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Many ethics review bureaucracies present signed, written forms administered at a single point in time as the default, best‐practice method for obtaining and documenting consent to participate in research. The demand is emblematic of ethics review committees’ insistence on form over function, their failure to understand the cultural contexts of field research, and erroneous assumptions about research methods. Ethnographers responding to an international survey argued that written consent may not protect participants, may mask unethical research, and may often be inappropriate for legal, cultural, political or historical reasons. We suggest the dominance of written consent reflects culturally specific views of paper, writing, signatures, and contracts grounded in particular historical imaginations of the authenticity of the signature and the power of writing and forms. Construed by ethics review institutions as culturally universal, the signed consent form has come to take on the qualities of a fetish. [research ethics, informed consent, signatures, forms, research ethics committees, institutional review boards]

WHAT IF THEY built an asylum and nobody showed up? By asking this question, I mean to forefront the problem of what sort of a structure it is to which people are committed or present themselves. In the extensive literature on asylums that has developed over the course of the last three decades, most authors assume a needy or dominated population to exist around such buildings who eventually give over their unfortunates to fill them up. Few theorists, moreover, look seriously at those who staff these structures, who are, at least in the rank-and-filejobs, generally locals. Thus, while we can find an ample literature about asylums as tokens of a type, we find much less on the actual local existence of any particular institution. 1 This essay developed out of a project investigating the cultural and historical relationships between a (recently) large mental hospital, St. Columba's Hospital in Sligo town, serving the counties of Sligo and Leitrim in the northwest of Ireland, and a market town and its environs, containing about 1,600 people, that for the purposes of this study I am calling Kilronan. In this paper I am interested in the local presence of a bureaucratic structure, examining how this institution is locally constituted as well as looking at some of the historical changes that it has effected at this locality. By proceeding in this fashion, the argument both echoes and reinforces recent calls in the discipline to treat together local, colonial, and national histories, insisting that understanding historical change in culture and understanding how culture conditions historical change are equally necessary parts of a comprehensive anthropological analysis

Paper Tangos. Julie Taylor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. 121pp. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. Hermano Vianna. John Charles Chasteen, ed. and trans. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 147 pp.

Cinematographic Theory and New Dimensions in Ethnographic Film. Paul Hockings and Yasuhiro Omori, eds. Anthropological Filmmaking: Anthropological Perspectives on the Production of Film and Video for General Public Audiences. Jack R. Rollwagen, ed. Disappearing World. Andre Singer and Leslie Woodhead. Visual Explorations of the World: Selected Papers from the International Conference on Visual Communication. Martin Taureg and Jay Ruby, eds.

Commons + Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability and the Flow of Knowledge. Marilyn Strathern. Wantage, Oxfordshire: Sean Kingston Publishing, 2004. 102 pp.

Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, Occasional Paper No. 25. James G. Cusick. Carbondale. IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations. Southern Illinois University, 1998. 502 pp.

Engaged Anthropology: Research Essays on North American Archaeology, Ethnobotany, and Museology, Papers in Honor of Richard I. Ford. Michelle Hegmonand B. Sunday Eiselt, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 263 pp.

The Potlatch Papers:. Colonial Case History. Christopher Bracken. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.276 pp.