Anthropology of Modern Problems: Applied Anthropology

Applied Anthropology

• The use of anthropological findings, concepts, and methods to accomplish desired ends

• 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

History of Applied Anthropology

• First associated with British colonialism

– During the 19th century, e.g., Britain employed anthropologists to help in the administration of colonies

– subjugated people, local populations

– were meeting needs of employer but not necessarily the local people

• Association of applied with colonialism made negative impression and was difficult to overcome

• Applied anthropology really took off again during WWII

– Anthropologists helped in war efforts

• Society of Applied Anthropology founded at Harvard (1941)

• More anthropologists doing applied work at that time than any time previous

• Accomplishments:

– helped establish government policy on food rationing

– provided cultural data on allies and adversaries

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

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.

• Roles of applied anthropologists include policy researcher, evaluator, impact assessor, planner, research analyst, needs assessor, trainer, advocate, expert witness, administrator, manager, cultural broker.

Responsibility to people and animals

• The primary ethical obligation of the anthropologist is to the people, species, or materials he or she studies

– must respect the safety, dignity, and privacy of the people, species, or materials we study

– should obtain the informed consent of the people to be studied and of those whose interests may be affected by the research

– Anthropologists may gain personally from their work, but they must not exploit individuals, groups, animals, or cultural or biological materials

Responsibility to scholarship and science

• 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

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

Ethics Pertaining to Applied Anthropology

• The same ethical guidelines apply to all anthropological work—academic and applied

• 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

Drawbacks of Applied Anthropology

• Participant observation takes a long time, can't just go in and immediately solve problems

• Anthropologists 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 anthropologist knows best, can't think that you know everything

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

Anthropology and Education

• Anthropology has helped facilitate the accommodation of cultural differences in classroom settings.

• Examples include English as a second language taught to Spanish-speaking students; the application of linguistic relativism in the classroom to B.E.V.; multicultural education

Urban Anthropology

• Human populations are becoming increasingly urban

• Urban anthropology is the cross-cultural and ethnographic study of global urbanization and life in cities

• Applying anthropology to urban planning starts by identifying the key social groups in the urban context

• Urban Anthropology

– cross-cultural variation in crime organization

– and in family structure

– understanding culture of homelessness

Medical Anthropology

• Medical anthropology is both academic (theoretical) and applied (practical)

– Medical anthropology is the study of disease and illness in their sociocultural context

• cross-cultural differences in perceptions of pain, causes of disease, and cures

• holistic perspectives on disease and health

– Disease is a scientifically defined ailment

– Illness is an ailment as experienced and perceived by the sufferer

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

• For example, Latin American women are believed to be susceptible to susto, an illness caused by fright. Its symptoms --including lethargy, vagueness, distraction

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

Health-Care Specialists

• All cultures have health-care specialists (e.g., curers, shaman, doctors)

• Health-care specialists emerge through a culturally defined process of selection and training

Lessons from Non-Western Medicine

• often more successful at treating mental illness than Western medicine

• often explain mental illnesses by causes that are easier to identify and combat

• diagnose and treat the mentally ill in cohesive groups with full support of their kin

Western Medicine

• 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

Biomedicine surpasses non-Western medicine in many ways

• Thousands of effective drugs

• Preventive health care

• Surgery

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

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, cross-cultural expertise, and focus on cultural diversity

Anthropology and International Development

• Until about 1950s, Western powers generally agreed that industralization was beneficial process of progress

• It clearly served the purposes of growing capitalist economies, and many believed it good for all

Intervention Philosophy

• The idea for development was to recreate in nonindustrial countries the same conditions experienced in the 18th-c West

• Out of this came an INTERVENTION PHILOSOPHY: a rationale for outsiders to guide economic development in what had become the Third World, all under the guise of benefiting indigenous people

Failed Intervention

• Beginning in 1950s efforts began to focus on acute problems like drought, famine, and population growth

• Many such projects failed because they failed to identify and harness local resource potential

• Others failed because of inappropriate technologies

• Other problems can be traced to their subordinate position in the nation-states in which they exist

• Let’s look at an example of failure

Sisal Agriculture in Brazil

• In northeast Brazil the local peasant subsistence economy suffered from occasional droughts

• People would migrate to coast for work

• To alleviate problem, Brazilian government introduced sisal, a drought-resistant crop

• Sisal could not be eaten, but could be sold to acquire cash (hence, cash economy)

• To prepare for market, sisal had to be processed

• Processing requires machinery, called disfiberer, that only elite could afford to buy

• While transitioning to sisal, farmers took work in processing plants

• Two jobs available: machine operators and sweepers

• Once farmers made commitment to sisal production, two factors kept them dependent on wage labor:

– the price of sisal dropped consistently over the protracted period before productive harvest (four years)

– no turning back: once sisal was in, its root system took over the soil and was difficult to eradicate to return land to subsistence production

Sisal Agriculture in Brazil

• Program backfired:

– loss of autonomy (farmers dependent on machine owners)

– new inequality among peasants (machine operators vs. sweepers)

– widened gap between land owners and peasants

– increased migration to coast for wage labor

– chronic nutritional stress, particularly among children

Goals for Successful Development

• Programs must be compatible with indigenous culture

• Anthropologists have the conceptual tools to identify social and cultural variation relevant to the design and implementation of programs

• Respond to locally perceived needs for change

• Many programs suffer from overinnovation, such as elaborate technology

• Too often innovations require huge costs and massive social and cultural change to maintain

• Harness traditional resources and organizations

– use “appropriate technology”: technology that takes advantage of locally abundant resources (such as labor)

– target existing social structures, such as lineages, to facilitate diffusion

• Have a proper and flexible social design for implementation

• Too many projects suffered from underdifferentiation: ill-founded assumptions about like-mindedness of people

Other Realms of Applied Anthropology

• 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

• 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

• Psychological Anthropology

– a broad, multidisciplinary organization of individuals interested in cultural, psychological, and social interrelations at all levels

• Archaeology and Historic Preservation

– protecting cultural resources from unnecessary destruction

– preservation planning

– developing educational resources on history and prehistory

• Forensic anthropology

– within the specialized area of osteology--the study of bones--comes the application of the methods and techniques of analyzing skeletal remains to cases of legal importance

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

– the culture of a small group of human beings with limited perspective

• 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