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Annual Review of Anthropology
Anthropology of Policy:
Tensions, Temporalities,
Possibilities
Winifred Tate
Department of Anthropology, Colby College, Waterville, Maine 04910, USA;
email: wltate@colby.edu
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2020. 49:83–99
Keywords
First published as a Review in Advance on
July 7, 2020
policy, governance, ethnography, methods, ethics, political anthropology
The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at
anthro.annualreviews.org
Abstract
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-010220074250
Copyright © 2020 by Annual Reviews.
All rights reserved
This article is part of a special theme on Race. For a
list of other articles in this theme, see https://www.
annualreviews.org/toc/anthro/49/1
As complex institutions extend into and govern greater spheres of social life,
ethnographers contend with policy in an ever-widening range of fieldsites.
This review examines anthropology of policy as an emerging subfield of political anthropology, focusing on policy making as central to contemporary
governance in English-language ethnographies. Broadening the analytical
field in the study of policy to include the targets of policy and their allies
is one of the central contributions of an anthropological approach to policy
making. Anthropological studies of policy production, implementation, and
effects face significant methodological and ethical challenges. Scholarly debates in the United States and Europe continue to erupt over the production
of scholarship intended to inform policy making, including the co-option of
ethnography. While turning the anthropological gaze on powerful political
actors could contribute to decolonization efforts within the discipline, ethically adopting ethnographic research into policy making requires complex
alliances with communities targeted by policy.
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INTRODUCTION
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As complex institutions come to extend into and govern greater spheres of social life, ethnographers contend with policy—however tangentially—in an ever-widening range of fieldsites. This
review examines anthropology of policy as an emerging subfield of political anthropology, focusing on the analysis of policy making as central to contemporary governance in English-language
ethnographies. I start by charting the role of anthropological studies of policy in the professional
and institutional formation of academic anthropology, primarily in the United States and Europe.
I examine ethnographies of policy production, with particular attention to the legitimation of
specific forms of expertise, including in ethnographies of climate policy, and the ways in which
anthropologists of policy attend to broad enframing ideologies, with a focus on neoliberalism and
militarization. In considering the anthropology of policy implementation, I focus on development
studies and migration. Broadening the analytical field in the study of policy to include the targets
of policy, their political allies, and others excluded from these efforts is one of the central contributions of an anthropological approach to policy making. In considering the social worlds created
by policy interventions, I argue that the Black women scholars who have studied the US welfare
system are an important yet overlooked part of the intellectual genealogy of anthropology of policy. I also explore ethnographies of the social worlds created through immigration and drug policy.
Additional related fields that address policy, such as urban anthropology, science and technology
studies, and others, are omitted for reasons of space; I also do not attempt a systematic analysis
of how race has been analyzed (or ignored) in the works addressed here. This review takes an expansive view of policy making; many of the works discussed here are not situated primarily within
the anthropology of policy as an existing field. I intend to demonstrate the multiplicity of ways in
which policy is considered within ethnographies, and to encourage anthropologists of policy to
consider how these works can inform future policy-oriented analyses.
Ethnographic research with policy makers, a category that variously includes government and
elected officials and their staff as well as administrators within private organizations, poses a variety
of ethical and methodological challenges to researchers. Administrators can exclude researchers
and limit access; the inability to “be there” within heavily policed institutions requires that we
reconceptualize ethnographic writing. Anthropology of policy sits—uncomfortably at times—at
the intersection of academic, applied, and public anthropology. I conclude with a review of the debates in the United States and Europe over the production of scholarship intended to inform policy making, including the ways in which ethnography can be co-opted for projects unintended by
authors. While turning the anthropological gaze on powerful political actors could contribute to
decolonization efforts within the discipline, adopting ethnographic research into political change
through policy making requires complex alliances with communities and social movements targeted by policy.
POLICY MAKING AS STATE FORMATION AND GOVERNANCE
People produce policy—written standards of institutional action—in a wide range of settings,
from relatively small single institutions to complex transnational networked organizations, in
both state and nonstate settings. Policies are distinct from laws in their formation and their
enforcement. Unlike laws, which are created by state officials and enforced through the power
of the courts and the police, bureaucrats and administrators generate policies through private
institutional processes and enforce them through administrative sanctions and the decisionmaking power of individual officials. Policy makers, political scientists, and journalists frequently
present policy as a concrete, linear process, in which the responsible authorities identify an
existing problem and design a proposal to address the issue. In this view, policy is responsive,
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diagnostic, and a blueprint for governance. In contrast, anthropologists argue that policy is a
generative realm of cultural production, producing and shaped by values, norms, identities, and
practices. Policy making does not diagnose but rather produces problems to be solved through
policy. Policy written as neutral and universal guidelines reproduces hierarchies of value through
implementation. Policy action does not have discrete beginnings and endings; such temporal
markers must be produced through the stories told about policy.
European anthropologists first demarcated anthropology of policy as a specific subfield of political anthropology during the 1990s, in part inspired by their personal experiences of austerity
in the United Kingdom and within the English academic system (Strathern 2000) and their frontrow seats to the development of the European Union. The growing influence of Foucauldian
theories of governmentality, and of Latourian approaches in science and technology studies, also
influenced the emerging field of anthropology of policy. The 1994 conference of the European
Association of Social Anthropologists, held in Oslo, produced the 1997 edited volume Anthropology of Policy: Perspectives on Governance and Power (Shore & Wright 1997). At the time, the study of
policy was largely left to political scientists; the 1997 volume justified the anthropological analysis of policy by comparing the role of policy with that of myths in traditional societies. In this
way, the authors argued that policy was best conceptualized as guiding principles for social order,
as political technologies for new categories of subjectivity and political relation, and as sites for
analyzing the operation of power. Since then, anthropologists have become more confident about
the anthropological appropriateness of the study of policy, even as the interpretive turn in critical
policy studies has generated a greater use of ethnographic methods within political science and
other related disciplines, including geography (Shore et al. 2011, Yanow 2011). Anthropologists
analyze policy, its production, and its effects in a wide range of institutional fieldsites, many of
which involve both state and nonstate actors producing policy to regulate daily life, as in hospital systems and health care (Abramowitz & Panter-Brick 2015, Andaya 2014, Bernstein 2018,
Funahashi 2016, Lock 2001, Mulligan 2014, Sharp 2006, Street 2014, Yates-Doerr 2015) and aid
and development (Ansell 2014, Bornstein 2012, Elyachar 2005, Ferguson 1994, Halvorson 2018,
Li 2007, Mosse 2005). The Association for the Anthropology of Policy was formed as a member
organization of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2014 after previously functioning as an interest group, and as of mid-2019 is a medium-sized section with approximately
350 members (https://www.anthofpolicy.org).
POLICY PRODUCTION: EXPERTISE, TEMPORALITIES,
AND ORGANIZATIONAL LOGICS
Policy making as a political project must first articulate the problems to be resolved in order to
manage, regulate, and shape both individual behavior and collective social life (Wedel et al. 2005).
Greenhalgh (2008) defines policy problematization as the process through which particular social relationships, identities, and practices are identified as requiring institutional intervention.
Rather than accept stated policy objectives, ethnographic inquiry into the policy-making process
interrogates contemporary institutional discourses of transparency and accountability. Anthropologists have noted that demands for transparency are entangled with historically situated notions
of accountability, auditing, and systems of measurement that necessarily obscure as well as reveal
(Hetherington 2011; Wedel 2001, 2011). Policy production often requires strategic ambiguity,
which allows the appearance of institutional coherence and consensus among disparate and even
contradictory initiatives to appear as unified consensus, as demonstrated by the role of US military
and civilian agencies in the design and implementation of aid programs to Colombia (Tate 2015).
Expert knowledge and authorization to participate in policy debates are circumscribed and
bounded by institutional needs and political values (Mitchell 2002). Anthropologists analyze what
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knowledge is labeled “expert” and how it is situated, celebrated, and incorporated (or excluded)
into policy discourses and practices (Riles 2001). In her ethnographic study of European Union
training programs in Turkey, Babul (2017) argues that human rights are translated into a form of
professional expertise. In his discussion of the study of the state, Trouillot (2001, p. 126) defines
the legibility effect as “the production of both a language and knowledge for governance and
of theoretical and empirical tools that classify and regulate collectivities.” Policy narratives make
political action legible, locating specific programs within broader spheres of political value, as well
as erasing and obscuring alternatives. Climate change and environmental debates and policies are a
particularly rich site for these ethnographic interventions examining how scientists, administrators
and officials, and activists compete and collaborate to advance particular understandings of climate
action (Barnes & Dove 2015, Callison 2014, Checker 2005, Crate & Nuttall 2009, Hall & Sanders
2015, Lahsen 2008, Moore 2001, Petryna 2018, Rojas 2016, Vaughn 2017, West 2006). Policy
formation also works through concealment, denial, and the production of ignorance (Geissler
2013, High et al. 2012, Mathews 2011, Proctor & Schiebinger 2008, Sanabria 2016, Tate 2015).
In addition to the forms of expertise produced and ratified through policy making, anthropologists reveal the broader logics and power structures in which particular institutional policies
become naturalized. This includes the work of enframing—naturalizing domination, as Mitchell
(1990, p. 571) describes how “modes of power are presented as outside local life, time and community.” Anthropologists embed the ethnographic particular of policy production in analyses of the
broader ideological fields in which policy is inscribed. Recent scholarship has called for greater
attention to the role of race, racism, and white supremacy within the discipline and to how white
supremacy is a structuring ideology for contemporary governance and social action (Pierre 2006,
Rosa & Díaz 2019). Anthropologists have begun to explore settler colonialism as a foundational
structure for policy formation in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere (Cattelino 2010,
Simpson 2014, Wolfe 2005).
Neoliberalism has been one of the central such logics shaping policy in a range of fields over
the past several decades (Ganti 2014, Wacquant 2012). Anthropologists have considered how the
broad policy imperatives of neoliberalism are articulated and implemented in particular places
(Craven & Davis 2013) and through new formations of capitalism (Comaroff & Comaroff 2001),
labor and market reconfiguration in Asia (Ong 2006), Mexican economic policies (Schwegler
2008), “neoliberal sovereignty” in Ghana’s customs service (Chalfin 2010), and trade and food
policies transforming daily life and health in Mexico (Gálvez 2018). National austerity policies
reducing public spending over the past several decades have transformed the environment, infrastructure, and human communities (Anand et al. 2018) in Europe and beyond (Bear 2015,
Rakopoulos 2018), in universities (Hyatt et al. 2015, Krause et al. 2008), and in city governance
(Brash 2011). Much of the emerging research on care locates the neoliberal retreat of the welfare state and increasing economic precarity as generating new subjectivities and social relations
(Muehlebach 2012).
Anthropologists also examine the ways in which militarism has been a central organizing logic
of contemporary US political life (Gusterson 2007). Militarism continues to produce particular
policies that determine the development of US military bases in the continental United States
(Lutz 2001) and abroad (Vine 2011), in school and education (Pérez 2015), and in border policing
(Rosas 2011). Masco (2014) argues that the imaginaries of fear are central to the securitization of
contemporary political life and militarization of national security threats, in the case of nuclear
war and the so-called war on terror, tracing their deployment in discourses, technologies, and
infrastructures. In Colombia, demobilization efforts have been institutionally militarized as part
of ongoing counterinsurgency efforts, while simultaneously drawing on the logics of advertising
and marketing (Fattal 2018).
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Policy production is a central site in which multiple futures are deployed in the present, haunted
not only by the past but also by fears of possible things to come (Bear 2015). These imagined
futures constrain and shape the possibilities for action in the present. Some of the possible futures
that weigh most heavily on the present are threats, imagined future dystopias, and the making real
of worst-case scenarios (Masco 2014). Through scenarios, modeling, and other forms of threat
assessment and prediction, dystopian visions are constructed as possible futures that present policy
must militate against (Lakoff 2007). An anthropology of policy can also reveal the unrealized
possibilities of foreclosed futures. An instructive example for anthropologists of policy is how
Bhimull (2017) uses archival research into the official governmental conferences that established
British aviation as an imperial project and as a commercial industry to explore an alternative future
in which Caribbean airlines were allowed to determine flight routes according to the needs and
desires of local people. In her research on water as a right and a commodity in Costa Rica and
Brazil, Ballestero (2019) exposes the multiple possible futures created through debates over water
policy.
POLICY IMPLEMENTATION AND EFFECTS: THE MAKING
AND UNMAKING OF SOCIAL WORLDS
Policy is enacted through bureaucratic practice, encounters between officials and subjects, and the
material products and processes of governance (Bear & Mathur 2015, Bernstein & Mertz 2011).
State agents engage in a range of practices to make the state’s own action legible both outwardly,
by subjects and publics, and inwardly, by the range of bureaucratic agencies that constitute the
state. The study of policy making requires examining bureaucracies in relation to one another, an
ethnographic approach that is oriented both toward the horizontal, across a particular political
field, and toward the vertical, from the most powerful state agents to the subjects of governance
(Feldman 2008, Heyman 1995). Ferguson’s (1994) Anti-Politics Machine contributed to the growing interrogation of the technocratic turn and the focus on bureaucracies as statecraft; many of
these ethnographies focus not on policy per se but on the material and embodied practice of bureaucracies implementing policies (Babul 2017; Gupta 2012; Hoag 2011; Hull 2012a,b; Li 2007;
Mathews 2011).
Enacting policy and mobilizing support involve emotional work by policy makers—that is,
emotional commitment that is couched and explained in terms of affective relationships and passionate obligations. Stoler (2002) has identified the ways in which sentiment structures and informs
systems of governance, analyzing how colonial projects extend into the domestic realm of desire,
affinity, and respectability. Along this vein, Navaro-Yashin (2006, p. 282) writes, “Bureaucracy has
been studied as a rationalizing apparatus, instigating discipline and organizing audit procedures,
with no room for affect.” Yet, as her research with Turkish-Cypriot civil servants reveals, bureaucracy “produces and incites specific modes of affectivity in its own right.” In her research on port
officials in India, Bear (2015) analyzes the affective role of “useful friendships.” As an emotive domain, these institutional practices involve desire, reverence, resentment, irony, restraint, apathy,
and dissatisfaction. These emotional identities and relationships are not simply conjured from existing ideologies, however, but must be materially made and continuously remade through institutional and organizational channels. US Congressional delegations to Colombia were orchestrated
to engender militarized solidarity between staffers and the Colombian National Police through
the ritual display of weaponry and commemorative acts focusing on memorialization of particular
wounded and dead (Tate 2013).
Much of the political science literature on policy effects evaluates policy in terms of its stated
objectives; anthropologists ask, instead, What work did this policy do? Indicators and assessment
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benchmarks reveal how particular forms of policy knowledge are authorized and privileged while
others are discounted (Merry 2011, Tate 2015). Anthropologists frequently center the communities affected by policy implementation and the ways in which they resist, contest, and evaluate policy. One of the central intellectual foundations for this research is the scholarship of Black women
who have critically examined the impact of US welfare policies on Black families and communities. Their contributions have been largely ignored in the emerging canon of anthropological
studies of policy because of ongoing structural racism within the academy (Bolles 2013, Harrison
et al. 2018). The intellectual work of the many Black women scholars who made their careers as
social workers, advocates, and activists confronting the daily machinations of white-dominated
government agencies has yet to be fully incorporated into this history (Carlton-Laney 2001).
As an anthropologist and teacher of social workers, Daniels Barnes (2015, p. 134) describes her
students as viewing the study of policy initially as punitive and pointless, “failing to provide adequate support for their clients and inadvertently participating in upholding policy practices that
penalize rather than assist their clients.” She concludes, however, that “Black feminist anthropology/ethnography/autoethnography creates a space through which practitioners, often from
marginalized or subjugated positions themselves, can see and understand themselves and their
clients as self-sufficient and empowered actors working toward their own accurate recognition”
(Daniels Barnes 2015, p. 145). In her study of the experience of women in a domestic violence
shelter, Davis (2006, p. 5) argues that welfare reform policy was a form of structural violence:
“Black women ‘lived’ welfare policy in the space where intimate violence, race, changes in the
composition of employment brought about by deindustrialization, and gentrification, intersect.”
Using the life histories of women in the shelter, she illuminates the five ways in which “welfare
policies regulate, or at the very least influence, various aspects of social life. . .[including] labor
markets, family, representation and reproductive control” (Davis 2006, p. 37). Bridges (2011) argues that racist ideologies and racial identities are produced through encounters with health care
providers and social welfare bureaucrats, in an ethnographic study of patient interactions in a large
New York public hospital. In her ethnographic account of work as the manager of a shelter for
homeless girls in Detroit, Cox (2015) focuses not on the policies that constrain the lives of the
residents but instead on how the girls imagine and enact freedom. Such ethnographic research
illuminates the devastating consequences of policy implementation, as well as the ways in which
impacted communities resist policy constraints and reimagine their social worlds.
Anthropology of migration has become a growing literature examining the lived impact of policy. Anthropologists focusing on the social worlds emerging in the wake of shifting immigration
policies have considered how precarity is produced as policy in the United States (GombergMuñoz 2016), the intersection of neoliberal austerity programs and immigration policies in
Greece (Cabot 2014), the life cycles of families deported from the United States to Mexico (Boehm
2016), how the regulation of migration produces new racial and ethnic identities (Besteman 2016),
the ways in which the US immigration policy Prevention Through Deterrence displaces violence
from the state to the harsh desert terrain (De León & Wells 2015), the role of humanitarianism and incarceration in immigration policies in France (Fassin 2005), and policing migration in
Europe (Feldman 2011, 2019).
Drug policy is a transnational field that creates opportunities and motivates multiple actors,
including politicians, peasant farmers, entrepreneurial traders, and consumers, throughout the
hemisphere (Campbell 2009, Ramírez 2011). Anthropologists have examined the ways in which
these economies produce new forms of governance and transform social life in marginalized communities in Brazil and Mexico (Larkins 2015, Muehlmann 2013, Penglase 2014). Excluded from
policy making, criminalized drug producers nevertheless engage in social movements, protests,
and electoral politics designed to influence drug policies. Coca growers in Colombia have faced
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ongoing state repression as they continue to organize as peasant farmers demanding the implementation of transformative development policies (Ramírez 2011). Their Bolivian counterparts
have influenced a sympathetic majority through strategic protest and by leveraging claims to indigenous authenticity to legitimize their coca farming, and have successfully gained significant political power (Grisaffi 2019). Following his election to the presidency, former coca grower union
leader Evo Morales has transformed domestic drug policy in Bolivia under his strategy of “coca
yes, cocaine no,” legalizing small plots of coca cultivation and expelling the US Drug Enforcement Administration from the country. In the second edition of her study of Peruvian traditional
coca use, Allen (2002) concludes with a reflection on how shifting drug policy, political violence,
and urbanization have contributed to changing ritual coca cultivation and consumption since her
original fieldwork in the 1970s. Drug policy implementation can also involve state violence reproducing plantation logics, as in the case of the militarized police attack on the West Kingston
community of Tivoli in Jamaica to enforce a US extradition order (Thomas 2019).
Drug regulation has become a central preoccupation of contemporary American political life,
as these substances have shifted in cultural, legal, and economic value and status; from medical
treatment to leisure use; and from domestic to commercial production. The policies targeting
drug users produce and reinscribe social hierarchies by race, gender, and class, contributing to the
creation of new social worlds of not only profound suffering but also forms of care and resilience
(Carr 2010, Garcia 2010, Hansen 2018, Knight 2015, Raikhel & Garriott 2013, Sue 2019). Anthropologists and others have documented the ways in which police procedures emerging from
antidrug laws reproduce and expand existing racial and gender hierarchies into new arenas in US
white rural communities (Garriott 2011) and how illegal economies intersect with land tenure and
sales (Polson 2013).
DOING ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF POLICY: ACCESS,
WRITING, AND ETHICS
Anthropologists face significant challenges in accessing ethnographic fieldsites in which policymaking decisions take place, as administrators police institutional boundaries. Such gatekeeping
may result from what Hamdy (2017, p. 288) calls “the ethnographer’s illegitimacy,” produced by
a combination of the lower status of the social sciences and institutional concern about possible
critique. Deeb & Marcus (2011, p. 51) have advocated for a new conception of fieldwork as collaborative work with policy makers, calling for “para-sites” in which orchestrated encounters with
elite research subjects enable a “mutual shift in stance from researcher-subject to epistemic partnership.” As Silverstein (2011, p. 80) points out in his critique, however, such projects have limited
application because of the “institutional zones of privacy” required by organizational leadership
and the preemptive move toward public relations rather than critique as an institutional stance
toward research and disclosure. The unstable and episodic formation of policy-making bodies,
such as commissions, congresses, and committees, can also limit researcher access (Mosse 2006,
Schia 2016, Zabusky 2002). Ethnographers employ a variety of strategies to gain access, including “embedded ethnography” (Tate 2015), in which researchers return to sites where they had
previously been employed (Fiske 2009, Greenhalgh 2008, Mosse 2005) or work through the “institutional kinship” of high-prestige networks (Ho 2009). “Studying through” offers one strategy
for addressing access issues, as anthropologists trace how policy travels, examining movement and
translation (Merry 2011, Peck & Theodore 2015, Wright & Reinhold 2011).
Issues with access can complicate the writing of “thick description,” often viewed as the highest form of ethnographic writing from the embodied and sensory experience of social relations
and practice, which is difficult to produce from a focus on bureaucratic practice or fieldwork
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that relies on documents and interviews (Dan-Cohen 2019). In many cases, policy makers, especially those employed in government, may have doctorates and better-paid and higher-status
positions than anthropological researchers, and offer researchers only limited interview time
rather than the “deep hanging out” of classic fieldwork. Riles (2001, p. 20) described her writing
on the use of documents through networks of Fijian bureaucrats and activists at a United Nations conference as “thin composition.” Jackson’s (2013, p. 153) “thin description” of the African
Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem offers instructive insights for anthropologists examining policy.
Jackson (2013, p. 14) reclaims thin description as a “way of knowing that privileges continued nonknowing,” as anthropologists research “nonplaces” and recognize the impossibility of “embodying
an expertise that simulates (and maybe even surpasses) any of the ways in which the people being
studied might know themselves.” Povinelli (2011, p. x) reports that her analysis of the impacts of
government land policies on Australian Aboriginals was described as “austere ethnography”; in
part she describes this choice as an ethical imperative to protect Aboriginal communities from
further government intervention.
Anthropology of policy requires reconceptualizing the ethical codes designed for projects that
study down (i.e., study subjects with less power than the researcher). “Studying up” (Gusterson
1997, Nadar 1972) may involve ethnographic research with public figures whose role cannot be
anonymized. Wedel (2001, p. 223) argues that, when conducting research within powerful bureaucratic institutions, the ethical codes for journalists are more useful for anthropologists than those
enshrined in the AAA and are, furthermore, legible to officials who are used to engaging with the
press. Journalistic ethical codes include rules about publication (on-the-record interviews or background), attribution, and fact-checking. The AAA’s first statement of professional responsibility is
“First, do no harm.” Aside from the problem of presupposing a unified notion of harm, anthropologists engaged in critiquing powerful institutions and their effects in exacerbating existing social
inequalities and other forms of oppression may be accused of harming them. Powerful subjects
may use anthropological codes of ethics to contest anthropologists’ findings, as in the case of
Mosse (2006) and his ethnographic analysis of development policy in a project sponsored in India
by a British governmental aid agency where he had worked for more than a decade as a consultant.
His former colleagues featured in the book lodged an ethics complaint with his university’s ethics
committee and the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth on
the grounds that Mosse (2005) had not preserved their anonymity and attempted (unsuccessfully)
to halt the publication of his book.
POLICY-RELEVANT ANTHROPOLOGY: HISTORIES, GENRES,
AND CULTURES OF IMPACT
Anthropology has a long history of producing knowledge intended to inform policy making as a
form of political engagement beyond the academy (Hinshaw 1980). Franz Boas and his colleagues
addressed their research to policy makers’ debates over race as well as related issues of immigration
(Anderson 2019), including Boas’s (1912) anthropomorphic study of 18,000 immigrants and their
children for the US Immigration Commission that he presented to Congress. In the US academy,
white anthropologists studied small-scale societies abroad, and as Borneman (1995, p. 667) argues,
their research within US Native populations was understood “as part of a global strategy in dealing with foreignness”; therefore, foreign policy and the ways in which US institutions dealt with
and addressed foreign, exotic populations were the natural site for anthropological intervention.
Cyril Belshaw (1976), who was a colonial administrator in the South Pacific before completing his
doctorate in anthropology at the London School of Economics in the 1940s, argued that British
anthropology had always been centrally preoccupied with policy, through its origins in colonial
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administration including the work of Edward Evans-Pritchard and Max Gluckman. With the
expansion and professionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline during the midtwentieth century, the application of ethnographic research to the objectives of organizations outside the academy was defined as applied anthropology, which was institutionalized in 1941 via the
founding of the Society for Applied Anthropology (https://www.appliedanthro.org). According to the mission statement on the website, “in order to affect policy at all levels, the Society
must promote anthropological interests, tools, methods and insights with a very broad array of
policy makers.” Yet anthropologists working within the academy continue to debate how and to
what ends they should be involved in research designed to influence policy-making processes,
in part spurred by contemporary discussions about the purpose and audience for ethnographic
research—what Marcus (2002) has termed the “crisis of reception.”
For some anthropologists, this means writing in distinct policy genres. In addition to producing ethnographies published by university presses and oriented toward the theoretical questions
of the discipline, they translate their findings into policy reports and briefs tailored to specific
policy interventions. Such writing generally follows a distinct set of genre conventions, including
short length, a focus on extracted empirical data rather than discussions of ethnographical method,
an orientation to specific existing public policy problems or questions, and the elimination of
academic theories and jargon. The Maternal Health Project in Harlem resulted in an academic
ethnography, Stress and Resilience: The Social Context of Reproduction in Central Harlem (Mullings &
Wali 2001), and produced community resources through the Harlem BirthRight Project. In addition to the general drug policy reform recommendations presented in the concluding chapter of
Righteous Dopefiend (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009), an ethnography of homeless drug users, medical anthropologist Philippe Bourgois has published extensively in public health journals, including
an article (Bourgois 2002) arguing that ethnographic methods can produce critical insights into
public health questions addressing specific policy concerns. Grisaffi (2014, 2019) has published his
findings as an academic ethnography examining the political culture of coca farmers in Bolivia as
well as in a policy brief published in coordination with an advocacy nongovernmental organization
based in Cochabamba directed toward debates over cocaine paste production.
Some funders and disciplinary associations are now encouraging or even requiring that research
have a public impact such as influencing policy making. In the US anthropological academic infrastructure, concern about direct impact is often viewed with more suspicion, to such an extent
that anthropologists who produce public-facing writing are frequently admonished by academics
that such work is a distraction from their academically significant scholarship and violates the traditional anthropological ethic of nonintervention. In an effort to combat such views, in 2011 the
AAA adopted guidelines for evaluating scholarship in the realm of public-interest anthropology for
academic promotion and tenure. In these guidelines, the AAA stated explicitly that “reports, media
or other products in addition to traditional peer-reviewed journal and book publications. . .become
part of anthropologists’ curricula vitae and promotion and tenure dossier.” American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the association, began publishing reviews of public scholarship in 2010.
The 2014 Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom introduced the so-called impact requirement, which requires evaluation of the reach and significance of research beyond the
academy, known as the Impact Agenda, with significant consequences for research funding.
Some have turned to examining the negative effects that anthropological research can have in
public policy and debates, what some call “GrImpact” in reference to the UK Impact Agenda
(Mitchell 2014). Such reflections are not new; Price (2008, 2011, 2016) has written a threevolume critique of the collaboration of anthropologists with US military and national security
agencies during much of the twentieth century. Collectives such as the Network of Concerned
Anthropologists (2009) continue to organize against the incorporation of ethnographic research
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into US military operations. In his wide-ranging critique of anthropological research on Africa,
Nyamnjoh (2015, p. 48) argues that “much anthropology today is little different from an evangelical and ideological commitment to saving souls, saving situations, winning converts and ‘giving
back,’” and instead calls for “a negotiated, inclusive and accountable ethics.” Lewis’s (1966) infamous project, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York,
launched the concept of the culture of poverty, arguably one of the most influential anthropological concepts to cross over into public debate over the causes and results of poverty and influence
generations of policy prescriptions. The definition and use of the term culture of poverty have
been extensively critiqued by anthropologists even as the concept remains widely deployed in
policy debates to justify regressive policies. This case and others demonstrate that an anthropology of policy must address not only the study of how policies are produced and implemented but
also the ways in which anthropological knowledge circulates within the discursive terrain of policy
making.
Assessing impact and interacting with policy makers pose significant challenges and can result in the distortion of research findings based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork. In If Truth
Be Told: The Politics of Public Anthropology (Fassin 2017), contributors examined a range of issues
involving efforts to impact policy making and influence multiple publics. Shange (2019, p. 152)
concludes Progressive Dystopia with an account of how her ethnographic writing was “implicated in
the school’s disciplinary technologies” that she critiques. Besteman (2010) elaborates on the difficulties anthropologists face when directly engaging policy “because of the nature of United States
policy goals, the relative power of anthropologists vis-á-vis [sic] policymakers, and the incompatibility of ethnographic knowledge with the epistemological demands of policymaking.” Being
policy relevant means being attached to current policy issues and knowledge production. Other
timescales that could illuminate policy impacts, such as decades-long agricultural, environmental,
and reproductive cycles, are invisible and discounted. Andersson (2018) offers an autoethnography of his efforts to produce anthropological expertise on migration for European Union and
other migration officials, in which he argues that emerging institutional incentives to engage with
high-level policy officials do not easily map onto the ethnographic analysis of the complex systems producing the immigration “crisis.” He also raises a broader question of the degree to which
a desire for policy relevance shapes the subject of research, and the production of ethnographic
narratives in the service of policy relevance. As Greenhouse (2011, p. 110) argues in her review
of urban anthropological studies of US inner cities, “to the extent that ethnographers write the
relevance of their work in relation to current policy debates, they furnish social description with
images, story lines, and purposes already in circulation. Announcing relevance in this way imposes
strictures on interpretation, if only because policy relevance entails a priori claims with respect to
identity and meaning, deploying identities rather than exploring them.” These efforts and others
demonstrate that anthropologists cannot control the ways in which ethnographic knowledge is
mobilized in policy debates and that translating ethnographic research into policy is a frequently
fraught endeavor.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Anthropology of policy continues to sit at the juncture of tensions within the discipline as a whole,
over how to produce and assess academic and public-oriented ethnographic knowledge and how to
act on the urgent political commitments produced through ethnographic study. In this concluding
section, I briefly trace two paths forward: (a) anthropology of policy that emerges in dialogue and
relationship with impacted communities and (b) anthropology of policy focused on the ethnography and critique of powerful policy-making elites.
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Anthropologists of policy attempting to work in alliance with impacted populations can draw
on the long history of Black feminist research and participatory action research. Williams (1995,
p. 25) argues for the expansive concept of “homework,” to “gather information in order to be an
informed citizen capable of acting in a morally conscientious manner toward a particular category of persons who share the identity fellow citizen.” As McClaurin (2001, p. 16) writes in the
introduction to the edited volume Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics,
“the research of Black feminist anthropologists is frequently directed toward action and achieving some outcome that will help ameliorate the oppressive/subordinate conditions to which Black
women historically have been and continue to be subjected.” As to the specific role of Black women
anthropologists in Black feminist anthropology, McClaurin (2001, p. 16) continues, “we seek to
fashion an engaged, scholarly, reflexive, and political anthropology—what Faye Harrison calls ‘an
anthropology for liberation. . .[where] knowledge production and praxis are inseparable.”’ Shange
(2019, p. 10) argues for an “abolitionist anthropology. . . . Emerging from deep relationality with
ancestors and contemporaries, its practice is a mode of reparative caring that seeks to be accountable to what is unaccounted for in social reform schemes.” Writing about his relationship with the
African Hebrew Israelites he studied, Jackson (2013, p. 278) advocates being an “anthropological
social critic whose engagement with the world begins by treating other subjects/informants as fully
embodied and affective interlocutors.” Decolonizing Ethnography (Bejarano et al. 2019) provides a
model of ethnographic participatory action research. The authors, including a professor of anthropology, a graduate student, and community activists, offer a guide to working with community
members, in this case undocumented immigrants in the United States, to produce ethnographic
policy knowledge in dialogue and relationship with the studied community. For these scholars,
ethnographic informants from impacted communities may pursue action focused on governing
institutions, or may view such a focus as incompatible with liberation. The emergence of policyoriented research from ethnographic studies with impacted populations is not predetermined, but
could be one of many strategies including mutual aid, protest, activism, court testimony, and policy
advocacy (Hale 2008).
Replacing the “savage slot” with a focus on the powerful is an alternative way forward for anthropologists of policy (Trouillot 2004). Vera Green (1972, p. 102), who worked as a social worker
before completing her PhD in anthropology, noted that “members of the discipline have fallen
short of being effective speakers for the ‘studied.’” She urged the discipline to consider how “anthropologists have tended toward a one-sided approach, not recognizing that partial studies of
the oppressed are of limited use, especially in the absence of even partial studies of the oppressors
and the ways in which their institutions operate to control the oppressed” (Green 1972, p. 102).
Green’s analysis echoes Nadar’s (1972) call to study up of the same year; this approach has been
taken up in multiple ways since (Gusterson 1997) and remains a powerful call. In her critique of
how the funding and prestige structures of anthropology reward particular approaches to immigration without any perceivable impact on the suffering of the migrants they study, Cabot (2019,
p. 271) advocates both working reflexively and humbly with refugee populations and “directing
the ethnographic gaze toward elites in the refugee regime, not merely to enact critique for its own
sake but rather to document the ethical-moral, bureaucratic, and political complexities of these
worlds. Especially for elite anthropologists from the Global North, a more responsible way of
dealing with problems of power and co-optation may be to focus not on border crossers but on
police, border guards, bureaucrats, and humanitarian actors.”
In these ways, anthropology of policy conducted from within the academy can contribute
to decolonizing practices (Allen & Jobson 2016, Harrison 1997, Todd 2018). As Tuck & Yang
(2012) remind us, however, such an effort cannot be simply rhetorical. Both approaches are particularly challenging for the growing number of contingent and marginally employed academic
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anthropologists. The first involves a commitment to produce policy analysis alongside those communities impacted by policy interventions, documenting their views and practices not as predetermined problems but as alternative, legitimate, and meaningful ways of understanding the social
issues at hand and committing to transformative political alliances with such communities. The
second requires reframing the problem to be studied not as the populations to be managed but
as the powerful political actors who define policy problems and their managing systems, administrators, and rules. These approaches are possible paths for anthropologists grappling with the
simultaneous expansion of policy regulation in daily life, and of crises both within and beyond the
academy.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lori Allen, Amahl Bishara, Graham Denyer Willis, Sherine Hamdy, Alex Fattal, Mary Beth Mills,
Naomi Schiller, and Stephanie Sevall provided thoughtful comments on early drafts; all errors
remain my own.
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