Acting Anthropologically: Notes on Anthropology as Practice

2024

Applied anthropology has a long controversial history, usually traced back to the colonialist and imperialist structures of power and domination. On the other hand, over the past two decades, there has been increased interest in community-engaged research in academia. Against this backdrop, the paper invites to reflect on what can be called 'anthropological debt': the obligation of 'giving back' to the human and non-human beings we work on, to the communities we desire to mingle with, to the places we intrude into for research purposes. How is it possible to reconcile research with advocacy and action, without reproducing and creating new forms of asymmetries between the researcher and the researched? With this question in mind, the paper discusses the legitimacy and effectiveness of applied anthropology in engaging with the current social reality, by accentuating the ethico-political issues involved in this sub-discipline and reflecting on probable solutions.

2010

An Introduction to Supplement 2 by Setha M. Low and Sally Engle Merry As a discipline, anthropology has increased its public visibility in recent years with its growing focus on engagement. Although the call for engagement has elicited responses in all subfields and around the world, this special issue focuses on engaged anthropology and the dilemmas it raises in U.S. cultural and practicing anthropology. Within this field, the authors distinguish a number of forms of engagement: (1) sharing and support, (2) teaching and public education, (3) social critique, (4) collaboration, (5) advocacy, and (6) activism. They show that engagement takes place during fieldwork; through applied practice; in institutions such as Cultural Survival, the Institute for Community Research, and the Hispanic Health Council; and as individual activists work in the context of war, terrorism, environmental injustice, human rights, and violence. A close examination of the history of engaged anthropology in the United States also reveals an enduring set of dilemmas, many of which persist in contemporary anthropological practice. These dilemmas were raised by the anthropologists who attended the Wenner-Gren workshop titled "The Anthropologist as Social Critic: Working toward a More Engaged Anthropology," January 22-25, 2008. Their papers, many of which are included in this collection, highlight both the expansion and growth of engaged anthropology and the problems its practitioners face. To introduce this collection of articles, we discuss forms of engaged anthropology, its history, and its ongoing dilemmas.

Anthropology Matters, 2017

This special issue of Anthropology Matters brings together selected papers from the 5th Postgraduate Conference of the Royal Anthropological Institute with the theme 'Anthropology and the Politics of Engagement', which took place at The University of Manchester's Department of Social Anthropology on 4 and 5 June 2015. In this Introduction, we provide a summary of how the notion of engagement has developed within anthropology. In doing so, we problematise the relationship between anthropology, engagement, and politics. In addition, we explore the potential for anthropological knowledge to enrich understandings of both engagement and the politics surrounding the distribution of this knowledge. Finally, we provide an overview of the five articles that appear in this issue.

The text describes a consideration of activist anthropology, which I treat as an extension of participant observation. It stems from and builds upon the methodological eclecticism of anthropology/ ethnology. For me, activist anthropology is the closest to the original premise of participant observation because in this view the researcher's participation is possibly closest to that of the research partners. I present the theoretical foundations on which it is based and the circumstances of my research-activist practice in which my interpretation of it was developed. I demonstrate in the text its features that reinforce the need to distinguish the term activist anthropology as a specific practice of participatory observation and anthropology itself.

Anthropology Matters, 2009

This article is an account of different experiences, reflections and impressions that have arisen when embarking on the process of doing anthropological research and writing a thesis. The common ground of these three narratives is that they refer to our personal engagement with anthropology, our experiences within the academic world, as well as to our restless endeavour to make sense of them. We are particularly concerned with the language, the methods, and what usually remains unsaid or is taken for granted with regard to the context of anthropological training, fieldwork and writing up. Our claim is that whereas we as anthropologists attentively take into account the context of our research, we have often failed to pay a similar kind of attention to ourselves and our academic context. We see this article as a contribution towards such study.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. p.1-10

Anthropology is often driven by a desire to improve society by "reducing suffering and improving the human condition" (Sluka and Robben 2007, 5). While this desire is near universal, this humanist impulse has taken on different forms as the discipline developed. The form of social activism in anthropology that we often see today can only be understood in relation to the forms of scholarship (and engagement) that preceded it. Ethnographic engagement has ranged from the desire to improve society through scientific understanding, to the desire to develop knowledge that can be put to use by policy makers, to an understanding of the ethnographer as an actor in their own right who can intervene directly in the field. Each of these ways of understanding the relationship between anthropology and social activism relies on a specific theory of knowledge. As such, as the dominant theory of knowledge in anthropology shifts, so too do the possible roles for the ethnographer as scientist, as witness, or as activist.

This course addresses emerging interest in public and politically engaged anthropology as well as in anthropological theorizing that explicitly addresses the questions of anthropological relevance and self-constitution in the contemporary moment. It asks how anthropologists articulate the relevance of our work in theoretical and political terms by staging an encounter between three disparate strands of scholarship: anthropology of the contemporary, engaged/public anthropology, and anthropology of everyday violence and ordinary affects. Our aim is threefold: to a) historically and theoretically contextualize these strands of scholarship, b) extend them in new directions and c) offer you platforms for rethinking your own research in light of engagement with course topics. Designed to bring together pre-fieldwork and post-fieldwork graduate students, this seminar functions as a laboratory for expanding existing conversations and exploring further articulations of engaged anthropology of the contemporary. Participants will reflect on how their political commitments, ethnographic and other sensibilities, and theoretical perspectives inform each other, and will invigorate their research design, writing, and analytical frameworks in light of these reflections and engagement with course texts. The course is open to students from across the disciplines.

Anthropology & Humanism, 2007

Applied anthropology strives to support accessible writing, especially in journals that publish the work of nonacademic anthropologists. In this, narrative must be concise and clear, as it reports on active projects that form the basis of research and practice. As such, the resulting texts can neither be jargon filled or excessively interpretive, especially when the production involves the participation of community collaborators. The challenges of writing applied and activist ethnography begin well before the research itself and continue throughout. We must seek informed permission for projects; carry out work in conjunction with the community; obtain preapproval for written products; and work to find a mode of expression that meets complex criteria: to be creative while also being concrete, to present theory to a general audience, and to share the ethnographic endeavor on all levels. This article addresses narrative and ethical dilemmas of applied practice and writing. Illustrations from a number of recent ethnographies supplement text and case studies from Chiapas, Mexico. An examination of the experience of collaborative research and writing that resulted in Duncan Earle and Jeanne Simonelli's book Uprising of Hope: Sharing the Zapatista Journey to Alternative Development (2005) illustrates the process of doing and writing ethnography for and with the community.

2009

In this paper I will examine issues of advocacy in anthropology in a number of ways. I will begin by discussing terminology and then raise some of the key questions relevant to this topic. These will then be explored in depth by taking two contrasting cases where anthropologists have adopted radically different positions about the appropriateness of advocacy. Finally, the paper ends with some reflections on the relevance of this debate for 21 st century anthropology. Keywords Advocacy, applied anthropology, ethics, neo-colonialism "I went up to Chagnon and said, ʻYou know these people are really sick. Some of them could die. I think we should go and get medical help.ʼ Chagnon told me that I would never be a scientist. He said, ʻNo. No. We didnʼt come to save the Indians. We came to study themʼ" Tierney (2000:60) "Those who have the good fortune to be able to devote their lives to the study of the social world cannot stand aside, neutral and indifferent, from the struggles in which the future of that world is at stake" Bourdieu (cited in Hillier and Rooksby, 2005:7).

Social Anthropology, 2003

In this article I will argue for the vital importance and urgent need for an engaged anthropology. There are a host of critical social issues that anthropologists are currently researching where our qualitative methodologies, in-depth field research, and knowledge of local languages and cultures give us vital insights into the sources of social problems and also potential remedies for some very pressing societal dilemmas. In the United States we have come to realise that we need to do three things as we become increasingly engaged with the world: first, transform our relations with the public in order to overcome entrenched stereotypes and foster current images that accurately depict anthropology today; second, continue to change our relations with the communities we work with, by attending to their concerns in formulating research questions and by viewing them as equal partners in carrying out research and educational activities; and third, work out effective ways of doing research on critical social issues that will expand the influence of anthropology in political arenas and policy debates. Engaging with policy experts, the public and the press can have its perilous side since we have to communicate our research findings more effectively and to overcome public perceptions about who anthropologists are and what we do. The public holds stereotypes of cultural anthropology, condensed images that reduce our work to what Micaela di Leonardo has termed 'Halloween costumes' (Di Leonardo 1998: 31). Many of these are images that are based on anthropology's occupation of what Rolph Trouillot calls the 'savage slot' , in other words the niche that the discipline long ago carved out for itself as the scientists who study the 'primitives'. In the past we have been complicit in constructing at least one of these costumes: the one di Leonardo labels as 'noble savage/noble anthropologist ' (1988: 32-6). In other words, American anthropologists in the past often preferred to portray themselves as studying primitive cultures for what they could learn about their own contrasting customs better to understand or even reform themselves. The prototype of this trope is Margaret Mead's Coming of age in Samoa (1928), in which Mead used an analysis of Samoan adolescence to critique American ways of dealing with puberty. But there are other stereotypes that many of us would reject. For example, there is the charge that anthropologists are really 'barbarians at the gate' (Di Leonardo 1988: 40-3). In this stereotype, anthropologists are viewed as those who over-value the practices of other cultures, hawking cultural relativism to naive undergraduates and by implication denigrating the classics and western civilisation. This is a perspective often promulgated