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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.
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Applying Anthropology
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• 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 first assoc. w/ British colonialism
– During the 19th century, e.g., Britain employed anthros to help in the administration of colonies.
– subjugated people, local pops
– were meeting needs of employer but not necessarily the local people
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Association of Applied w/ colonialism made negative impression and was difficult to overcome.
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Applied anthro really took off again during WWII.
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Anthro helped in war efforts
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Society of Applied Anthro founded at Harvard (1941)
• More anthropologists doing applied work at that time than any time previous
• Accomplishments:
– helped establish gov. policy on food rationing.
– provided cultural daa on allies and adversaries.
– relocation of Japanese-American interns on the West coast.
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• 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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• 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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• 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.
• Cultural anthros in an applied situation want to bring about change.
– i.e. Star Trek “prime directive”-do not interfere or change societies for better or worse.
– Because hard to judge long-term effect of change.
• Roles of applied anthros include policy researcher, evaluator, impact assessor, planner, research analyst, needs assessor, trainer, advocate, expert witness, administrator, manager, cultural broker.
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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Participant observation takes a long time, can't just go in and immediately solve problems.
• Anthros get wrapped up in "their" people, lose the go-between attitude so don't work well with the managers of the projects.
• Lack quantitative data, numbers, but this is changing.
• Idea that the anthro knows best, can't think that you know everything.
• Cultural relativism appears in conflict to loyalty to gov. employer.
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• 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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• 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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• 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.
• Education and Anthropology
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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Thousands of effective drugs
• Preventive health care
• Surgery
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• 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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• 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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• Nutritional Anthropology
– to encourage research and exchange of ideas, theories, methods and scientific information relevant to understanding the socio-cultural, behavioral and political-economic factors related to food and nutrition;
– to promote practical collaboration among social and nutritional scientists at the fields and program levels.
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Political Anthropology
– Its members share interests in issues of contemporary importance in the fields of political and legal anthropology, including nationalism, citizenship, political and legal processes, the state, civil society, colonialism and post-colonial public spheres, multiculturalism, globalism, immigration, refugees, and media politics.
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Psychological Anthropology
– a broad, multidisciplinary organization of individuals interested in cultural, psychological, and social interrelations at all levels.
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• 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.
• Careers in Anthropology
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Case study: Oral rehydration therapy in Pakistan
– A study by the Mulls in rural Pakistan showed widespread ignorance or rejection of ORT by mothers despite the fact that the use of ORT has been promoted on a national level by the Ministry of Health since 1983, and packets of oral rehydration solution (ORS) are available free of charge through government health outlets; also, more than 18 million packets of ORS are produced annually by
Pakistan’s own pharmaceutical industry.
– The researchers found that many of the mothers were ignorant of how the ORS should be used, and some of them saw the diarrhea (which was very common in that area) as a natural and expected part of teething and growing up and not as an illness. Some believed it was dangerous to try to stop the diarrhea, lest the trapped ‘heat’ within it spread to the brain and caused a fever.
– Others explained infant diarrhea as due to certain folk illnesses such as nazar (evil eye), jinns
(malevolent spirits) or sutt (a sunken or fallen fontanelle said to cause difficulty in infant sucking), which should be treated with traditional remedies or by traditional healers without recourse to ORT.
– Some of these mothers did not connect the fallen fontanelle with severe dehydration, and tried to raise it by applying sticky substances to the top of the infant’s head or pushing up on the hard palate with a finger.
– Many mothers in the group saw diarrhea as a ‘hot’ illness which required a ‘cold’ form of treatment, such as a change in maternal diet or giving certain foods and herbs to the infant, in order to restore the sick infant to a normal temperature.
– They classified most Western medicines, such as antibiotics and even vitamins, as also ‘hot’, and therefore inappropriate for a diarrheal child. A few even rejected ORS (which contains salt) because they thought that salt ‘was bad for diarrhea’.
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• Work with the people to form a better understanding of the causes of rejecting a “western” medicine.
• Contact leaders and chiefs to allow treatment.
• As this and other case studies illustrate, there-fore, health care programs should always be designed not only to address medical concerns, but also to involve community participation.
• They need to take into account the specific needs and circumstances of different communities, their social, cultural and economic backgrounds, and what the people living in them actually believe about their own ill health and how it should be treated.
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