A “shooting ratio” is “the ratio between the total duration of its footage created for possible use in a project and that which appears in its final cut.” For a Hollywood film, where the scenes are planned in advance, this might be four to one. That is, shooting four hours of footage for every hour of the final film. Now that films have largely gone digital, producers no longer need to worry about the cost of expensive film stock, but it still costs a lot to have actors and crew out for a day and nobody wants to waste too much time shooting the same scene over and over again.

For documentary films, however, it is different. While you usually have a conception in your mind about what the final story will look like, you have to be ready to follow your subjects wherever the story takes you. For this reason the shooting ratio on a documentary film is likely to be more like 60:1, one hour of footage for each minute used in the final film. Some documentary films might even be as high as 80:1, or higher. For Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!, which is 75 minutes long, we shot over 200 hours of footage. You might interview someone for an hour but only end up using a thirty second sound bite from the whole interview. The problem is, until you are in the editing room, you never know which thirty second sound bite will be the one you need.

So what does this mean for ethnographic research? Well, one thing you can do is to start writing up your research while you are in the field. If you are editing a documentary film while shooting it makes it easier to see where the story is developing and that helps you focus your shooting on the subjects that are most likely to make it to the final cut. Similarly, if you start writing up your notes every day while in the field you will be better able to focus your efforts. Of course, that isn’t practical for everyone – especially for shorter, more intensive, field trips where you might simply be too exhausted after writing up field notes to think about editing and reviewing them as well.

On a documentary film you might pick a number of subjects that seem to have potential and then only end up using some of their stories in your ethnography. Similarly, by the time you are about half way through your fieldwork you should have a sense of who these subjects might be. Take some time to go over what you’ve collected on each of them and see what gaps you might have left out. For instance, if you are comparing two people with complementary life-trajectories, did you ask them each the same questions? Are there people you only spoke to briefly who might be worth returning to for a more in-depth interview? Here I’m talking about “people” as if it was a documentary film (which tend to be focused on “characters”) but the same questions can be asked if you are focusing on organizations or other topics. The important thing is to have a checklist for the minimal data you need and to make sure you’ve collected at least that much, with some redundancy as well.

Is there a data ratio you can aim for? Unfortunately, it is hard to quantify it in that way. I use the concept of a “shooting ratio” to get students to understand that you need to collect a lot of data in order to find that one choice nugget upon which you will hinge and entire chapter of your dissertation. Another analogy from documentary filmmaking is useful as well: “coverage.” Coverage refers to “the amount of footage shot and different camera angles used to capture a scene. When in the post-production process, the more camera coverage means that there is more footage for the film editor to work with in assembling the final cut.” In a documentary film this might mean shooting the street where a subject lives, as well as the front of their house and the walls of their living room, etc. In ethnographic research you need coverage as well. Don’t just interview a person, but interview their friends, co-workers, family members, etc. Don’t just do interviews, but also collect as much written material as you can about their activities. Also take notes on your impressions of the person and the world they live in, just as if your notes were a camera filming the street on which they live. (And, again, while I am focusing on “people” I think the same ideas apply to ideas and institutions as well.)

One reason I like putting it this way is that it focuses attention on doing fieldwork for the final written ethnography, not just to answer questions in the ethnographer’s head. Too many books I’ve read on fieldwork focus on the ethnographic investigation, even saying that you have enough data when you no longer are learning anything new. I think this is wrong. Collecting data isn’t just about learning, it is also about collecting material that can be used to flesh out a story or argument and make it come alive. Thinking like a documentary filmmaker can help you do that.

Ryan Anderson: What brought you to anthropology?  What made you choose this as your career?

Kristina Killgrove: I’ve written a bit in the past (originally as a response to a Savage Minds post on love letters for anthropology) about how I’m an “accidental anthropologist.”  I never really set out to have a career in anthropology, as I honestly wasn’t entirely sure what anthropology was until maybe my third or fourth year in college.  What eventually brought me to anthropology, though, was a dissatisfaction with the field I’d chosen to major in: classics.

I’ve been interested in the ancient Greeks and Romans since I was a kid, and I would pore through classical archaeology textbooks, looking for deeper insight into how these people lived but realizing these texts were compendia of artifacts and architecture, lazily informed by historical records. Growing up and going to college in Charlottesville, VA (not even a mile from where Thomas Jefferson excavated a Native American burial mound), I knew that archaeology could do more, and I began to delve more deeply into the larger field of anthropology towards the end of my undergraduate studies. After taking a course in human osteology at UVa, I realized that what really bugged me about those classical archaeology textbooks was the lack of analysis of the human remains themselves.  At the time (the late 90s), the number of classical archaeologists who worked with human bones (and wrote in English) could be counted on one hand.  I decided that this lack of osteological information was a huge hole in our understanding of the ancient world and figured that, with my background in the language, art, architecture, and archaeology of the classical world combined with my growing understanding of theoretically-driven US anthropology, I could add new information about a civilization that had already been studied for the better part of two millennia.

So I bounced between graduate programs in anthropology and classics, settling on anthropology for my PhD because of two things: the anthro department at UNC gave me great flexibility to choose the classes I felt were most relevant to my research, and I was more passionate about teaching about monkeys, hominids, and skeletons than Cicero, concrete, and mosaics.  It’s been challenging to combine these two fields that have very different intellectual histories, at least in US academia, but I feel like they’re coming closer together, particularly in light of recent developments in archaeological technology and digital humanities.

RA: What does “public anthropology” mean to you?

KK: The idea of a public anthropology, to me, means proactively reaching out to a variety of audiences using a variety of media to explain the basic tenets and specific research of anthropology.  Anthropology is not a subject taught in grade school like chemistry, English, or mathematics, which means that most people don’t encounter it–if they ever do–until college.  This also means that most people don’t know what anthropologists do or why it’s important.  Much more so than chemists, mathematicians, or writers, we anthropologists have to show what makes our perspective special, interesting, and important.

I also came at public anthropology accidentally, having chosen to start a blog way back in the early days of blogging as a way to practice short-form writing, the medium I’ve always felt most comfortable with.  The current iteration – PoweredByOsteons.org – started during my dissertation fieldwork and has changed over the years to encompass larger questions within anthropology and academia, along with information about my research and my thoughts on my small, rather insular field of Roman bioarchaeology.

I count myself fortunate to have found a job at the University of West Florida, which communicates very well with the public about local archaeology through the Florida Public Archaeology Network. FPAN is a statewide organization but was founded here by archaeologist Judy Bense, now our university president, and literally everyone I’ve met since moving here last year has something to say or ask about archaeology.  This history of engagement is one of the reasons I conceived of teaching this past spring’s graduate proseminar that I called Presenting Anthropology.  I wanted to create a course for our MA students that let them survey the ecology of anthropology on the web, carry out projects that could form the basis of a job or PhD application portfolio, and discuss strategies for bringing their take on anthropology to the public.

RA: What were some of the highlights of this course?  What did you come away with after teaching this for a semester?  Are you planning on teaching it again?

KK: I based Presenting Anthropology loosely on the TV show Project Runway.  I’ve always been fascinated by the show because the contestants find inspiration for their creations in the oddest places and can whip up some fantastic outfit in a few hours’ time.  But sometimes their vision comes crashing down around them.  It’s really the same with presenting anthropology – inspiration can come from anywhere, and if you don’t try to do something new and different, your audience is going to get bored.  The highlights of the course for me were the students’ projects, particularly the ones aimed at young kids (who are surprisingly under-served in anthropological outreach) and the audio and video projects.  Students who had never thought about using these media to talk about anthropology or their thesis projects submitted really clever presentations.  They learned to work with iMovie and Audacity; they used their latent skills as college radio DJs and art majors to put their own spin on the projects.  We also discussed each project in class and read articles, websites, and other online resources regarding best practices for each medium used.

I had a lot of fun with this course, but if I teach it again, it will definitely need a bit more structure, especially in terms of the reading.  There’s not a whole lot published in terms of ways to present anthropology to the public, and I didn’t have time to thoroughly dissect the bounty of literature produced by other STEM fields and communications researchers on presenting science in general.  Teaching this class really confirmed for me that most anthropologists don’t talk about the ways they present their work; we don’t have much of a meta-narrative going on in the field about best practices in either teaching or talking about anthropology.  The final assignment for this course was therefore a short seminar paper in which the students discussed their inspiration, choices, and reasoning for three of their favorite projects.  Reading their reflections on their own work was interesting and, I hope, a good exercise in epistemology for them.

RA: Earlier you mentioned the fact that the general public doesn’t really encounter anthropology, and how this makes it all the more necessary for anthropologists to speak out.  In my experience, while there is a lack of knowledge about anthropology these days, there isn’t necessarily a lack of interest among the general public.  While I run into plenty of people who ask me the “what the heck is anthropology?” question, I also meet a lot of people who are really interested in the kinds of things that anthropologists study—human history, culture, language, and so on.  I am intrigued about your mention of FPAN, and how that has served as a way to engage the surrounding community.  Why do you think this network has worked so well?  What are they doing right when it comes to public anthropology?

KK: Loads of people are interested in archaeology; it’s pretty simple to find people who want to talk about local history (or even the ancient Romans) everywhere I go.  But I also still get the “What is anthropology?” question, as the overarching academic field isn’t as well understood.  One of the things that FPAN does well is foster community interest and involvement by dealing primarily with local history and archaeology.  There are eight regional centers around the state, each with its own staff, website, and public-facing programs, and each highlights the archaeology being done in your own town or neighborhood.  Since Florida has a lengthy history of exploration and colonization, there are a number of different time periods and therefore narratives of Florida’s history.  Owing to this history and the fact we’re surrounded by water, we also have a great underwater archaeology tradition in the state. These shipwrecks produce some truly amazing artifacts, but the FPAN staff and university faculty are active in educating the public about how underwater archaeology works, how recreational divers shouldn’t disturb wrecks they find, and how important it is to conserve waterlogged artifacts.  FPAN also has field and lab volunteer opportunities, loads of talks at public libraries and historical buildings, activities like historical tours on foot and by bike, and plenty of kid-friendly things to do and see.  So, really, FPAN is a way of making sure people have basic knowledge of local history and that they know where to go with their burning questions about the stuff they find in the ground or the water. At least, that’s my perspective as still a bit of a newcomer here (and as one of the few faculty and staff who don’t do Florida archaeology). The media and activities that FPAN produces, though, were definitely an inspiration for my Presenting Anthropology course and for my own attempts to engage the public in my Old World-focused research.

RA: So here’s an issue: I think there are a good number of people who equate things like public outreach and public anthropology with a sort of “dumbing down” of the ideas of the discipline.  What’s your response to this kind of argument?

KK: It definitely takes some effort to code-switch, as it were, between talking to colleagues about your research and talking to the public.  But just because you’re using different terminology and a different approach for the public, that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily dumbing down the ideas.  As you mentioned, anthropology is, at its core, about topics many people care deeply about and can relate to – history, culture, and language.  For example, I’ve always been interested in culture contact, in migrants’ experiences in a new situation, and I’ve explored this theme in my work with Native American, Roman, and most recently Medieval German skeletal remains.  Since the U.S. is a big melting pot-slash-salad bowl of cultures, languages, and ethnicities, most of us have a family story of immigration.  Whereas my presentations at conferences will often rest on name-dropping social theorists, my presentations to the public attempt to evoke in the audience those stories or memories of travel, language difficulties, and cultural faux-pas to help them connect with the lives of people who lived two millennia ago and half a world away.

And in all honesty, I prefer giving these public lectures to giving conference presentations.  Not because I can’t “talk the talk” of anthropological theory, but because figuring out how to explain the importance of my work to a general audience is far more interesting than figuring out which latest jargon terms need to be dropped. (I based a public talk a couple years back on the similarities between the ‘We are the 99%’ of the Occupy movement and the socioeconomic structure of ancient Rome; drawing parallels between the audience’s experience and that of “the other” can be a powerful way to reach out.) If we only write for each other, and if we only give presentations for each other, anthropology will become a supremely insular discipline.  With more of us writing blogs and engaging in public outreach, though, we might be able to return to a time when anthropologists like Margaret Mead were called upon as experts in an important field of knowledge.  But both faculty and students need to learn to code-switch, to convey the same information to colleagues and the public alike.

RA: Last question.  So how should anthropology go forward from here?  What’s the best way to push the field toward deeper engagement with wider audiences?

KK: This is a difficult question, and one that people like John Hawks have been trying to answer for a couple years now (see, for example, his amazing “What’s wrong with anthropology?” essay).  In essence, though, I think anthropology needs to be more open in general, rather than clinging to the hoary, closed model of my-data-my-publications-my-truth. This will mean convincing anthropology publishers to offer more open access options, as well as convincing faculty to publish in primarily open-access venues.  It will mean convincing faculty to open their research to wide, immediate critique, and asking them to train their students to do the same.  Academia is slowly but surely moving towards large-scale open access, putting the results of our work up for the critique of our colleagues and the public.  It is potentially paradigm shifting for academia, which has a legacy of massive economic and class privilege issues, this idea of opening up the vaults of knowledge to anyone interested in the topic.

But in addition to opening up our data and publications, we need to do a better job of being open with and to the public.  We need to actively seek out opportunities to talk to the public and engage them in a conversation about anthropology.  Faculty members should take every chance they can to blog, give talks at the local library, and provide an opinion for a science journalist covering a story of anthropological interest.  Talking with the university’s PR person could help faculty hesitant to step out of the ivory tower. And faculty should encourage their students to take the pulse of their real and/or online communities and contribute to them.  The students in my Presenting Anthropology seminar, for example, found fantastic new ways to reach out that I’d never considered – many wrote (and continue to write) on tumblrs instead of longer-form blogs and have cultivated a set of followers, becoming invested in posting interesting information and gauging the reaction of the community. One student created a public archaeology project centered around FPAN and Foursquare; every two weeks, he added new media and new ideas to the project until it was fully formed and launched at the end of the semester.  And another engaged in some gutsy performative anthropology: she covered herself in stripes of paint representing soil layers and stood on the campus quad for a few hours one day with a sign inviting gawkers to talk to her about archaeology and stratigraphy. The reactions these students got from both the campus community and the public have been terrific so far.  Empowering students to engage with the public – and requiring them to engage with the public – is incredibly important in their development as anthropologists in the 21st century.

I strongly feel that by encouraging students and faculty to engage and be open with the public, we’ll have less complacency in the field of anthropology.  We can’t just write for and talk to other anthropologists; we need to dig down to the essence of our work and express those themes to a public that really does want to know what we find out and how it relates to their understanding of the world around them.

***

Ryan Anderson is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky.  He is currently in Yucatan, Mexico with his family splitting his time between writing his dissertation and being on baby duty.  He is the editor of the anthropologies project and also blogs at Anthropology in Public.  You can email him at: anthropologies project at gmail dot com, or find him on Twitter (@publicanthro).

Ryan Anderson:  First of all, thanks for doing this interview.  Let’s start off with the basics:  Why anthropology?  How and why did you end up in this field?

Sarah Kendzior: I got interested in anthropology while working as a research assistant for an anthropologist, Nazif Shahrani, while getting my MA in Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. Before I was an anthropologist, I was a journalist, but I was frustrated with the superficiality of foreign coverage. Journalists often cover foreign conflicts without knowing foreign languages, talking to local people, or examining the history and culture of the place they visit. I wanted to do things differently.

In 2004, I used to joke that anthropology was journalism with more work and less money. Of course, now there is no money in journalism either, but my point still stands. Ethnography is journalism that takes too long. I mean that not pejoratively but as an affirmation of the discipline’s values –– long-term observation; scrutiny of methodological practice; respect for history; commitment to understanding local beliefs and traditions.

I got spoiled working for Dr. Shahrani. He is an outspoken intellectual who spares no criticism of systems that he finds corrupt – including academia. He saw anthropology not as an abstraction removed from public life, but as a source of insight from which the public could benefit. In 2004, at the height of the “war on terror” and political propaganda against Muslims, this seemed a worthy goal. Dr. Shahrani is also very funny and honest and therefore left me with an erroneous impression of what anthropology, as a disciplinary institution, is like.  I applied to PhD programs in the fall of 2005. In my application essay, I wrote: “I am not only interested in writing about the world, but for it as well.” This is still true. In retrospect, it is surprising I got in so many places.

RA: And how was your experience in graduate school?  What’s your overall assessment of grad student life in anthropology?

SK: I can’t separate my grad school experience from other things going on in my life at the time. During graduate school I wrote six peer-reviewed journal articles, one policy paper, one dissertation – and had two children. My daughter was born at the end of my first year, in 2007, and my son was born as I finished my dissertation in 2011.

I was not a typical graduate student, and I didn’t have a typical graduate student life, so I’m probably not the best person to assess it. But on a personal level, it was fine. Because I’ve written critically about academia, people tend to assume I had a bad time in graduate school. This is not the case. I entered academia from the working world — graduate school felt like a luxury. My department supports its students well, and I had free tuition, a decent stipend, research money, and travel money for conferences. I worked on my own time on projects of my own choosing. I love to research and write and I enjoyed writing the dissertation.

Graduate school was easy. It was the non-existent future that I was working toward that was the problem. Every grad school path is unique, but almost all lead to the same dead end: a contingency market in which you must have both personal wealth and a willingness to accept your own exploitation to stay in the game.

I would never tell anyone not to go to graduate school. It is a personal decision, and there are many reasons to go. But I would tell them not to go to graduate school believing that your performance in graduate school has anything to do with your ability to find a full-time academic job. Academia is closer to a Ponzi scheme than a meritocracy.

RA: Looking back, is there anything you would change about your experiences in graduate school?  Anything that you think should be done differently about how we train and teach graduate students?

SK: Graduate students live in constant fear. Some of this fear is justified, like the fear of not finding a job. But the fear of unemployment leads to a host of other fears, and you end up with a climate of conformity, timidity, and sycophantic emulation. Intellectual inquiry is suppressed as “unmarketable”, interdisciplinary research is marked as disloyal, public engagement is decried as “unserious”, and critical views are written anonymously lest a search committee find them. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the Academic Jobs Wiki.

The cult mentality of academia not only curtails intellectual freedom, but hurts graduate students in a personal way. They internalize systemic failure as individual failure, in part because they have sacrificed their own beliefs and ideas to placate market values. The irony is that an academic market this corrupt and over-saturated has no values. Do not sacrifice your integrity to a lottery — even if you are among the few who can afford to buy tickets until you win.

Anthropology PhDs tend to wind up as contingent workers because they believe they have no other options. This is not true – anthropologists have many skills and could do many things – but there are two main reasons they think so. First, they are conditioned to see working outside of academia as failure. Second, their graduate training is not oriented not toward intellectual exploration, but to shoring up a dying discipline.

Gillian Tett famously said that anthropology has committed intellectual suicide. Graduate students are taught to worship at its grave. The aversion to interdisciplinary work, to public engagement, to new subjects, to innovation in general, is wrapped up in the desire to affirm anthropology’s special relevance. Ironically, this is exactly what makes anthropology irrelevant to the larger world. No one outside the discipline cares about your jargon, your endless parenthetical citations, your paywalled portfolio, your quiet compliance. They care whether you have ideas and can communicate them. Anthropologists have so much to offer, but they hide it away.

I got a lot of bad advice in graduate school, but the most depressing was from a professor who said: “Don’t use up all your ideas before you’re on the tenure track.” I was assumed to have a finite number of ideas, and my job as a scholar was to withhold them, revealing them only when it benefited me professionally. The life of the mind was a life of pandering inhibition.

I ignored this along with other advice – don’t get pregnant, don’t get pregnant (again), don’t study the internet, don’t study an authoritarian regime – and I am glad I did. Graduate students need to be their own mentors. They should worry less about pleasing people who disrespect them and more about doing good work.

Because in the end, that is what you are left with – your work. The more you own that, the better off you will be. In the immortal words of Whitney Houston: “No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity.” And in the equally immortal words of Whitney Houston: “Kiss my ass.” Both sentiments are helpful for navigating graduate school.

Academic training does not need to change so much as academic careerism. There is little sense in embracing careerism when hardly anyone has a career. But graduate school can still have value. Take advantage of your time in school to do something meaningful, and then share it with the world.

RA: How have things been for you since you graduated?  What has it been like to move beyond graduate school and academia?

SK: I’m not sure becoming the poster girl for the collapse of higher edu

cation means moving beyond academia, but overall things have gone well — albeit not in a way I had expected. I did an interview on this topic for From PhD to Life, and people can read about it there.

RA: Earlier you mentioned an adviser who sees anthropology as something that should not be removed from public life–as something that can benefit the public.  Do you share a similar vision of the discipline?  What’s your take on the role of anthropology in public life?

SK: Anthropology benefits the public. Unfortunately, it is blocked from the public, and anthropologists who engage with the public – people like David Graeber – tend to be shunned by other anthropologists, to the point where they lose their jobs. This makes younger anthropologists afraid of public engagement, even though they have valuable insights to share.

Anthropologists complain about politics and the media, but they rarely engage with either. Then they wonder why their voices are not being heard. The most obvious way anthropologists can increase their influence is by writing online. I don’t mean writing in places like Anthropology News — where you have to pay an exorbitant membership fee to leave a comment – but on real blogs, on Twitter, on mainstream media sites, and in open access journals. Publishing reprints of paywalled articles is also a good idea, and is usually legal after a period of time. I did an interview about the benefits of reprinting journal articles online with Academia.edu, which you can read here.

Anthropologists tend to forget that tenets basic to our discipline – for example, that race is a social construct and not a biological determinant of behavior – come as revelations to a lot of people. Issues of racial and religious discrimination are among the many areas where anthropologists can have a powerful voice.

I recently wrote an article for Al Jazeera, “The Wrong Kind of Caucasian”, that had a complicated premise but a simple conclusion: do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnic background or country of origin. It was read by half a million people and shared on Facebook 57,000 times. I got letters from people saying I had changed their preconceptions and that they were going to keep an open mind about race, ethnicity and immigration. It felt good to make a difference at a politically heated time.

Academics justify the paywall system by saying the public is not interested in academic research. I argue that the public has had no opportunity to decide for themselves, since access to research has always been blocked. But I have faith in the ability of non-academics to understand and appreciate academic work. Given our current political and economic situation, anthropology may be of particular interest. More than any other discipline, it tackles issues of power and corruption, paying attention not only to the powerful, but to the struggling and marginalized.

Except, of course, when it comes to the struggling and marginalized anthropologists. Rarely have I seen a group more oblivious to their own hypocrisy than the “enlightened” anthropologists ignoring the adjunct crisis. You would think such incredible structural inequality would be interesting, at least, to the anthropological mind. I know it is interesting to me.

RA: You’re writing for a lot of non-academic venues these days–Al Jazeera and so on.  How is this different from writing for academic venues and audiences?

SK: Hundreds of thousands of people read it. That is the main difference. I still write on many of the topics I studied while getting my PhD — digital media, politics, Central Asia. Stylistically, there is little difference between my Al Jazeera articles and my academic articles. The idea that academic writing needs to be abstruse is a myth. I had a pretty easy time publishing in academia — no reviewer criticized my writing style or suggested I use more jargon.

Because so many people read my work, I get a lot more feedback. Sometimes it is overwhelming. Al Jazeera is a great place to write because it has a huge international audience – I get email and tweets from people around the world, and like hearing their perspectives

That said, I enjoyed academic writing too. I don’t find it hard to move between different audiences, in part because I don’t make a distinction. Many of the people who like my Al Jazeera articles are academics; many of the people who like my academic articles are not.

RA: Above, you highlighted the fact that many anthropologists complain about their voices not being heard, yet ironically they often don’t engage much with politics or the media.  To me, this persistent disengagement paves the way for attacks on social science by the likes of Tom Coburn and Florida Governor Rick Scott.  We’ve essentially dug our own grave when it comes to public engagement–it’s easy to discount a highly insular, often silent discipline that few people have ever heard anything about.  So, in order to wrap up this interview I am going to ask you two simple questions that I hear all the time from non-anthropologists:  1) Anthropology?  What the hell is anthropology?; and 2) What are you going to do with that?

SK: You are right that academics’ lack of public engagement opens the door to political attacks. I wrote an article about this for Al Jazeera called Academic funding and the public interest.

I’m not going to answer “What is anthropology?” No one cares about our ontological debates. But here is how I would explain cultural anthropology to a layperson:

All of the social sciences – history, political science, economics, etc – study how people behave, form groups, and build a society. Each social science has its own way of figuring this out. Anthropologists believe the best way to find out what someone is thinking is to ask them. We respect that people in another community understand their own way of life better than outsiders do. We observe a community for a long period of time so that we don’t come away with hasty generalizations. We are careful when we write about others to put their words and their views before our own.

When you study anthropology, you learn about people and places that you might not otherwise. Anthropologists write about everyone – powerful and powerless, rich and poor, all races and nationalities. They explore how political decisions affect ordinary people, and how ordinary people influence politics. They look at how public perception is shaped, how social trends emerge, and how movements are formed. They ask what people expect from life, and what happens when they don’t get it.

Anthropology has a reputation for being exotic. But the point of anthropology is that exoticism fades when you get to know someone. Bigotry and prejudice fade too, which is why anthropologists used to be influential in reshaping ideas about race and ethnicity.

Anthropologists are interested in why people believe lies. For example, a large percent of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. For an anthropologist, it would not be enough to note that this is factually incorrect. They want to know why so many people believe it is true.

Anthropologists understand that the world often doesn’t run on facts, but on dreams and delusions, hopes and fears, imagination and ambition. They don’t dismiss anything as unimportant.

Now onto your second question — what are you going to do with that? First of all, higher education and the economy are both such disasters that you cannot assume any major or degree will guarantee you a good, secure life. STEM, liberal arts, law – no profession is safe. Industries are disappearing or being restructured out of existence. Practical training you get in college will likely be useless ten years from now. There are no safe bets.

So what is the point of an education? The point is to think critically, become an informed citizen, gain some specialized knowledge, gain broader insight into the world, and communicate well. Some people will say they don’t need to go to college to do this. I actually agree with that. But since college is a prerequisite for most jobs, you might as well get a solid education.

The best education is a broad education with an emphasis on primary sources, debate, and writing skills. I recommend that people study anthropology, but they should also study history, literature, religion, art, science, economics, sociology, political science, and other subjects. The constant assertion of disciplinary superiority is self-defeating. If the social sciences want to win the battle against people who want to defund us, we need to band together. We also would benefit intellectually if we read work outside our discipline and showed tolerance for alternate approaches.

I study Central Asia, a region of the world that is so understudied that there is a very small body of anthropological literature. As a result, most anthropologists draw not only from anthropological studies, but from the work of sociologists, historians, geographers and others. We also tend to read and cite non-academic work, since data on Central Asia is so limited. We have a supportive research community and no one’s knowledge is dismissed out of hand because of their background.

I also study the internet, and so I read broadly in communication, sociology, humanities and other fields. Yet when I write an article for an anthropology journal, I am expected to cite only other anthropologists. When I co-wrote a mixed-methods article with a quantitative communications scholar, and we got it published in the top communications journal, I was told by some anthropologists to leave it off my CV, because it showed I was interested in something other than anthropology. This is ridiculous. There is no need for this insecurity masked as insularity.

Anthropology is struggling as a discipline because anthropologists bank on a lofty reputation that they don’t really have while simultaneously shielding their work from the public. The public is not going to believe you have something worthy to say when you refuse to let them in on the conversation. Don’t be so afraid, anthropologists. You of all people should know the world is not what it seems.