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Private Detectives: Secrets, Privacy and Investigation in post-1960 Britain
Private Detectives: Secrets, Privacy and Investigation in post-1960 Britain, is the title of research that Tobias Kelly, Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, has set out to do. Can you help, whether by sharing recollections of your work as a private investigator, or simply pointing him in the right direction? His contact details are on this Edinburgh webpage. Tobias writes:
Private detectives have a significant and ambiguous place in the popular imagination – seen as both heroic discoverers of truth and as seedy invaders of privacy – but little is known about the work they actually carry out. This project asks: what do private investigators try and uncover, how do they go about doing so, and what social and ethical conflicts are involved in this work? As such, the research will provide important new insights into the meanings and implications of privacy, secrecy and investigation in contemporary Britain.
Personal privacy is widely seen as being under threat, from state and corporate surveillance on the one hand, and wider ‘cultures of confession’, on the other. It is often argued that norms around personal privacy have moved from the ability to keep secrets, towards an emphasis on the ability to exercise individual freedom and transparency. However, it is important not to overplay the demise of personal secrecy. Secrets still matter deeply to people, and the personal secrets between friends, relatives, neighbours, and colleagues, can matter in particular. The types of secrets that people are invested in might have changed – as infidelity, inheritance, debt, fraud and missing people shift in relative meaning and significance – but people continue to invest a great deal in both keeping secrets and uncovering them.
Private investigators provide a unique point of entry to examine wider shifts and continuities in cultures of privacy and investigation, as a profession with specific and often controversial expertise in revealing the personal secrets people want uncovered. Although private investigators have a history dating back to the mid-19th century, the research will focus on Britain since 1960: these years have seen important changes around, for example, the social and legal implications of adultery, ‘cultures of confession’, and the role of data protection, that have changed the types of personal secrets that people want to find out and the ways they can do so.
The research will combine ethnography, oral history and archival research with private investigators, alongside visual methods drawn from the creative arts. In doing so, the project will treat gaps in evidence as an opportunity to reflect on academic research’s own cultures of investigation and representation. Outputs will include journal articles, a monograph, an illustrated collection and an exhibition.
Precisely which personal information should be shared with other people is a deeply contentious and important issue. If we are to understand the meanings and implications of attempts to keep personal secrets and to protect privacy, we need to grasp why and how secrets are uncovered. The research will therefore be of wide interest to policy makers concerned with the implications and challenges of privacy, as well as historians, anthropologists and lawyers concerned with privacy, secrets and investigation.
Tobias Kelly
Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology
Email Toby.Kelly@ed.ac.uk
Telephone +44 (0)131 650 3986
Room 5.30, Chrystal Macmillan Building
Edinburgh EH8 9LD
Posted by: Ian (D. Withers)
www.WAPI.org