Consider, as an alternative model, a case I read about in, I’m not kidding, Harvard Business Review. The researchers in question were looking for ways to improve nutrition for kids in impoverished rural villages in Vietnam. For several years the region in question had been the target of big, top-down aid efforts that had not been able to address this problem effectively.

Then someone noticed that in every village studied, while most children were malnourished some were plainly not, despite the fact that there was no significant difference in the economic status of their parents. Closer investigation revealed that the mothers of the better nourished children had discovered and were exploiting local resources of which other mothers were unaware. One example was snails that grow in rice paddies that turned out to be a good source of protein.

The program that worked took advantage of this local knowledge by identifying these mothers and the resources they had discovered, promoting the mothers as local heroes and paying them to teach what they had learned to others. One complication was, of course, the danger of overexploiting and destroying the resources in question (wiping out all the snails would eliminate that source of protein, for example). But this turned out to be a problem that other villagers could recognize and work together to resolve.

The moral of this tale is, of course, that speaking on behalf of the marginalized had nothing to do with this success. Careful attention to local models and local knowledge and providing programmatic support, in particular making it worthwhile for local innovators to share what they had discovered—that’s what did the trick.

That doesn’t mean that anthro is necessarily opposed to policy; theoretically, an ideal situation can be created in which such tensions are resolved. Tax’s action anthropology was one attempt to create just such a situation; whether it was successful or not is unclear. It was *modest*, though, and for it’s modest aims it seems to have achieved modest successes; on the scale of, say, third-world development, it’s hard to say whether it mightn’t have collapsed into the same old story — siding with policy-makers or with anthropological subjects.

Most activist anthropologists I know of are profoundly suspicious of top-down efforts at social change. Books like Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” and Hardt and Negri’s “Empire” come to mind. There is a certain anarchist bent to much contemporary leftist social theory. This (anti-policy) position has been best articulated in Piven and Cloward’s book: “Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail.”

This is not to say I agree with all this. I’m not an anarchist. But I do think it explains why so many activist anthropologists are unwilling or uninterested in engaging in policy making.

Personally, I think we need a healthy mix of grassroots movements and policy makers. I find it strange that so many of the anarchist-leaning anthropologists I know quote both Foucault and Gramsci at length, considering how seriously both of those two scholars took policy debates.

Another answer might come from Bourdieu. It seems to me that many anthropologists would loose their political capital as people who speak for the marginalized if they suddenly had to speak for the state as well.

In Canada, it seems to go without saying that applied anthropology not only exists but is necessary. Perhaps it’s because so much of Canadian anthro is involved with Native rights . . .

Based on my own, rather different, experience, I am always surprised when discussions of applied anthropology shift, as they so often do, to portraying the applied anthropologist as playing the role of defense attorney in the court of public opinion.

As for the identity issue . . . I think that’s a largely personal thing and has to do with the extent to which a person wants to incorporate this into their self-concept. This, in turn, has a lot to do with a person’s relationship with their discipline: is it a profession or a way of life? Is it a stream of academic knowledge or a worldview (for the individual in question). To what extent does an anthropological perspective shape that person’s life in terms of choosing a way of life, making important decisions, influencing their own belief system and resulting actions, etc.

None of these are better or worse than the others – each individual needs to clarify that for themselves.

In between grad school and the time I actually got a job teaching anthro, I felt fairly comfortable identifying as such. However, I’ve had visceral reactions in the past to people calling themselves “anthros” without having a clear idea of what an anthro is – just romanticised ideas about the lone ethnographer or the adventurous archaeologist.

This leads me to another thought: is there a distinction between one’s identity as an anthropologist and one’s identity as a professor/teacher? Is one an anthropologist who professes or teaches or a professor/teacher who teaches anthropology (in the case, of course, of people trained in anthropology who are teaching or professing it).

True. Past posts on morality and Anthropology by Dustin (again) come back to mind here.

“..fascinating about anthropology is that it is eager to embrace political activism (particularly here on SM) to change the world, but becomes remarkably more shy when asked to do policy stuff. Why is that… ?”

Perhaps because anthropologists loose some of their anthropologist reputation when explicitly engaging in “policy stuff”? Perhaps because other sociocultural approaches that programmatically are engaged in politics have adopted anthropology’s genuine tool of ethnography? Perhaps because not engaging in “policy stuff” is one of the few distinctions from other disciplines that leaves to anthropology?
Dunno.

“Maybe the problem is partially that anthropology is rarely discussed as having an applied aspect to it, like political science is. And yet it clearly does have an applied aspect, as evidenced by people who use it to get jobs in the private sector.”

Perhaps applied praxis is best suited for engagement in public policy issues. But the applied sector is often marginalized by the larger anthropological community. Saying “I am an anthropologist” receives a different reaction than “I am an applied anthropologist.” However it is the applied section that is most engaged with the private sector.

The public’s understanding [or lack] of what anthropology is and does contributes greatly to its perception. Just adding “anthropology” to a resume doesn’t do much. Since the public is not aware, a practical introduction that includes applied-oriented benefits of an anthropological perspect is also needed.

Saying “I am an anthropologist” never works as the opening remark in a presentation, nor for that matter in any situation where it would be a claim to authority. It can, however, be useful when stated as “I was trained as an anthropologist” or “I did my Ph.D. in anthropology” in the informal stage of building a business relationship. There it shows that I have an unexpected depth, something that differentiates me from straight business people and makes me a bit more interesting.

Why? Because many executives spend much of their time looking for people who can add unexpected value to planning or negotiations or are simply delighted to find someone to whom they can comfortably reveal, for example, a tour in the Peace Corps or an interest in another culture that goes beyond the usual expat club bromides.

Think of it this way: As an employeer I’m looking for someone who offers competence (useful skills), relevance (knows my business), and, if possible, something more. Anthropology can sometimes be that icing on the cake.

As opposed to all those other questions that _aren’t_ socially constructed? :P

Like the medievalist or art historian I mentioned, the anthropologist has a particular problem demonstrating relevance to employer or client. The old saw about liberal education being training in critical thinking has become so routine that it has no specific force. From the employer/client side, it amounts to nothing more than “I am trainable” and assumes an employer/client willing to invest in training.

Recent years have, however, seen a spurt of interest in anthropologists and anthropological research in advertising and marketing. Why? The value of traditional marketing research paradigms based on surveys and focus groups has declined as a result of both product proliferation and the fragmentation of mass markets. Marketers now turn to anthropologists in hope of fresh insights that conventional research paradigms no longer seem to deliver.

The most successful anthropologists/market researchers are people like Paco Underhill or, in a very different style, Grant McCracken, who have aggressively seized this opportunity to sell the way in which they do anthropologoy as a source of the insights their clients want. This window of opportunity is, however, becoming increasingly crowded as others leap in, positioning themselves as ethnographers/trend trackers/cool hunters, etc., with or without formal anthropological training.

This is the material context in which current our current disciplinary emphasis on political correctness and endless repetition of jaded old/new-left critique leaves too many anthropologists looking absolutely clueless when they look for non-academic jobs. (And no, I am not writing from a “capitalism, love it or leave it” standpoint. Just applying a bit of that old-fashioned look-at-the-relations-of-production first attitude I learned from my Marx-influenced teachers.)

An individual with a background in political science who is hired to work political opinion polling because his poli sci expertise is helpful in that field will probably have no trouble identifying himself as a political scientist, and will probably get little disagreement from people who work academic political science.

But an anthropologist who is hired to work for an NGO because their expertise in anthropology is useful in accomplishing the goals of the NGO seems much less likely to identify themself as an anthropologist, and even if they do, seems very unlikely to get approval from people who clearly work anthropology in academia.

Maybe the problem is partially that anthropology is rarely discussed as having an applied aspect to it, like political science is. And yet it clearly does have an applied aspect, as evidenced by people who use it to get jobs in the private sector.

So here I am, with a role set that includes anthropologist, adman, activist, member of the league of husbands happily married to very smart women, soon to be grandfather as well as the writer and translator that procure my livelihood. Being an anthropologist is certainly important to me, but in no way is it all of me. I wonder how others here would describe themselves and how heavily “anthropologist” weighs in their self-descriptions.

Perhaps because I’m committed to interdisciplinary work I’m also sympathetic to the critique of any discipline as an identity, although such identification seems, to me as an outsider, especially self-consciously strong among anthropologists.

I do think the way forward is not naively to say that we should do policy, or to presume that engagement in the world requires a whole series of normalizations. The other obvious point is that the identity “anthropologist” is itself a product of larger processes (in which “policy” is already implicated), but that’s hardly a new insight.