Informed consent in the anthropology of psychosis

This essay juxtaposes the (informed) 'consent' sections of the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) Statement on Ethics (2012) and the Ethical Guidelines for good research practice (2021) of the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) of the UK. It discusses two a priori and uncritical assumptions that constitute the premise of the informed consent doctrine, as it has been incorporated in anthropology: that research participants and anthropologists organise their worlds in temporally coherent ways; and that research participants employ verbal and/or written modes of communication. I argue that erstwhile critiques of the informed consent doctrine in anthropology are somewhat limited, to the extent that they do not always recognise the exclusionary implications of these underlying assumptions. Acknowledging these assumptions in the context of anthropological research with 'psychotic' patients might allude to the impossibilities of-seeking 'informed' consent from such patients, and thus perhaps of ethnographically approaching 'psychotic' expressivity and subjectivity. I offer a way out of this impasse by drawing on specific ethnographic vignettes of the 'embodied voice' of psychotic patients. The essay then concludes with a suggestion for professional anthropological associations to develop alternative, more inclusive, and nonconventional ways of locating informed consent.