitivity to my field consultants, and the need to write the fullest, most complex ethnographic account of their communication practices that my data support". I think that i might evaluate what is really important for the world to know and what might cause trouble for the people involved, and go from there.