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Supplements
The following students supplements are available with the
textbook:
• The Kottak Anthropology Atlas, available shrink-wrapped
with the text, offers 26 anthropology related reference
maps.
• The Student's Online Learning Center features a large
number of helpful study tools and self quizzes, interactive
exercises and activities, links, readings and useful
information at www.mhhe.com/kottak.
• PowerWeb, available via a link on the Student's Online
Learning Center, offers help with online research by
providing access to high quality academic sources."
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Overview
This chapter discusses the role of applied anthropology. It discusses
the ways in which it is related to and separate from academic
anthropology. It also discusses in depth several fields of applied
anthropology such as urban anthropology, medical anthropology, and
forensic anthropology.
Applying Anthropology
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Introduction
• Applied anthropology refers to the application of anthropological data,
perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve social
problems.
• Applied anthropologists work for groups that promote, manage, and
assess programs aimed at influencing human social conditions.
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Applied Anthropology
• Applied anthropologists come from all four subfields of anthropology.
• Biological anthropologists work in public health, nutrition, genetic
counseling, substance abuse, epidemiology, aging, mental illness, and
forensics.
• Applied archaeologists locate, study, and preserve prehistoric and
historic sites threatened by development (a.k.a. cultural resource
management).
• Cultural anthropologists work with social workers, businesspeople,
advertising professionals, factory workers, medical professionals,
school personnel, and economic development experts.
• Linguistic anthropologists frequently work with schools in districts
with a wide range of languages.
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The Role of the Applied
Anthropologist
• Anthropologists have held three views about applying anthropology.
• The ivory tower view contends that anthropologists should avoid
practical matters and focus on research, publication, and teaching.
• The schizoid view holds that anthropologists should carry out, but not
make or criticize, policy.
• The advocacy view argues that since anthropologists are experts on
human problems and social change, they should make policy affecting
people.
– Identify locally perceived needs for change.
– Work with those people to design culturally appropriate and socially
sensitive change.
– Protect local people from harmful development schemes.
• Kottak favors advocacy.
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Jobs for Applied Anthropologists
• Professional anthropologists work for a wide variety of employers:
tribal and ethnic associations, governments, nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs), etc.
– During World War II, anthropologists worked for the U.S. government to
study Japanese and German culture “at a distance.”
– Malinowski advocated working with the British Empire to study
indigenous land tenure to determine how much land should be left to the
natives and how much the empire could seize.
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Responsibility to people and
animals.
• The primary ethical obligation of the anthropologist is to the people,
species, or materials he or she studies.
• Researchers must respect the safety, dignity, and privacy of the people,
species, or materials we study.
• Researchers should determine in advance whether their hosts wish to
remain anonymous or receive recognition.
• Researchers should obtain the informed consent of the people to be
studied and of those whose interests may be affected by the research.
• Anthropologists who develop close relationships with individuals must
adhere to the obligations of openness and informed consent.
• Anthropologists may gain personally from their work, but they must
not exploit individuals, groups, animals, or cultural or biological
materials.
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Responsibility to scholarship and
science.
• Anthropologists should expect to encounter ethical dilemmas during
their work.
• Anthropologists are responsible for the integrity and reputation of their
discipline, of scholarship, and of science.
• Researchers should do all they can to preserve opportunities for future
fieldworkers.
• To the extent possible, researchers should disseminate their findings to
the scientific and scholarly community.
• Anthropologists should consider reasonable requests for access to their
data for purposes of research.
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Responsibility to the public.
• Researchers should make their results available to sponsors, students,
decision makers, and other nonanthropologists.
• Anthropologists may move beyond disseminating research results to a
position of advocacy.
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Ethics Pertaining to Applied
Anthropology
• The same ethical guidelines apply to all anthropological work—
academic and applied.
• Applied anthropologists should use and disseminate their work
appropriately.
• With employers, applied anthropologists should be honest about their
qualifications, capabilities, aims, and intentions.
• Applied anthropologists should be alert to the danger of compromising
ethics as a condition for engaging in research or practice.
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Academic and Applied
Anthropology
• After World War II, the baby boom fueled the growth of the American
educational system and anthropology along with it, starting the era of
academic anthropology.
• Applied anthropology began to grow in the 1970s as anthropologists
found jobs with international organizations, governments, businesses,
hospitals, and schools.
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Theory and Practice
• Like most other disciplines, anthropology boomed immediately after
the Second World War, and again in the sixties as the strengths of the
discipline fit with prevailing social interests, which began a turn
toward practical applications.
• Anthropology’s ethnographic method, holism, and systemic
perspective make it uniquely valuable in application to social
problems.
• Applied anthropologists are more likely to focus on a local, grassroots
perspective in approaching a problem than to consult with officials and
experts.
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Anthropology and Education
• In particular, anthropology has helped facilitate the accommodation of
cultural differences in classroom settings.
• Examples include English as a second language taught to Spanishspeaking students; different, culturally based reactions to various
pedagogical techniques; the application of linguistic relativism in the
classroom to B.E.V.
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Urban Anthropology
• Human populations are becoming increasingly urban.
• Urban anthropology is the cross-cultural and ethnographic study of
global urbanization and life in cities.
• Urban versus Rural
– Robert Redfield was an early student of the differences between the rural
and urban contexts.
– Various instances of urban social forms are given as examples, African
urban (Kampala, Uganda) social networks in particular.
• Applying anthropology to urban planning starts by identifying the key
social groups in the urban context.
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Medical Anthropology
• Medical anthropology is both academic (theoretical) and applied
(practical).
– Medical anthropology is the study of disease and illness in their
sociocultural context.
– Disease is a scientifically defined ailment.
– Illness is an ailment as experienced and perceived by the sufferer.
• The spread of certain diseases, like malaria and schistosomiasis, have
been associated with population growth and economic development.
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Theories of Illness
• There are three basic theories about the causes of illnesses.
– Personalistic disease theories blame illness on agents such as sorcerers,
witches, ghosts, or ancestral spirits.
– Naturalistic disease theories explain illness in impersonal terms (e.g.,
Western biomedicine).
– Emotionalistic disease theories assume emotional experiences cause
illness (e.g., susto among Latino populations).
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Health-Care Systems
• All societies have health-care systems.
• Health-care systems consist of beliefs, customs, specialists, and
techniques aimed at ensuring health and preventing, diagnosing, and
treating illness.
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Health-Care Specialists
• All cultures have health-care specialists (e.g., curers, shaman, doctors).
• Health-car specialists emerge through a culturally defined process of
selection and training.
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Lessons from Non-Western
Medicine
• Non-Western systems of medicine are often more successful at treating
mental illness than Western medicine.
• Non-Western systems of medicine often explain mental illnesses by
causes that are easier to identify and combat.
• Non-Western systems of medicine diagnose and treat the mentally ill in
cohesive groups with full support of their kin.
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Western Medicine
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Despite its advances, Western medicine is not without its problems.
Overprescription of drugs and tranquilizers
Unnecessary surgery
Impersonality and inequality of the patient-physician relationship
Overuse of antibiotics
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Biomedicine surpasses non-Western
medicine in many ways.
• Thousands of effective drugs
• Preventive health care
• Surgery
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Medical Development
• Like economic development, medical development must fit into local
systems of heath care.
• Medical anthropologists can serve as cultural interpreters between
local systems and Western medicine.
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Anthropology and Business
• Anthropologists can provide unique perspectives on organizational
conditions and problems within businesses.
• Applied anthropologists have acted as “cultural brokers,” translating
managers’ goals or workers’ concerns to the other group.
• For business, key features of anthropology include ethnography, crosscultural expertise, and focus on cultural diversity.
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Careers in Anthropology
• Because of its breadth, a degree in anthropology may provide a
flexible basis for many different careers (with appropriate planning).
• Other fields, such as business, have begun to recognize the worth of
such anthropological concepts as microcultures.
• Anthropologists work professionally as consultants to indigenous
groups at risk from external systems.
• Other employers of anthropologists include USAID, USDA, the World
Bank, private voluntary organizations, etc.
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