http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012820102749246453.html

The interesting thing here is that Applied Anthropology has been around since anthropology. The largest employer is the U.S. government followed by Microsoft. Apple, Nokia, are among others in the hi tech field doing so.

A small entrepreneural marketing group in Baltimore was founded by young grads with Ph.Ds. The Atlantic ran a recent article of a similar group doing contextual market research using participant observation and interviews of how young people party with booze to see how people relate to it as part of social praxis, for example. .

Medical anthropology is one area in which applied work is essential and hiring happens, for example. Linguistic anthropologists do important work in language revitalization programs, for another.

WAPA (the DC area associaton of applied anthropologists) has a long history, with members contracting to do important work in international projects-among others.

One of my undergrads, as a result of a small ethnography of a soup kitchen and study of food scarcity in the US, found work in refugee resettlement.

I encourage all of my undergraduate students to joint the professional organizations, as well as the AAA, to develop a network of professionals early.

We don’t have to re-invent the horse…it’s there. We just need to develop connections. I fear that we suffer from history, when as a result of political events in the mid-20th C, many theoretical anthropologists withdrew into the academy and the applied arena was looked down upon. It’s time to get back to focusing on the value of applied work.

I’m an East Asianist and see opportunity everywhere for students.

I am not the sort of person who thinks society should go whole hog on deregulation, but a lot of credentials seem like so much rent-seeking: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/154826233/why-its-illegal-to-braid-hair-without-a-license

No denying that. But I think that is independent of the fact that employers tend to look for new hires with some very specific skills who they can plug and play rather than new hires with solid general skills (the ability to create accurate and legible prose, to do statistical analysis, etc.) and promise who need a few weeks of training for the task at hand.

Anyone smart enough to be in graduate school and studying a discipline that prides itself on understanding the impact of material, social and cultural factors on human lives looks pretty lame if, Ph.D. in hand, he or she hasn’t taken proactive steps in whatever direction they want to go.

I am talking from personal experience, having been a totally clueless turkey when the axe fell.

“[…] professional anthropologists are not all in academic institutions. The humanistic, versatile and multidisciplinary intellectual training of anthropologists, combined with the scientific discipline, is a good combination to work in several areas where the clientele targeted is quite heterogeneous. In addition to teaching and academic research, anthropologists can work, for example, in the following fields/posts :

– project manager
– reasearcher (government, institutions, NGOs, etc.)
– coordinator for a militant organisation (?!)
– program coordinator (social/humanitarian)
– museum curator
– recruitment coordinator (or anything HR)
– community manager/director
– Social worker (really?)
– assitant or coordinator to reasearch projects
– interpretor
– political analyst
– liaison officer”

I actually cut some items out of the list because they were quite redundant (research professional and research assistant?). There were also alot of references to community based organisations, NGOs, government, supranational instutitons, but NOTHING related to business or commerce (except indirectly for “recruitment coordinator”).

I’m guessing that faculty won’t be adding any “marketting anthropology” courses any time soon ;).

“Do you think manufacturing or financial companies will hire anthropologists because anthropology has perceived value and potential in marketing or finance?”

Definitely not.

“Some CEO’s don’t even know what anthropology is.”

You’re right about that. CEO’s and plenty of others have no idea what contemporary anthropology is all about. And that’s not their fault, it’s ours.

“What I’m saying is that anthropology departments have to be creative in training their students and making them employable.”

I agree with you that departments need to rethink training (not that any departments around the US care what I think). Right now, most of them are geared toward producing more academics. The obvious problem though is that there aren’t enough academic jobs for all these graduates. But, no matter, all these departments keep accepting new students and training them as if everything is juuuuust fine.

“Marketing Anthropology, Business Anthropology, and Financial Anthropology are better than these UCLA Anthro courses: Archaeology of Ancient China, Primate Behavior, and Talk and the Body, as far as making anthropology students skilled and employable is concerned.”

Depends on what you’re doing or what you want to do. Robert Sapolsky is a neuroscientist who works with primates (baboons) to better understand human stress. I’m sure he’d tell you that primate behavior classes can be quite valuable. I think his work is incredibly interesting–and certainly meaningful outside of academia. Again, I find a lot of value in anthropology, including courses about archaeology in ancient China. I think anthropology adds layers to our understanding of humanity that don’t exactly get covered in mandatory education (high school, etc). These added layers may not always translate directly to jobs, but I think they matter. I think specialization is fine, sure, but I also think we add a lot with a broad training in anthropology–to me that’s part of what adds the unique perspective to something like “business anthropology” or economic anthropology.

“Also, who hire Papua New Guinea experts here in the US besides universities? Employability here is important. Anthropologists who have loans need good jobs to pay them off.”

Again, it depends. I agree with you that getting jobs matters. Of course it does. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn anthropology into something that’s only concerned with appealing to the demands of the current job market. That should be part of the equation, sure, but education is about more than just getting jobs. BUT, and this is very important, if students are going bankrupt in the process then it’s basically self-defeating. What’s the point of learning critical thinking if you just end up in massive debt? That’s why we need to deal with the debt issue sooner rather than later. It takes a bad situation and makes it a lot worse.

@John:

“As far as I can make out, the only sensible path for anyone these days is a combination of looking out for yourself as well as you can and becoming politically active in pursuit of a juster world. Complaining about how the monastery is run, while the world is falling apart outside the walls, doesn’t seem like the road to salvation for anyone.”

I think you’re right that people need to look out for themselves. And maybe it is fairly useless to complain about how the monastery runs itself. As I see it, if they don’t change, they are just going to run aground. Maybe the best thing to do would be to break away from the monastery as soon as possible and seek out new paths. Hmmm. I know this: I am not putting all of my eggs in the [academic] antho basket, that’s for sure.

“Is there any evidence here to counter the proposition that what this proposal amounts to is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic?”

It probably is just that. I already said that student loans are like life rafts above…and since those aren’t really working, well, we must really be in trouble.

@Ixak:

“Here’s the problem: If there are less and less positions open for anthropologists in academia, what’s the value of a PhD? The average anthro PhD takes nine years to complete, and in most professional circles a MA and three years of experience (or a BA and 5 years of experience) is considered to be equivalent (from a hiring standpoint, at least). An MA with three years of experience is also likely to have a wider range of contacts outside of academia, and more credibility in the eyes of most professional non-academics (there’s not much appreciation for academic writing outside of academia) … So what’s the point?”

Ouch. This is depressingly accurate. You have nailed it. My solution is to rethink training and maybe retool the PhD so grads have more options. I am not sure how much interest departments around the US really have in this sort of thing. But if they don’t, and they keep training more and more academic anthropologists, well, things will only get worse. And as I wrote above, the whole debt thing just compounds everything (literally, with interest).

Thanks for the comments everyone.

In my case, after my one shot at tenure track in academia, I never got a job as an anthropologist. What got me in the door for my first job in Japan in 1980 was being a competent writer who knew more about computers than most writers did back then. The company that hired me had a daily translation account with IBM and needed an editor. What got me in the door at the Japanese ad agency where I spent thirteen years as a copywriter and creative director was the experience at the first company (I had wound up writing and editing a publication called the Sony Marketing Hotline) and lunch with a friend with whom I shared a mutual interest in personal computing. What gave me a place to go when I left the agency was being married to one of the smartest women I know, who had in the meantime established herself as one of the best Japanese-English translators in the world and founded our company back in 1984.

Does this mean that the anthropology I studied was wasted effort? Not at all. As I wrote in the conclusion to a paper that I will be giving in Shanghai in May (because some Chinese friends think that I know something about business anthropology),

“What, then, can anthropology of business contribute to anthropology in or with business? The answer is simple: perspective.

Working in advertising, I was used to short-term projects with tight deadlines and highly specific objectives. At first, I often found myself confused and frustrated, especially when my proposals were brushed aside as uninspired and old-fashioned. But as time went on and one project followed another, I began to be able to distinguish between routine or repetitious and genuinely new ideas. I slowly came to understand my clients’ and colleagues’ perspectives and how to take them into account in offering my own proposals. And what I had learned about doing ethnography from Victor Turner became increasingly valuable.

As Moeran points out in A Japanese Advertising Agency, every competitive pitch is a tournament of value (1996:92-96). My understanding the structure of the field on which the tournament occurs, the dynamics of the social drama as the tournament unfolds, the talents, strengths and weaknesses of the various players, became increasingly valuable. Being attuned to the multiple meanings of words and visual symbols and the ability to highlight those most relevant to the client sold a lot of advertising.”

Anthropology never got me a job. It made me a lot more effective at the job I did get, and combined with lucky break of following my wife to Japan just before the bubble economy of the late 1980s took off has made for a pretty comfortable as well as interesting life.

This is the experience on the basis of which I remain skeptical of programs oriented to skills in current demand versus general knowledge with a strong tech component, the street smarts I only acquired after being kicked out of academia, and the versatility on top of resilience required to be what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls antifragile.

I wish I had more to offer. Folks like Matt and Ryan, who have done so much for us all while facing their own uphill battles deserve the highest respect and all the support we can give them.

If you’re looking for work as you come out of school, employers are more interested in what you can do rather than what you know.

If anthropology wants to stay relevant it needs to be able to successfully get its students into the job market (ideally before they’ve given up on the discipline).

Here’s the problem: If there are less and less positions open for anthropologists in academia, what’s the value of a PhD? The average anthro PhD takes nine years to complete, and in most professional circles a MA and three years of experience (or a BA and 5 years of experience) is considered to be equivalent (from a hiring standpoint, at least). An MA with three years of experience is also likely to have a wider range of contacts outside of academia, and more credibility in the eyes of most professional non-academics (there’s not much appreciation for academic writing outside of academia).

So what’s the point?