The paper finally got published and I got a tweet and a blog post out. Within a day (few hours is nearer to the mark) I got a comment on my blog post from one of the travel message board managers saying they would have liked it more if I had sought permission beforehand, words to that effect.

After reading it I blushed red. What had happened was that I had sought permission from the moderator (and retained a record of it too) who was no longer a moderator and hence the confusion for this new manager/moderator.

When I asked the manager/moderator why they assumed I had not taken permission they said replied because it was so common for researchers to do this! They do not seek permission. We were able to sort it out amicably but I was surprised that the first assumption was that permission was not taken. All these comments are present on my blog post but I am hesitant to give a link.

Sitting in India (where many universities would have no Institutional Review Boards) I have benefited immensely from Robert’s writings on the issue and much more than that the email exchanges he has been kind enough to do with me to support my research.

So having the procedures explained and codified to an extent (so that I still retain flexibility) is of immense help to people like me.

The more I mull over Rob’s arguments, the closer I come to seeing their cogency, particularly with respect to the need for a focal point around which a set of common understandings can start to accrete, or already has started. And then I recall that our dear, sacred word “ethnography” is itself a NEOLOGISM coined in the early 19th century — which might make it an oldologism by now — to define a practice that hadn’t previously existed in quite the form or with quite the goals that the word’s coiners were trying to convey. If we were having this discussion in 1835 at the Royal Society, I might be questioning why we need that new-fangled term, “ethnography”, when, say, “comparative moral philosophy” or “manners and customs of the savages” still work perfectly well. (Let’s try those on our business clients!) The worlds of research and intellectual innovation are strewn with neologisms that might’ve sounded odd or wrong when brand-new: cybernetics, psycholinguistics, software. So yes, new mappings of reality sometimes call for new names, and sometimes the names take a while to settle in.

Speaking of attempts to trademark or otherwise legally monopolize key terms: while preparing a conference talk a while back I discovered that the words “anthropology” and “ethnography” are already registered service marks in the US, the latter being assigned to, apparently, a shoe retailer in California for purposes unknown. Attempts to corral, domesticate and brand words like this are certainly consistent with prevailing notions of intellectual property. If there is any value in the continued existence of an intellectual “commons” that includes key concepts and practices, then Rob’s recommendation to identify those things, name them well, and evangelize around them, makes sense.