Journal of Ecological Anthropology Vol. 17 No. 1 2014 Published by Scholar Commons, 2014 BOOK REVIEWS Ethics in the Field: Contemporary Challenges, an edited volume by Jeremy MacClancy and Agustín Fuentes, brings together eleven contributions from researchers across the US, UK, and Japan, drawing from anthropology, behavioral ecology, and sociology. It illustrates well that ethical issues often cannot be anticipated. Many times, there are ethical concerns relevant to the particular context that do not become apparent until the research has commenced. It also refers to research that was done both before and after the mid-1990s, when formalized university ethics approval became a requirement. Before this time, there were only disciplinary guidelines on ethical practice. Chapters cover a mix of topics including medical and web research; five chapters discuss ethics in primate research. Other topics include the investigation of ethical queries raised by the ever- more pervasive use of new technologies (Miller; Rundall) and the consequences of having a private body fund one’s research (Parker; Kilshaw), an increasingly common and concerning phenomenon in these neoliberal times. Ethics in the Field: Contemporary Challenges Jeremy MacClancy and Agustín Fuentes (Editors) Volume 7, Studies of the Biosocial Society Berghahn Books, Brooklyn, NY, 2012 189 pp. $70.00 Hardcover Reviewed by Lisa C. DePaoli Society has also become more litigious, and so there is the need to protect informants, researchers, and institutions against lawsuits. Informed consent, intended to advise potential research participants about what their involvement in the research might mean for them, in principle also has the role of protecting the institution and researcher from litigation. There are numerous ethical and logistical complications with the idea of informed consent, including the diiculty of obtaining or achieving consent that is truly informed, e.g., when conducting participant observation (Parker and Allen; MacKinnon and Riley; Miller; and MacClancy). As a whole, the book’s themes illustrate a number of ethical concerns that are common to primatology and social and biological anthropology. hese include: the centrality of ethics to the research methods of all three; the integral importance of ethical training to neophyte ieldworkers; persistent questions over the beneits and obstructive downsides of a prescribed code of ethics; the simultaneous presence of multiple moral codes [e.g., ieldworker, informants, local community, university] and the quandaries their encounter cause; the dearth of easy, quick answers; the sustained need to constantly negotiate moral complexities, which may well prove irresolvable in a conclusive manner; the enduring ethical consequences of long-term ieldwork, and of their persistence, even after the academic has left the ieldsite (p. 4-5). Two further themes include the observation that ethical review and regulation has had a profound efect on research topic choices, and that ever tighter ethical regulations are not the best answer to these diiculties. As MacClancy and Fuentes state in the opening chapter titled "he Ethical Fieldworker, and Other Problems:" “…morality…is a distinctive, essential, integral aspect of humanity that results in complex webs of ethical scenarios and conduct” (pp. 3-4) and “as moral beings in morally complex settings, we have to learn to live with ambiguity” (p. 5). hey airm that this book is the irst attempt at a