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Moving Beyond Culturally Bound Ethical Guidelines
they expect anthropologists to write in a fashion that respects their
epistemological assumptions and ethical values. Hence, the call for a
decolonization of research methods and a critical evaluation of Eu-
rocentric assumptions and categories governing the allocation of re-
search grants and the design of research projects (Brettell 1993 , Du-
ran and Duran 2000 , T. L. Smith 1999 , Battiste 2000 , Cole 2004 ,
Lovelace 2004 , Long and LaFrance 2004 ). In other words, in the field
of research, as reiterated in Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People
and Their Representations ( 2005 ), aboriginal peoples and aboriginal
scholars challenge forms of ethnocentrism shared by Europeans and
their descendants.
Decolonization of one’s ethnographic endeavor leads to its redefini-
tion as the advocacy of the truth value of stories other than the ones
with which Europeans are familiar. In his presentation of the Tutchone
account of the creation of the world, for instance, Legros responds to
this expectation by acknowledging the validity of aboriginal criticism:
“When they read Us,” he writes, “they also read in our choice of the
word ‘myth’ [to refer to their stories] the arrogance of the so-called
enlightened scholar—of the unbeliever towards the believer” (Legros
1999 , 21 ). Striving to make the Tutchone “oral text coeval with Chris-
tian sacred books” (Legros 1999 , 1 ), and wanting at all costs to avoid
the term myth, with its negative connotations, Legros opts for “more
neutral terms such as sacred narrative” (Legros 1999 , 21 ) or “reli-
gious oral text” (Legros 1999 , 16 ). “Such change,” Legros ( 1999 , 18 )
writes, cannot originate from an initial personal theoretical reflection
but from imposed “changes in the praxis and politics of anthropolog-
ical research and writing” (Fabian 1983 , xi). Rooted in a new socio-
political reality, Legros’s atheoretical publication reflects the North-
ern Tutchone band council request that, as a condition of his research
among them, he “now research and write for Them, not on Them for
Them in the outside world, ‘down South’” (Legros 1999 , 19 ).
To raise epistemological and ethical issues within the framework
of a paradigm of decolonization of research is to propose new crite-
ria and obligations, including that of conceptualizing one’s research
on the basis of “Aboriginal cognitive and spiritual maps” and of ad-
hering “to Aboriginal protocols at all stages of its enactment” (Mc-
Naughton and Rock 2004 , 52 ).
