Introduction: Anxious borders between work and life in a time of bureaucratic ethics regulation

AE FORUM ver the past few decades, anthropologists have reassessed the value of fieldwork "at home," in particular, and reviewed the disciplinary status of field practice, in general-in both cases from various angles-in light of the shifting contemporary circumstances and opportunities for ethnographic work. The articles in this AE Forum extend that scrutiny by focusing attention on informality in ethnographic fieldwork both at home and away. Informality here refers to the undemarcated moments of ethnographic practice when "research" and "daily life" are inextricable. Informality is a prominent feature of partly or wholly unfunded (self-funded) research pursued part-time at home; it is also evident, if less notable, perhaps, in funded research anywhere, insofar as "doing fieldwork" is all about embedding oneself in ongoing social situations not designed by the investigator. Although informality is a long-standing, acknowledged fact in ethnographic sociology-in which unfunded research at home is the norm-it is as yet largely unremarked in anthropology despite being a common corollary of the trend to home-based fieldwork. In both disciplines, informality demands explicit attention because it has recently become problematized in new ways in the United States. For over three decades, institutional review boards (IRBs) have overseen researchers' compliance with U.S. federal regulations concerning ethical "human subjects" research. During the past five or six years, however, federal regulators have been on high alert, a stance passed along to local IRBs as an increasing fear of legal and financial consequences to their home institutions should they slacken efforts to fulfill their internal monitoring responsibilities. Federal regulations presuppose a research process whose locations, time frames, personnel, and protocols are all clearly demarcated (in funding proposals, typically) such that research may be clearly distinguished from a scholar's "ordinary life," in which other ethical guarantees and constraints (like the First Amendment and libel laws) apply. Against this presumption of clearly bracketed research, informal fieldwork blurs the work-life distinction.