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Ethics policy as audit in Canadian clinical settings: exiling the ethnographic method

In the 1990s, institutional research ethics boards (REBs) impacted the relationship between researchers and their participants by formalizing the ethics requirements to conduct research involving human subjects. While exceptions are made in some ethics policies for research that crosses international borders — for example, where obtaining written consent is not culturally acceptable — there are no such exceptions for research that crosses interdisciplinary domains. Consequently, when conducting anthropological fieldwork in a Canadian clinical setting, the requirements of the standardized ethics policy proves to mesh poorly with the ethnographic and general anthropological approach to research, distorting the process and meaning of obtaining informant consent in the anthropological sense. This article documents one neophyte ethnographer's complicated journey into the land of the REB, raising some important questions about the audit-type nature of the ethics review process and the potential exile of ethnography that may result.