3
Applying Anthropology
Anthropology:
Appreciating Human Diversity
14th Edition
Conrad Phillip Kottak
2
Applying Anthropology
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Role of the Applied Anthropologist
Development Anthropology
Strategies of Innovation
Anthropology and Education
Urban Anthropology
Medical Anthropology
Anthropology and Business
Careers and Anthropology
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
3
Anthropology
• How can change be bad?
• How can anthropology be applied to
medicine, education, and business?
• How can the study of
anthropology fit into a career path?
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
4
• How can change be bad? The Coca Cola
example.
• What changes do the people and which people
want?
• How can conflicting wishes and needs be
accommodated?
• Applied anthropologists help determine whether
change sis needed and how it will work.
• Innovation succeeds best when it is culturally
appropriate. McDonald’s, Starbucks and Ford have
learned that fitting is more profitable than trying to
Americanize local habits.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
5
The Role of the
Applied Anthropologist
• Applied anthropology: One
of two dimensions of anthropology;
use of anthropological data,
perspectives, theory, and techniques
to identify, assess, and solve
contemporary social problems
involving human behavior and
social and cultural forces,
conditions, and contexts.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
6
Recap 3.1.: The Four Subfields and Two
Dimensions of Anthropology
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
7
Early Applications
• Application was central concern of early
anthropology in Great Britain
(colonialism) and U.S.(Native American
policy).
– Academic anthropology
grew most after World War II.
– During the 1970s, some anthropologists found
jobs with international organizations,
government, business, hospitals, and schools.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
8
Anthropology and colonialism
• Malinowski’s practical anthropology was
colonial applied anthropology with the
aim to westernize tribal societies
through diffusion of European culture.
He did not question the legitimacy of
colonialism or his role in making it work.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
9
• During World War II, American
anthropologists studied German and
Japanese culture (at a distance) to
predict the behavior of their enemies.
• After the war, they worked on Pacific
Islands to promote local-level
cooperation with American policies.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
10
• During the Vietnam War, anthropology
became popular in American colleges
with students wanting to learn more
about other cultures.
• Anthropologists protested the
superpowers’ disregard for non-Western
lives, values, customs and social
systems.
• The new trend forced anthropologists to
question the wider social value and
implications of their research.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
11
Applied Anthropology Today
• Modern anthropology is usually seen as a helping
profession. Removed from the colonial perspective.
–
–
–
–
Speak up for disenfranchised
Solve problems for clients
Entire field combats ethnocentrism
Highly qualified to suggest, plan, and implement
policies affecting people
– World Bank, USAID, Environmental Protection
Agency.
– Cultural resource management and historic
preservation (remember Hasankeyf and Zeugma)
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
12
• Garbology – environmental protection
• Forensic anthropology – police, medical
examiners, courts to identify victims of
crimes
• Biological anthropology – public health,
nutrition, genetic counseling, substance
abuse, aging, mental illness
• Linguistic anthropology – physicianpatient interactions, dialect differences
in classroom learning
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
13
• The goal is to find humane and effective
ways of helping local people.
• Applied anthropologists use
ethnographic techniques in both foreign
and domestic settings while living with
and learning from local people.
• Anthropology’s holistic perspective
(biology, society, culture and language)
permits evaluation of many issues that
affect people.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
14
Roles for applied anthropologists
• Identifying needs for change that local
people perceive.
• Working with those people to design
culturally appropriate and socially
sensitive change.
• Protecting local people from harmful
policies and projects that may threaten
them.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
15
Development Anthropology
• Development anthropology: Branch of
applied anthropology that focuses on
social issues in, and the cultural
dimension of, economic development. It
also plans and guides policy.
– Ethical dilemmas often confront development
anthropologists. Foreign aid usually doesn’t
go where it’s most needed but is spent on
political, economic and strategic priorities
based on maximizing interest.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
16
Development Anthropology
• Commonly stated goal of recent
development policy is to promote equity
– Increasing equity: results in reduced poverty
and a more even distribution of wealth.
– However, wealthy and powerful people often
resist projects that threaten their vested
interest.
– Negative equity impact is generated when
wealth disparities are widened. (irrigation,
fisheries)
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
17
Culturally compatible projects
• To maximize social and economic
benefits, projects should
– Be culturally compatible,
– Respond to locally perceived needs,
– Involve men and women in planning and
carrying out the changes that affect them,
– Harness traditional organizations,
– Be flexible.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
18
Strategies for Innovation
• Development anthropology can help
sort the needs of people and fit projects
accordingly.
– Avoid overinnovation: trying to achieve too
much change
• Projects that fail are usually ones that are
economically and culturally incompatible.
• South Asia:Enforcing cultivation of cash-crops
instead of traditional labor-intensive rice growing.
• Ethiopia:Trying to onvert nomadic herders to
sedentary cultivators.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
19
• Avoid underdifferentiation: the tendency
to view the so-called less-developed
countries as being more alike than they are.
• Neglecting cultural diversity and adopting a
uniform approach to deal with deifferent sets
of people.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
20
• Faulty social design that imposed
incompatible property notions and social units
assuming either
• individualistic productive units that are privately
owned by ind/couple/nuclear family, or
• cooperatives that are based on models from
former socialist countries.
Whereas in West Africa, the basic social unit is the
extended family and neither of the above. Project
still worked because local people applied their
traditional extended family networks .
Hence, greater use of indigeneous social models is
needed for indigeneous social development.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
21
Indigenous Models
• In some nations, governments
acts as an agent of the people.
– Madagascar and Malagasy
– “Descent groups” organized
before the origin of the state
– Descent group is a kin group
composed of people whose social
solidarity is based on their belief that
they share common ancestry. It
proved preadapted to equitable
national development.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
22
– Realistic development promotes change
but not overinnovation
– Respect, or at least don’t attack, local
cultural patterns
– Effective development draws on
indigeneous cultural practices and social
structures.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
23
Anthropology and Education
• Research that extends from classrooms
into homes and neighborhoods
– View children as total cultural creatures
whose enculturation and attitudes toward
education belong to a context that includes
family and peers
– Sociolinguists and cultural anthropologists
work side by side
– Education in mother-tongue.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
24
Urban Anthropology
• Urban anthropology: the cross-cultural
and ethnographic and biocultural study
of global urbanization and life in cities
– Proportion of world’s population
living in cities has increased
since the Industrial Revolution
– UN estimates that about onesixth of the earth’s population
live in urban slums
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
25
• As industrialization and urbanization
spread globally, anthropologists study
these processes and the social
problems they create.
• Immigration, ethnicity, ppoverty, class,
urban violence, crime, urban
transformation, ghettos.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
26
Urban Anthropology
• Urban Versus Rural
– Robert Redfield: focused on
contrasts between rural
and urban contexts in 1940s
• Urban (impersonality) and rural (faceto-face relations) represent different
social systems.
• Applying anthropology to urban
planning starts by identifying the key
social groups in the urban context.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
27
• Cities are centers through which cultural
innovations spread to rural and tribal areas.
• Migrants bring rural practices and beliefs to
cities and take urban patterns back home.
• One role for urban anthropology is to help
relevant social groups deal with urban
institutions, such as legal and social
services that they might be unfamiliar with.
• Traffic lights and crossing the streets
(Diyarbakır)
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
28
Medical Anthropology
• Medical anthropology: comparative,
biocultural study of disease, health
problems, and health care systems
– Examines which diseases and
health conditions affect a
particular population, and why
– Determines how illness is socially
constructed, diagnosed, managed,
and treated in various societies
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
29
Medical Anthropology
• Disease: a scientifically identified health
threat caused by a bacterium, virus,
fungus, parasite, or other pathogen
• Illness: a condition of poor health
perceived or felt by an individual
– Various ethnic groups and cultures
recognize different illnesses, symptoms,
and causes and have developed different
health care systems and treatment
strategies for them.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
30
Medical Anthropology
• Health care systems: beliefs,
customs, and specialists concerned
with preventing and curing illness
– Personalistic disease theories:
illness caused by sorcerers,
witches, ghosts, or ancestral spirits
– Naturalistic disease theories:
illness explained in impersonal terms
– Emotionalistic disease theories:
assume that emotional experiences
cause illness (e.g., susto)
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
31
Medical Anthropology
• Curer: one who
diagnoses and treats
illness; often a shaman
• Scientific medicine: a
health care system
based on scientific
knowledge and
procedures
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
32
Western Medicine
• Industrialization and globalization
spawned their own health problems
– In U.S., good health is
becoming an ethical imperative.
– More personal treatment of illness
that emulates non-Western
curer-patient-community relations
could benefit Western systems.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
33
• Health problems in industrial nations are
caused as much by economic, social,
political and cultural factors as
pathogens.
• Modern stressors such as pollution,
poor nutrition, dangerous machinery,
isolation, poverty, homelessness,
substance abuse.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
34
• Changing notions of health and
sanitization.
• People acting out of the norm (smokers,
overeaters, those who avoid doctors)
are stigmatized as unsanitary.
• Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong,
varying conceptualization of health and
weight.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
35
• Medical anthropologists serve as cultural
interpreters in public health programs, which
must pay attention to local theories about the
nature, causes and treatment of illness.
• Health interventions cannot be forced on
communities.
• IUD implementation in South East Turkey.
• Abortion, stem sell research, in-vitro
fertilization, contraception, euthanasia.
• How boundaries of life and death are being
questioned and negotiated.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
36
Anthropology and Business
• Anthropologists may acquire a unique
perspective on organizational conditions
and problems.
– Ethnography and observation
– Cross-cultural expertise
– Focus on cultural diversity
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
37
Careers in Anthropology
• Anthropology’s breadth provides
knowledge and an outlook on the world
that are useful in many kinds of work.
– Knowledge about the traditions and beliefs
of many social groups within a modern
nation is important in planning and carrying
out programs that affect those groups.
© 2011 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.