On Sensitivity and Secrecy: How Foreign Researchers and their Local Contacts in Myanmar Deal with Risk under Authoritarian Rule

Toward the end of my fi rst year as a PhD student, I participated in a graduate conference on research ethics and dilemmas that anthropologists encounter in the fi eld. My intended fi eld research, covering aspects of human rights, democratization, and social activism in Myanmar, had yet to take place.1 There was limited published academic guidance on how to conduct such research, and the few available ethnographic studies on politics and human...