Professional Documents
Culture Documents
RIALL W. NOLAN
Purdue University, United States
Types of anthropology
University Externally
based based
In this entry, the term “applied anthropology” refers to any use of anthropology—by
any anthropologist—to solve problems, while the terms “practitioner” and “practicing
anthropology” refer specifically to those anthropologists based outside the academy
who are also engaged in problem solving.
These distinctions have emerged out of a growing literature of practice written mainly
by practitioners themselves, documenting the realities of their work and some of the
issues of particular significance to them. Three important things have so far emerged
from this literature that illuminate key aspects of practice.
The first is that, for practitioners, knowledge alone (and the discovery of knowledge
through research) is not sufficient; of equal if not greater importance is an understand-
ing of what to do with that knowledge. Practitioners hardly ever engage in research or
other work for its own sake—they tend, by and large, to work on problems brought to
them by clients, and they are expected to deliver results.
The second important aspect of practice is that, for the most part, practitioners do
not work alone but in collaboration with others, many of whom may not be anthro-
pologists at all. As a result, the methods, findings, and recommendations of practicing
anthropologists are subject to others’ judgments. They are not only expected to collabo-
rate and to co-think closely with others, but they must also expect to be challenged and
to defend their views in ways that they would not normally expect within academia.
Finally, practitioners are fully involved with their work in ways that academics doing
part-time applied work may not normally be. Generally speaking, practitioners are not
part-time consultants and they are not outsiders to an organization. They tend, for the
most part, to be full-time employees, participants rather than lookers-on. As such, they
must take long-term responsibility for their work, work that often has significant con-
sequences for others.
History
One of the more interesting aspects of application and practice within anthropology
is the way in which it has been treated historically. Although it is certainly true that
A P P L I E D A NT HR OP OL OGY 3
After the war, two important developments occurred that were to shape anthropol-
ogy and its application. One was the enormous and rapid expansion of universities in
the United States; the other was the equally rapid growth of what came to be termed
“international development.”
Universities in the United States embarked on ambitious programs of expansion, and
the relatively young discipline of anthropology took advantage of this to establish itself
more firmly within the academy. At the same time, the United States began to engage
more directly with faraway areas of the world, such as remote Pacific islands that had
recently been liberated from Japanese control.
In 1950 there were twenty PhD programs in anthropology in North America; by 1975
there were eighty-seven. At the same time, some interesting and important projects in
the application of anthropology outside the university were taking place, led by academ-
ically based anthropologists. One of these was the Fox Project, led by Sol Tax (based at
the University of Chicago), a long-term series of activities carried out in collaboration
with the Meskwaki Indians between 1949 and 1959. This project involved an approach
that came to be known as “action anthropology.” Another initiative, the Cornell–Peru
project, began in 1952 and was led by Alan Holmberg and other anthropologists at
Cornell. It lasted for over fifteen years.
The expansion of US influence overseas, the growth of the international develop-
ment industry, and the deepening rifts of the Cold War produced a sharp rise in the
need for what might be termed “social knowledge” of others in the world, and anthro-
pology seemed ideally suited to meet this need. Within the universities, anthropology
worked to establish itself as a respectable and vibrant discipline focused on understand-
ing other cultures, in particular, remote and non-Western ones. Federal money was
available to send anthropologists overseas, and many academics at this time engaged
in short- or long-term assignments involving some aspect of development. A small but
important literature emerged from the work of anthropologists at this time, detailing
how an anthropological approach could facilitate community development, change, and
improvement.
By the mid-1960s, however, the attractions of tenure and its accompanying secu-
rity and support appear to have pulled many academically based anthropologists away
from considerations of application and inwardly toward considerations of a more purely
scholarly kind. The engagement and activism that had characterized earlier cohorts of
anthropologists seemed forgotten as scholars focused instead on theory. Partridge char-
acterized the change in this way:
Almost all energies were [now] thrown into the proliferation of theoretical taxa … The
profession as a whole became increasingly oriented to the college and university setting,
academic rather than practical matters, and teaching 18- to 24-year-old Americans as
the only career of bona fide anthropologists. This institutional setting in which abstract
anthropology thrived failed to demand a theory of practice from the discipline, by which
anthropology could emerge as a politically effective and ethically relevant social science
in other institutions of the modern world. (1985, 139–41)
begun to look upon its earlier involvement with government with decidedly mixed feel-
ings. Anthropology had, in the postwar period, engaged in a great deal of intensive,
long-term fieldwork in some of the poorest and most marginal areas of the world, and
it was perhaps natural that a concern with the ethics of what anthropologists were doing
there began to assume a prominent role in academic discussions. And, if the ethics of
university-based fieldwork research could be problematic, it stood to reason that work
for nonacademic entities—corporations and governments in particular—was perhaps
even more ethically fraught.
The Vietnam War and its associated turmoil merely added to this disdain for appli-
cation and practice. Anthropologists, most of whom opposed the war, were surprised
and then outraged by the revelations concerning the notorious Project Camelot and
then, shortly thereafter, by reports of anthropological work on counterinsurgency
programs in Thailand. Despite there being little or no concrete evidence of anthro-
pological involvement in either set of activities, the discipline elevated these stories
to near-mythic status as examples of the ethical pitfalls awaiting those who chose
to work for the government. Applied and practice work, already viewed with
some doubt and disdain by many within the academy, was now marginalized even
further.
Negative attitudes toward application continued to characterize mainstream aca-
demic opinion well into the 1970s, even as university growth began to slow. By this
time, the discipline was producing ever-greater numbers of PhDs while insisting that
tenured professorships were the only worthwhile and legitimate careers that graduates
should be thinking of. As requirements for tenure and promotion became ever more
demanding, those anthropologists whose interests lay primarily outside the academy
and outside what the academy defined as “scholarly” research and publication found
themselves unable to compete for what had now become a declining number of
positions.
Although a substantial number of graduates had in fact chosen work outside the
walls of the academy since the mid-1960s, these practitioners were regarded by most
academic anthropologists as failed scholars, not good enough for serious work. Aca-
demically based anthropologists who did applied work outside the university from time
to time were certainly tolerated and in places encouraged, but their prospects for tenure
and promotion depended, as before, on traditional forms of scholarly activity.
By this time, anthropology had established itself academically, and from its place
within the walls of the university had begun to speak officially for the discipline, influ-
encing what was to be taught and how, what constituted ethical behavior, and—most
importantly—how anthropology should relate to the wider world. If hands-on involve-
ment with government and the corporate sector was now seen as ethically suspect,
critical analysis—from a safe distance—became the preferred mode of engagement for
many anthropologists. The arrival of postmodernism in the 1980s reinforced and per-
haps intensified this tendency. This was the period of disciplinary history that has been
termed “the era of diverted gaze” (Rylko-Bauer, Singer, and Van Willigen 2006) as aca-
demics busied themselves with what were essentially internally generated issues and
concerns and paid little, if any, attention to what their nonacademic colleagues were up
to out in the world.
6 A P P L I E D A NT HR OP OL OGY
a variety of reasons not to seek the PhD but to go straight into practice. With their
master’s degrees in applied anthropology, they proved to be well qualified for a wide
variety of jobs and entered the nonacademic market just as interest among the wider
public began to build concerning the usefulness of anthropology in the workplace.
By the early years of the twenty-first century, nonacademic practitioners had begun
to develop and expand professional networks of their own. The Ethnographic Prac-
tice in Industry Conference, held yearly in a major city, brought people together—not
all of them anthropologists—who used ethnographic approaches in business settings.
Online, websites such as The Versatile PhD appeared, serving as a platform for dis-
cussion and professional career development among degree holders of all disciplines
working outside academic organizations.
These networks, while not in competition with more established academic forms,
were in no way based on them and had several interesting and significant features.
They included many other specialists than anthropologists alone and so promoted a
kind of cross-disciplinary conversation that is difficult to achieve within more tradi-
tional academic structures. They focused, for the most part, on practicalities rather
than on theoretical concerns alone. Younger anthropologists, and particularly students,
found networks like these ideal places to meet actual practitioners and to learn about
their work.
In 2010 the American Anthropological Association’s Committee on Practicing,
Applied and Public Interest Anthropology (CoPAPIA) published a landmark study of
master’s graduates entitled The Changing Face of Anthropology. One of the few studies
of nonacademic anthropologists—and certainly the most comprehensive and useful
to date—the study highlighted the importance of training, the wide range of jobs
practitioners do, and their feelings about their discipline.
Fiske, Shirley J., Linda A. Bennett, Patricia Ensworth, Terry Redding, and Keri Brondo. 2010. The
Changing Face of Anthropology: Anthropology Masters Reflect on Education, Careers, and Pro-
fessional Organizations: The AAA/CoPAPIA 2009 Anthropology MA Career Survey. Arlington,
VA: American Anthropological Association.
Grillo, Ralph, and Alan Rew, eds. 1985. Social Anthropology and Development Policy. London:
Tavistock.
Guerrón-Montero, Carla, ed. 2008. Careers in Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century: Perspec-
tives from Academics and Practitioners. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kedia, Satish, and John van Willigen. 2005. Applied Anthropology: Domains of Application. West-
port, CT: Praeger.
Morais, Robert J., and Timothy de Waal Malefyt, eds. 2014. “Ethics in Business Anthropology.”
Special issue, Journal of Business Anthropology 1.
Nolan, Riall W. 2003. Anthropology in Practice. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Nolan, Riall W., ed. 2013. A Handbook of Practicing Anthropology. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Partridge, William L. 1985. “Toward a Theory of Practice.” American Behavioral Scientist 29 (2):
139–63.
Rylko-Bauer, Barbara, Merrill Singer, and John van Willigen. 2006. “Reclaiming Applied Anthro-
pology: Its Past, Present and Future.” American Anthropologist 108 (1): 178–90.
Sabloff, Paula, ed. 2000. Careers in Anthropology: Profiles of Practitioner Anthropologists. Wash-
ington, DC: American Anthropological Association.
Wasson, Christine, Mary O. Butler, and Jacqueline Copeland-Carson, eds. 2011. Applying
Anthropology in the Global Village. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.