Veronica Strang - What Anthropologists Do-Routledge (2021)

What Anthropologists Do
Why should you study anthropology? How will it enable you to understand
human behaviour? And what will you learn that will equip you to enter
working life?
This book describes what studying anthropology actually means in practice, and
explores the many career options available to those trained in anthropology.
Anthropology gets under the surface of social and cultural diversity to understand
people’s beliefs and values, and how these guide the different lifeways that they
create. This accessible book presents a lively introduction to the ways in which
anthropology’s unique research methods and conceptual frameworks can be
employed in a very wide range of fields, from environmental concerns to human
rights, through business, social policy, museums and marketing. This updated
edition includes an additional chapter on anthropology and interdisciplinarity.
This is an essential primer for undergraduates studying introductory courses to
anthropology, and any reader who wants to know what anthropology is about.
Veronica Strang is a Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Insti-

tute of Advanced Study at Durham University, and is affiliated to the School of
Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at Oxford University. From 2013–
2017 she was the Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK
and the Commonwealth. Her publications include Uncommon Ground: cultural
landscapes and environmental values (1997); The Meaning of Water (2004); Gardening
the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (2009); Ownership and Appro-
priation (2010); Water: nature and culture (2015); and From the Lighthouse: inter-
disciplinary reflections on light (2018). More information about her work can be
found at www.veronicastrang.com/.
What Anthropologists Do
Second edition
Veronica Strang
Second edition published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Veronica Strang
The right of Veronica Strang to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
First edition published by Bloomsbury 2009
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Strang, Veronica, author.
Title: What anthropologists do / Veronica Strang.
Description: Second Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. |
“First edition published by Routledge 2009”--T.p. verso. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049492 | ISBN 9781350099357 (Hardback) |
ISBN 9781350099340 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781003087908 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Anthropology--Vocational guidance. |
Anthropology--Research. | Anthropology--Methodology.
Classification: LCC GN41.8 .S77 2021 | DDC 301.023--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049492
ISBN: 978-1-350-09935-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-350-09934-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-08790-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
List of figures vi
List of contributions viii
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1 Anthropology and Advocacy 11
2 Anthropology and Aid 32
3 Anthropology and Development 43
4 Anthropology and the Environment 69
5 Anthropology and Governance 98
6 Anthropology, Business and Industry 117
7 Anthropology and Health 136
8 Anthropology and Identity 169
9 Anthropology and the Arts 181
Conclusion 204
Glossary 214
Appendix 1: Studying Anthropology 217

Appendix 2: Suggestions for Further Reading 218
Appendix 3 221
Bibliography 226
Index 264
Figures
1.1 The late Santiago Pop, who was then eight years old, in 1979.
Photograph: Richard Wilk 14
1.2 The late Ma’ Teul, a resident of Aguacate village in Belize.
Photograph: Richard Wilk 15
3.1 Using PRA tools for community resource mapping, Vietnam 45
3.2 Learning to harvest rice with ethnic Black Tai in a Vietnam
participatory irrigation management project 47
3.3 Vehicular Heritage Survey Team, Pilbara, Western Australia.
Photograph: Phil Czerwinski 57
3.4 Helicopter Ethno Survey Team, Pilbara Western Australia.
Photograph: Phil Czerwinski 58
3.5 A waste management site visit in Surabaya, Indonesia.
Photograph: Thomas Wright 65
4.1 Kunjen Elder Alma Wason at Shelfo (Errk Ikow), a sacred site
on the Mitchell River, Far North Queensland, Australia.
Photograph: Veronica Strang 70
4.2 St Mary’s Church in Dorset, with ‘well head’ gravestone
representing ideas about water, life and spiritual renewal.
Photograph: Veronica Strang 71
4.3 Members of the Bardi Jawi (Indigenous) Ranger teams including
Kevin George (centre right), and Cecelia Tigan (left), with
Michelle Pyke (right), preparing to interview the late and much-
missed Traditional Owner and Elder, Paul Sampi (left) 77
4.4 Preparing body decoration Martukuru (grass) for Junba
(ceremonial dance) at Ngumpan Aboriginal Community,
Kimberley, Western Australia, September 2018. Left to right:
Ari Schipf, Jean Tighe, Bianca Nargoodah. Photograph: Jess
Ford 78
4.5 Annette Kogolo and Ari Schipf sharing lunch at Karnparrmi
Community outside Fitzroy crossing, Western Australia.
Photograph: Leo Thirkell 79
4.6 Conducting fieldwork with beekeepers and bees, Mellifera e.V.,
Germany 82
List of figures vii
4.7 Researching the world of bees. Photograph: Daksha Madhu
Rajagopalan 84
4.8 ‘Stop + Smell the Democracy’: Research at an anti-gas event
organised by local residents, 2015. Photograph: Martin Espig 91
7.1 Cecilia Vindrola-Padros carrying out fieldwork. Photograph
courtesy of Lucas Cannistraci 137
7.2 Sailing from the Port of Antwerp, Belgium, 2011. Photograph:
Sisse Groen 139
7.3 Sailing from the Port of Antwerp, Belgium, 2011. Photograph:
Sisse Groen 141
7.4 Indiana Government Centre, where the author observed public
meetings related to CHW policy development. Photograph:
Ryan Logan 142
7.5 Examining skeletal remains (1). Photograph: Hugo Glendinning 147
7.6 Examining skeletal remains (2). Photograph: Hugo Glendinning 148
7.7 While community residents look on in the background, a
member of the Safe and Dignified Burial team in Sierra Leone is
sprayed with chlorine prior to removing his protective suit.
Burial team members had recently picked up the corpse of a
deceased community member. Photograph: Ginger A. Johnson 159
7.8 Natalie Langley (right) providing training at the University of
Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center with James Roberts
(left). Trainees are learning to document and map a surface
recovery of skeletal elements 168
9.1 Installation: Geographies of the Imagination, 2008. Photograph:
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod 184
9.2 Sean examining a fire-scarred wood sample. Photograph: Robert
Ferdinandt 191
9.3 Michal Glikson, Safia’s jhuggi: IndoPak scroll III: Australindopak
Archive 2012–2016. Watercolour, oil, graphite, found material,
gold leaf, shell silver, paper, embroidered panels 200
9.4 Safia’s jhuggi. Film still from documentary. Photograph: Michal
Glikson 2014 200
9.5 Michal Glikson, Safia and the Bricks: IndoPak scroll III:
Australindopak Archive 2012–2016. Watercolour, oil, graphite,
found material, gold leaf, shell silver, paper, embroidered panels 201
10.1 Placencia Peninsula Integrated Water Project notice, Placencia,
Belize. Photograph: Christian Wells 206
10.2 Listening to the narrative of the coffeehouse, owned by
Tacettin, with my students at historical Fatih Horse Bazaar, 2019 210
Contributions
Meeting modern Maya 12

Me an expert? Anthropology, the law and asylum-seekers 29
Informing development 45
Promoting meaningful participation in development 48
From Appalachia to the Outback 56
A curious journey 64
Waterways and lifeways 72
Reflections from Australia on what anthropologists do, and what others
do with anthropology 76
Honeybees – the sweetness of anthropology 83
A transition into primatology 85
Living with limits: fracking in Australia 91
Parliamentary research 98
A general anthropologist 101
The value of evaluation 112
The path less taken 118
Anthropologist working for a union 122
Informing marketing and management 130
Anthropology in the UK healthcare system 137
Anthropologists prevent work injuries 140
Community health workers 142
Studying remains 145
Responsible drinking 151
Understanding disease transmission 157
A forensic career 166
A journey with linguistic anthropology 175
Linguistic anthropology, education and social change 177
Geographies of the imagination 185
Fire in the woods 190
Seeing through drawing 199
Waffles and spaghetti 205
Anthropology with students from different disciplines 209
Acknowledgements
The original edition of this book arose from discussions between the Association
of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth and the Royal
Anthropological Institute, who recognised that school leavers know little
about what anthropologists do, or about the huge potential for interesting
(and viable) careers that studying anthropology provides. Many potential
research users also remain unsure about what anthropology can offer. As a
result of these discussions Berg’s managing director, Kathryn Earle, asked
me to collect a range of examples and describe these in a form accessible to
a younger audience. This proved to be an intriguing project, enabling me
to discover what colleagues around the world were doing in areas of
research far removed from my own. The recent request to update What
Anthropologists Do has allowed me to see how opportunities for anthro-
pologists to pursue diverse and rewarding careers have expanded con-
siderably in the last decade. Many anthropology associations and journals
have again circulated requests for information, and the Australian Anthro-
pological Society was particularly generous in sharing the results of its
extensive survey on anthropological careers. I am most grateful for this
support.
Particular thanks should go to two people who assisted this project directly.
The first edition benefited from the work of my New Zealand research
assistant, Mira Taitz, who did a sterling job collecting diverse examples of
anthropological careers. This edition has gained from the equally stellar efforts
of my UK research assistant, Joanna Puckering, without whose dedicated
work the task of revising the text would probably have remained on my ‘to
do’ list until my retirement. I would also like to thank the University of
Auckland and Durham University, who provided funding to support their
respective endeavours.
Thanks must also go to the helpful and enthusiastic anthropologists who
were kind enough to send in accounts of their experiences, as well as providing
the images for this volume. And I am also appreciative of the input from several
reviewers, who kindly read the original volume and made helpful suggestions
about new or expanded sections in this one.
x Acknowledgements
Over the years What Anthropologists Do seems to have made it into many
introductory courses and career offices. I hope that this edition will similarly
encourage students to embark upon or continue their studies in anthropology,
as well as reassuring anxious parents that it can open the door to many useful
(and exciting) career directions.
Introduction
What do anthropologists do?

‘What anthropologists do’ seems to be a bit of a mystery to many people, and
there are several reasons for this. One is that anthropologists are involved in such a
wide variety of things that the most accurate answer to the question ‘what do they
do?’ is ‘just about anything that involves understanding human social behaviour’.
Another is that people’s ideas about anthropology are often gleaned from
portrayals in literature, film and television, which favour dramatic stereotypes:
pith-helmet-wearing colonial adventurers living with (equally stereotypical)
‘hidden tribes’ in the jungle; crime-busting forensic anthropologists (who
always find the murderer); or bearded, sandals-with-socks obsessives going
bonkers somewhere in the outback (MacClancy 2005; Weston et al. 2015).
I think that we need to challenge these stereotypes for several reasons:
because the facts are more interesting than the fiction; because, in an ever more
complex world, anthropology has a vital contribution to make; and because,
contrary to the stereotypes, anthropological training is immensely applicable in
a very wide variety of careers. So the purpose of this book is to describe what
anthropologists actually do, with examples from a range of areas. It is not a
comprehensive account: just a brief introduction to the kind of work that
anthropologists undertake, and the multiple directions open to practitioners.
Other introductory texts are listed in the resources section.
It is probably useful to start by talking about what anthropology is. The
broadest definition is that it is a social science that involves the study of human
groups and their behaviour: their interactions with each other, and with the
material environment. Most anthropologists study contemporary societies or
smaller groups within them, although in some countries anthropology also
includes archaeology and the study of past societies. It sits alongside related social
sciences like sociology (which tends to be more quantitative), and psychology
(which focuses more on individuals).
Anthropology itself is a very broad discipline with large sub-disciplinary
areas. The largest ones are social and cultural anthropology, but there are other
major areas including political anthropology, economic anthropology, linguistic
anthropology, the anthropology of religion, primatology, evolutionary and
2 Introduction
biological anthropology, legal anthropology, forensic anthropology, medical
anthropology and my own field, environmental anthropology. There are other
‘offshoots’ too, crossing into development studies, social policy, cognitive science,
ethnohistory or historical anthropology, museum curation and studies of art,
material culture, photography, film and other media. And, as a glance at the
diverse list of contents for this book illustrates, there is a host of smaller, more
specialised areas focusing, for example, on governance and the state, kinship,
migration, gender studies, education, and urban anthropology.
What unites this diversity? Anthropology has several key characteristics: it is
holistic, placing whatever behaviour it is examining within its social and
environmental context, and considering the range of cultural beliefs and
practices that direct people’s activities. It is largely qualitative, recognising that
most of these things are not readily measurable. It aims to be ‘in-depth’,
getting under the surface of social life to make its underlying dynamics visible.
It engages fully with the complexities of human ‘being’.
In effect, ‘what anthropologists do’ is try to understand and represent the
realities of particular cultural and sub-cultural worldviews, encapsulating their
key features and underlying principles, in order to ‘make sense’ of human
behaviour. They try to do this in such a way that this understanding can be
communicated cross-culturally, acting as a translatory bridge between groups
whose beliefs, values and practices may be completely different.
Anthropological research generally involves working with a host group or
community to create an ‘ethnography’. This can be described as a portrait of
that group and its dynamics, which is usually in text form, although some
anthropologists also use visual media. Most ethnographies contain a set of
core elements: the composition of the group; its history; its ways of making a
living in a particular environment; its social and political institutions; its belief
systems and values. A good way to imagine this ethnographic portrait is that
the particular issue the anthropologist is studying will be in the foreground, in
detail, but the contextualising elements that shape how people live will be
there too, as an explanatory background (see Pawluch et al. 2005).
An ethnography is the result of the two key things that underpin any science:
theory and method. Like other sciences, anthropology has, over many years,
developed a set of theoretical principles. Being part of an ongoing international
and intercultural scientific ‘conversation’, these are always moving forward,
increasing our understanding. Again like other sciences, anthropology is funda-
mentally comparative: we compare different social and cultural groups and, by
examining their differences and similarities, we are able to tackle broader questions
about human beings and the patterns of behaviour that they share.
Anthropology theories have been described in various ways: for example, by
James Peacock (2001) as a ‘lens’ that helps to bring human life into focus. As a
keen scuba diver, I tend to think of the in-depth immersion of ethnographic
research as a way of seeing under the surface. Theories are also presented as a
sort of ‘tool kit’ for analysis, and that’s quite a good analogy too, as it under-
lines the reality that theory is a practical thing: a set of useful ‘idea tools’ that
Introduction 3
help us to open up what is often regarded as the ‘black box’ of human behaviour.
Peter Kreeft suggests that a capacity for clear analysis also requires the logical
thinking skills enabled by philosophical anthropology (2007).
Any sensible analysis requires data, and anthropology is fundamentally empirical,
in that it relies on data collected ‘in the field’. Let me have another swipe at the
stereotypes here, and say that ‘in the field’ doesn’t have to be somewhere far away,
or even somewhere else. As anyone who has travelled will know, being a long
way from home is certainly useful, in terms of coming into contact with (and
being able to compare) very different perspectives on life. But highly diverse
social groups and cultural ideas can also be found on the doorstep, and there are
many anthropologists for whom ‘the field’ is at home, working with particular
communities, sub-cultural groups, organisations or networks.
While ‘going into the field’ to work with communities, either in far-off places
or close to home, remains central to anthropological practice, contemporary
technologies have also expanded ethnography into less tangible domains.
Increasingly people inhabit not only local places, but also social and professional
networks maintained via digital media (Horst and Miller 2012). Daniel Miller’s
research in an English hospice (2015) and Faye Ginsburg’s exploration of how
people with disabilities use the internet (2012) illustrate the need to consider not
only where people are located but also how – particularly in situations where
they feel isolated – they make use of multiple forms of communication to con-
nect with others. dana boyd, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, has
considered how social media affect the lives of American teenagers: ‘Teens are
passionate about finding their place in society. What is different as a result of
social media is that teens’ perennial desire for social connection and autonomy is
now being expressed in networked publics’ (2014: 8).
As social media platforms such as Facebook have become an increasingly
essential part of daily social and professional life all over the world, Steffan
Dalsgaard observes that they have simultaneously become platforms for much
ethnographic research: ‘For those who study online cultural phenomena,
social media and the relationships mediated by these media have come to
constitute field-sites in their own right’ (2016: 96; see also Pink et al. 2016).
With the advent of virtual reality technology, it has even become possible for
ethnographers to enter and explore virtual worlds such as Second Life. Tom
Boellstorff emphasises the ‘reality’ of interactions, places and meaning-making for
the inhabitants of such worlds, and the need to study virtual environments on their
own terms (2015). Underlining the potential for forms of enquiry less grounded in
a physical location, but which still draw on the tenets of ethnography, Jeremy
Aroles describes ‘digital nomadism’ and new ways of working, playing and
belonging in increasingly virtual communities. He describes a year-long study of
one particular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game),
League of Angels, which involved joining various guilds (both English- and French-
speaking) on different servers, conducting phases of participant observation, and
visiting forums as well as other associated pages on the game, to consider ideas
about belonging within a virtual community (2018: 423–4). Virtual communities
4 Introduction
also make their own social and political arrangements; for example, Oskar Milik’s
research into online gaming found that:
EVE Online grants individuals the anonymity and freedom to act in any
way they wish, going so far as to encourage and reward in-game criminal
behavior toward other players. This design might lead some to expect
anarchy within this digital universe. Instead, this virtual world is highly
ordered, containing large organisations led by powerful leaders.
(2017: 764)
As well as providing access to new, virtual worlds, digital technologies have also
affected how anthropologists engage in public scholarship. Amy Johnson points
to the new opportunities that social media present in widening access to
research findings and opening these up to scholarly debate and criticism with
both other scholars, and with the participants in the research (2015). Martijn de
Koning, for example, looks at how blogs can assist anthropological outreach:
Although the writing on blogs is often not as precise and nuanced as in

texts in peer-reviewed academic journals and books, the accessible
format and style of blogging allows others who are not familiar with academic
work to engage with the research. Preliminary ideas can be shared, one’s own
questions about particular phenomena might be answered, methodological
issues can be discussed, and so on.
(2013: 395)
Employing anthropology
Anthropologists are supported in their work in a variety of ways. Some are
employed by universities, and therefore combine teaching with research. Both of
these activities are important to universities, and most hope that their academic
staff will devote their time fairly equally to both. In reality, most university-based
anthropologists probably spend a higher proportion of their time teaching and
doing administration, but they are still expected to keep up with what is going
on in their field, and to conduct research. At a tertiary level, there is (or should
be) a symbiotic relationship between teaching and research, with original research
findings feeding into the curriculum. This ensures that students receive teaching
that is intellectually fresh and up to date.
For anthropologists who like teaching and can tolerate the (considerable)
administrative demands of university life, an institutional post has some
advantages. The teaching itself is often very rewarding; a good academic
department provides a lively and supportive intellectual environment and –
with luck – congenial colleagues; and, where tenure or long-term contracts
are available, there is a greater degree of security than may be provided by
more independent career paths. Universities often provide some financial
support for research, or at least regular sabbatical time to enable bursts of
Introduction 5
research activity, and university-employed anthropologists also write research
proposals and compete for funding from national or international funding
bodies. Most countries have a research council, and there are other (national
and international) funding bodies, such as the Royal Anthropological Institute
or the Wenner-Gren Foundation, whose aim is to support original research in
the discipline.
Some university-based anthropologists also do consultancy work, and some
combine part-time teaching posts with other forms of employment or freelance
research. As the case studies in this book illustrate, anthropological CVs tend to
reflect multiple ways to make use of anthropological training, and there is
considerable scope for people to shape their careers in accord with their
particular interests and preferences.
Although teaching is an obvious avenue of employment for anyone trained
in a scientific discipline, there are probably greater numbers of anthropologists
either employed as full-time researchers or working as freelancers for govern-
ment departments, non-governmental organisations, charities, industries, legal
bodies, indigenous communities and so forth. There are significant advantages
to employment outside the academy: an ability to focus on research (rather
than spending a large proportion of time on teaching and administrative duties);
the opportunity to follow specific areas of interest – for example, in politics,
health, or development; and, of course, independence from the strictures of
institutional employment.
Given the increasing emphasis on ‘employability’ in higher education, it is
worth noting that anthropology graduates bring a strong range of skills to the
labour market. Surveys by anthropology associations demonstrate the breadth
of the areas in which these skills are now being used (Ellick and Watkins 2016;
Maud 2015).
The World Council of Anthropology Associations recently conducted a survey
(McGrath et al. 2018) which drew responses from nearly 4000 anthropologists. It
offered the following information:
There are more women than men practising anthropology, with a roughly
60:40 ratio
Men only outnumbered women in the oldest (70+) age group, suggesting
a feminising shift in the discipline
Nearly 60% of the respondents held a PhD in anthropology, and 25% a
master’s degree
Anthropologists are most numerous in the Americas and across Europe and
the UK, but there are also high levels of mobility in the discipline
Expertise was well distributed around the globe with respondents reporting
research in about fifty different countries, and many working both ‘at
home’ and in other geographic locations
Universities are the major employer of anthropologists, with nearly 50% of
the respondents citing an HE institution as their primary employer
6 Introduction
Other key areas of employment included (local, regional and State)
Government agencies; domestic and international NGOs and development
agencies; independent research institutes; museums and galleries; professional
societies; mining and energy companies
A substantial number of respondents were self-employed and/or working
as consultants
When asked about the thematic focus of their work, the respondents
reported interests in over a thousand different areas
The top six activities on which people were spending substantial proportions
of their time reflected the high levels of employment in universities:
Teaching (undergraduate)
Field research
Writing for peer review publications
Desktop/archival research
Meetings (internal)
Academic administration
Time was also spent convening, organising and presenting at conferences,

and peer reviewing colleagues’ funding proposals and publications. Although
the focus of university-based anthropologists was on research and teaching,
people also reported a range of external-facing activities, including advocacy in
relation to social and environmental issues; engagement with communities and
stakeholder groups; policy development; mediation and conflict resolution; and
involvement in design and urban planning.
Conducting research
However anthropologists make a living, they have a responsibility, not only to
their employers or sponsors, but also to anthropology as a discipline, in terms of
maintaining professional standards, academic independence and ethical principles.
Work with different cultural communities raises a host of ethical issues about
power relations and consent; the collection of medical or cultural information; or
material culture. Ethics are therefore central to practitioners’ relationships with
the groups or communities in which they conduct research (see Caplan 2003;
Fluehr-Lobban 2003; Turner 2012). Professional anthropology associations
expect their members to conform to detailed and rigorous codes of practice,
which ensure that the interests of the host group or community are carefully
protected throughout the research.1 Such professional codes also form part of
teaching in anthropology, ensuring that students are fully prepared for work in a
range of occupational sectors (Briody and Pester 2014).
Across diverse sectors, anthropological research is therefore designed with
two key questions in mind: ‘How will this research produce new knowledge
that answers a particular question?’ and ‘How will it benefit the group in which
Introduction 7
it is conducted, and society in general?’ In many cases, the host group is
involved in the research design from the beginning. At the very least, there will
be a process of asking permission from them; of seeking input on the proposed
work; and of getting feedback on the research findings as these emerge. This
longstanding concern to ensure benefit to host communities has merged with
more recent policy requirements to consider the ‘impact’ of research, which has
had significant influence upon funding policies in the UK (Green 2016a;
Jarman and Bryan 2015; Page and Strathern 2016; Stein 2018).
Many anthropologists maintain long-term relationships with communities,
returning regularly to extend earlier research, or to do new projects. As well as
allowing researchers to develop long-term and productive collaborations with
individuals and groups, these lengthy relationships also permit shorter research
projects, building on accumulated background ethnographic data. In many
professional contexts, the realities of research funding do not permit lengthy
fieldwork, and anthropologists have to build on former (or other people’s)
datasets and experience. Nevertheless, the major objective is still to create as
complete a picture as possible, so that the research question is always given an
ethnographic context that will help to explain what is going on.
Anthropologists tend to collect a lot of data, and it is this meticulous depth and
detail that gives strong foundations to their analyses. Preliminary literature reviews
can take many weeks, and it is common for fieldwork to take from six months to a
year. In a sense, anthropology is the ‘slow food’ of the social sciences, because it
tends to be quite painstaking and cannot be ‘whipped up’ instantly. Fortunately,
this willingness to be thorough generally pays off, providing genuine and useful
insights into human behaviour.
Ethnographic data are collected in a variety of ways. A core method is
‘participant observation’, which – as its name implies – involves participating
in the everyday life of the host community, and carefully observing and
recording events. The other major method is to conduct interviews with
individuals and groups, and this usually means a mixture of long in-depth
interviews and shorter, more opportunistic ones. Interviews might be formal
(with a specific list of issues to explore) or more exploratory and informal.
Ethnographers often interview people a number of times, and spend a lot of
time with them, in particular those members of the host group willing to
work collaboratively on the research.
Fieldwork is followed by a process of analysis, which means organising the
data coherently and employing theory to make sense of the picture that
emerges. This can take a while too: there will be a lot of data to consider and
there are no easy answers. Humans are complex, and while biological and
ecological factors may play a part, behaviour is greatly complicated by social
and cultural complexities. The art of producing a good ethnographic account is
to crystallise the issues succinctly but not to reduce them to the point where
they cease to be meaningful, and to leave sufficient explanatory context so that
it is possible to see consistent patterns, to understand what is going on, and thus
8 Introduction
to offer practical, helpful insights that can be applied to the problems and
challenges that people face.
Many people assume that anthropology divides into ‘applied’ or ‘engaged’
work (by which they usually mean research with an intended practical out-
come taking place outside the academy), or more ‘theoretical’ and scholarly
work, which supposedly takes place in the ‘ivory tower’ of a university. There
are various societies of ‘applied anthropologists’, and these are immensely
helpful and supportive to practitioners who freelance, or whose institutional base
does not contain many anthropological colleagues. However, although this
applied/theoretical dichotomy is a functional shorthand, it is a little misleading. It
encourages an assumption that ‘ivory tower’ research and the development of
theory is rather exclusive, disengaged and not very practical, and that anthro-
pologists working elsewhere are somehow ‘outside’ the main part of the discipline,
and not contributing to its scholarly development.
My own view is that both of these assumptions are wrong. Good ‘applied’
research, wherever it is based, requires a strong theoretical framework and a
rigorous ‘academic’ approach; and theoretical development itself is greatly
strengthened by information gleaned directly from empirical data (based on
evidence) and field experience. The nature of anthropological research, with
its grassroots focus and its immediate involvement with human communities,
is very grounded in any case. So however esoteric a research question may
seem, understanding ‘why people do what they do’ always has some practical
value, and even seemingly abstract research generates ideas and proposes new
theories that – if they are robust – will filter, through wider discourse, into
practice.
In essence, the process of anthropological research entails the following steps
(although probably in a much less neatly defined order, with lots of feedback
loops and sidetracks):
Designing: outlining the research question and the aims of the research
Seeking funds: writing grant proposals
Reviewing: trawling the theoretical and ethnographic literature to see
what has been done on the research topic to date
Defining and refining: developing the project aims and hypotheses
Doing ethnographic fieldwork: collecting data through, for example,
participant observation and interviews (some preliminary fieldwork is
often done at an earlier stage too)
Analysing the data: making sense of the picture through the ‘lens’ of
anthropological theories, testing hypotheses
Finding answers: drawing conclusions from the research
Disseminating the findings: writing texts, giving presentations, making
films, or producing other outputs, such as exhibitions
Participating in international conversations: adding input to wider debates
on research questions, contributing to theoretical development.
Introduction 9
And often …
Making recommendations: advising policy and decision makers, research

users
Following through: assisting the implementation of the findings
Evaluating: conducting further research on the effects of this implementation.
As this list suggests, anthropological research produces outcomes in several

potential directions: towards theoretical developments within the discipline,
and into practical recommendations for research users. It also illustrates the
important feedback relationship between theory and practice, underlining the
artificiality of the division between ‘theoretical’ and ‘applied’ work.
This division is equally artificial in defining people’s career identities. As
noted above, anthropologists’ careers frequently involve a mixture of teaching/
university posts and other roles, and most have research interests that engage
with issues far removed from any kind of ‘ivory tower’. Typically, anthro-
pologists’ websites or lists of publications (including those found on university
web pages) describe a range of work, some of which could readily be described
as ‘applied’ and some of which is more obviously focused on contributing to
theoretical debates. They also reveal an extraordinary diversity of interests: a
profession investigating a host of intriguing questions about human behaviour
in an equally varied range of groups.
Anthropology is not only fascinating but also rather addictive. Many people
start by studying a bit of anthropology but then find they want to go on. That
is more or less what happened to me: after more than a decade of working as a
freelance writer and researcher in various parts of the world, I was sufficiently
intrigued by a stint in the Australian outback to spend a year doing a master’s
course in anthropology. A doctorate, several teaching posts and numerous
research projects later, it remains endlessly absorbing.
This raises a question as to why there are not more people doing anthropology.
After all, there are plenty of souls with incurable curiosity, the flexibility to work
with different cultures and ideas, and enough patience to do in-depth research. A
major obstacle is that, despite a short-lived attempt to establish an anthropology ‘A’
Level, anthropology is not generally taught in schools, so most people don’t come
into contact with it (Ford 2016). This leaves them with only the stereotypes to
consider, and part of the problem with those (quite apart from the fact that they
are inaccurate and outdated), is that they don’t seem to point either to potential
careers in anthropology, or to many ‘practical’ uses of anthropological research.
So this book is intended to show that anthropology can lead to a vast choice
of careers, and that it has an equally diverse range of potential applications. I
have divided the material into some broad areas, but these are fairly arbitrary
and there is considerable overlap and flow between them. In each area, how-
ever, the purpose of anthropological research remains constant: to gain a real
understanding of a particular social reality, its beliefs, values and practices, and
to communicate this understanding across cultural and sub-cultural boundaries.
10 Introduction
Note
1 The Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth reg-
ularly updates its ethical code, which can be found here: https://www.theasa.org/
ethics/guidelines.html
1 Anthropology and Advocacy
Balancing acts
A lot of the work that anthropologists do involves acting as cultural translators:
creating bridges between societies or social groups who have different
worldviews. Being able to understand various points of view, and translate
ideas in a non-judgemental way, is a key aspect of the training that they
receive, and this rests on a combination of rigorous in-depth research and a
theoretical framework that enables them to step back and consider situations
analytically. In many situations, having a ‘neutral’ but empathetic outsider,
who has taken the trouble to gain insights into the complexities of people’s
lives, can greatly assist cross-cultural interactions. Scientific neutrality can be
particularly important in legal contexts, where courts or tribunals depend on
the testimony of ‘disinterested’ expert witnesses to present evidence, but there
are many situations in which cultural beliefs, values and practices clash, and
tensions arise. For example, the translatory skills of anthropologists may be
used in conflicts between religious groups; in quarrels between managers and
workforces; in defusing racial or ethnic hostilities; in mediating between
organisations competing for the control of heritage sites and national parks; or
in facilitating communication between local groups and government agencies.
For some practitioners, advocacy is a logical extension of long-term working
relationships with host communities. It is, after all, virtually impossible to work
closely with people and not develop some sympathy for their concerns. Even
in the early 1900s, when Bronislaw Malinowski first established in-depth
fieldwork as a core anthropological method, he suggested that ‘as a scientific
moralist fully in sympathy with races hereto oppressed or at least under-
privileged, the anthropologist would demand equal treatment for all, full
cultural independence for every differential group or nation’ (Hedican 2008:
60). Malinowski presented evidence to the Australian government about the
labour conditions people were experiencing in the western Pacific, and criti-
cised colonial administrations for appropriating the land of indigenous people
and disregarding their customary practices. ‘Malinowski thereby laid the
foundation for an advocacy role in anthropology very early on in the history
of the discipline’ (Hedican 2008: 60).
It is almost inevitable that sustained contact with a given people will involve
the ethnographer in disputes emerging from the contradictions between
ethnic, regional, national and international interests … The profession’s
commitment to the non-academic world, is especially evident in the context
of indigenous human rights … Countries such as Australia, Canada, Brazil,
and most of Hispanic America have conferred a great deal of weight on the
work of ethnographers. Both the State and the public at large, credit these
professionals for their anthropological knowledge but, perhaps more
explicitly, for the kind of complicity bred between researchers and
research subjects, a complicity that comes from sharing the vicissitudes met
by indigenous people in their interethnic lives.
(Ramos 2004: 57–8)
Anthropologists have always had to make delicate judgements about where to

position themselves on a continuum between striving for as much scientific
‘impartiality’ as can be achieved (recognising that all scientific activity contains
value choices), and taking up a more partisan role as ‘active agents of change’
(Kellett 2009: 23). There has been much debate in the discipline about how rela-
tionships with host communities and other research users should be constructed,
and about the potential for direct advocacy to undermine perceptually objective
scientific ‘authority’, which is, in its own way, highly effective in assisting people.
The ethics of working with people, whoever and wherever they are, require
researchers at the very least to ‘do no harm’ to them. As noted in the introduction,
many anthropologists think this ought to go further, believing that research should
not be a one-way street that merely benefits the funding agency or the social sci-
entist, but should entail a reciprocal relationship also beneficial to the group con-
cerned. This ‘benefit’ may lie in the usefulness of the research, rather than in direct
advocacy, but the principle of reciprocity is now well-embedded in the ethical
codes that guide the discipline and much contemporary anthropological research is
based on principles of partnership with host communities.
Meeting modern Maya

Richard Wilk
I really wanted to be an archaeologist, to dig up ancient Mayan cities and find
out why their civilisation fell apart, and I was lucky enough to get a volunteer
position on an archaeological project in northern Belize (then called British
Honduras) while I was still an undergraduate. I got to live my dream, but over
time I realised that the Maya had never gone away – I was meeting them
every day, since our project employed many of them. Eventually they con-
vinced me that I could do a lot more good in the world by helping them out of
poverty, than I ever could by digging up their ancestors. I switched to cultural
anthropology and went to southern Belize to do my dissertation research in
the small Mayan villages scattered through the rain forest in the southern part
Anthropology and Advocacy 13
of the country. I spent a year living in different villages, learning the language
and getting to understand how they made a living from a fragile environment,
and how they were coping with the growing pressures of modern life, con-
sumer culture and economic change.
One thing anthropologists don’t always talk about is that we usually disrupt
people’s lives. We are constantly asking questions, sticking our noses into pri-
vate business and taking people’s time and energy, and when we try to help
with chores and tasks we are usually pretty worthless. Using a machete, I was
usually more danger to the people around me than to the trees and brush we
were trying to cut. So we ring up a lot of debt, and this leaves us feeling obli-
gated to give something back, to help in any way we can. The more you get to
know people, the more you share their problems and hopes, and you feel the
same way towards them that you do towards any other friends in need.
I wrote a long dissertation and later a book about how village life was chan-
ging and their culture was adapting and I thought my work could help the
government and development organisations who were planning projects to
bring better healthcare, water, sanitation and education to what was the poor-
est and most isolated part of the country. A few years later I was hired by some
of those development organisations to go back to Belize, and I was able to use
what I had learned to pay back some debts. I was able to get USAID to fix their
roads and put up new bridges so people could get in and out of the villages
during the rainy season. I worked on scholarship programmes and projects that
drilled wells to bring clean water to villages, and I helped start a project to get
Maya farmers to grow more cacao – which turned out to be a big success.
Today you can buy organic Fairtrade chocolate bars all over the USA and
Europe made from their beans.
But sometimes things that seemed like small issues at one time turn out
to be really important much later. When I was doing my dissertation research
most of the villages had no legal titles or claims to the land they lived on and
farmed. Working in the archives, I found that in the early 1900s the British
authorities had set up ‘reservations’ for most villages, but they had never
marked the boundaries, and the land legally remained government property.
At the time the government was pretty much leaving people alone, so the
question of land rights just took a few pages of my book. But by the end of
the 20th century, oil prospectors and loggers were driving roads right
through the villages and cutting down huge swaths of forest which the vil-
lages depended on to feed their families. The government started to sell big
tracts of land to foreign companies that wanted to grow bananas, farm
shrimp or set up jungle resorts for ecotourists. Some land was even taken a
way to set up nature preserves and parks. The Maya people started to see
their way of life slipping away and in 1995 they asked the Belize government
to give them legal title to their lands, so they could make their own decisions
about how it could be used and the forest could be sustained. They hired
lawyers with help from the Indigenous Peoples Law & Policy Program at the
University of Arizona. The government refused, claiming that these Maya

people were immigrants from neighbouring Guatemala, and were not truly
indigenous people, so they had no right to the land. I joined a team of
archaeologists and anthropologists writing affidavits in support of the Mayan
Figure 1.1 The late Santiago Pop, who was then eight years old, in 1979. Pho-
tograph: Richard Wilk.
Figure 1.2 The late Ma’ Teul, a resident of Aguacate village in Belize. Photo-
graph: Richard Wilk.
position that they were indigenous people, and explaining how they used the
forest in a sustainable way that maintained their traditions and culture. More
than 30 villages eventually joined the lawsuit.
This story is not over. It took years to move the case through the court
system and I testified twice before the Belize Supreme Court and the Belize
court of appeals. We won each case, but the government kept fighting as the
dispute went to the Organization of American States and the Caribbean court
of appeals, which finally ordered the government to start granting land titles in
2014, but as of this writing, no villages have received legal titles and new dis-
putes over the location and control of roads, dams, boundaries and archae-
ological sites keep coming up. The process continues and I continue to work
with other anthropologists and Maya communities to find ways to improve their
way of life without losing the language and culture they value so highly.
In reality, every anthropologist has to decide how best to do rigorous and useful
research, while also meeting ethical and moral imperatives. Anthropologists are not
just social scientists – they are also individuals with their own values and political
beliefs, and they have often chosen to do this kind of work because they feel that it
can make a difference. ‘Advocacy, in its choice of an issue, is often highly charged
and personal’ (Ervin 2005: 151). Anthropology therefore enables its practitioners
not only to follow their intellectual curiosity about why people do what they do,
and produce research that reveals this in scientific terms, but also to act upon issues
that they care about, and to help the communities in which they work.
In becoming involved in people’s lives, anthropologists perform many kinds
of community service, and this can be very informal. For example, Mitzi
Goheen, who has worked with the Nso’ community in western Cameroon so
extensively that they gave her a local title, not only directs a local lending
organisation, providing small loans to women to enable them to become
players in the local economy, she
often puts her topical and geographical expertise to practical use in serving
the people among whom she lives and works … She is godmother to a
Cameroonian child, helps young men of the community negotiate bride-
wealth payments, and maintains a fund at the local Baptist mission hospital
to pay her friends’ medical bills … She also helps villagers make hospital
care decisions – and often transports them to the hospital as well.
(Gwynne 2003: 144)
These kinds of activities are common: anthropologists in the field typically try
to make themselves useful in whatever way seems to fit. In this sense, the
concept of anthropology as ‘community service’ underpins a lot of the work
described in this book.
Human rights
Ethnographic methods lend themselves to understanding the complex dynamics of
human rights issues (Merry 2017), and anthropologists have long been active as
researchers and advocates in such areas, including the most fundamental rights to
safety, and to sufficient food and water (Nagengast and Vélez-Ibáñez 2004) and
issues such as informed consent, cultural heritage and civil rights (Fariña 2012).
Attention to human rights also focuses on the safety of women and children.
Anthropologists have done important work, for example, on controversies about
dowries in India (Basu 2015, Kellett 2016), sex trafficking (Merry 2016), and
violence against women (Østebø 2010). Penny Van Esterik has long been active
in the controversy surrounding corporations selling baby formula as a substitute
for breast milk in ‘Third World’ countries (Van Esterik and O’Connor 2017).
This controversy flared up in the 1970s and 1980s, when Nestlé found its market
share in Western nations diminishing alongside research indicating the capacity
for breast-feeding to improve immunity. There were major protests when it tried
to open new markets in countries where the lack of clean water and facilities for
boiling water sufficiently, as well as a lack of funds, made it a significant health
risk. Penny Van Esterik became a passionate advocate against this exploitation of
poorer communities, and she argues that there are compelling reasons to parti-
cipate in advocacy causes. The breast-or-bottle controversy that she dealt with
had a lot at stake: children’s health and levels of infant mortality; the relationships
between mother and child; processes of social change; people’s capacities to
adapt; and a critical issue concerned with the power of nation-states and inter-
national corporations. The matter has now been further complicated by issues
surrounding HIV transmission (Van Esterik 2020). As Ervin points out:
Scientific knowledge, as provided by anthropologists and others, is valuable

for these battles. A series of expert testimonies can be provided, sometimes
for court cases, sometimes as part of public relations campaigns through the
media or as preparation for public debates.
(2005: 153)
Controversies about the selling of unsuitable or substandard goods in poorer

countries have grown since the Nestlé issue, as have concerns about the
commercial exploitation of disempowered groups. In the last decade, there has
been growing disquiet about the social and ecological costs of globalisation, and
anthropologists are interested in it both as analysts of social movements, and as
advocates for groups whose cultural and economic security is threatened by
changes being wrought at a global level.
Facilitating cross-cultural communication

Advocacy often entails articulating the concerns of a group who may otherwise
not be heard. For instance, Jacqueline Solway works in Botswana as an advocate
for minority language groups who, even in a peaceful multi-party democracy,
remain somewhat disenfranchised. By communicating the realities of their lives
to decision-makers in the political arena, her work seeks ways to assist the state in
becoming more inclusive to these groups (2004).
Elizabeth Grobsmith worked for many decades with Native-American inmates in
prisons in Nebraska who, although their community comprises only 1.5% of the
population as a whole, make up more than twice that percentage of the prison
population. Her work began in the 1970s, when the courts upheld prisoners’ rights
to religious freedom and education, and she was employed to teach a programme in
American Indian studies. As she says, ‘prisoners stand to profit both from an aca-
demic perspective and from the increased self-respect which education affords. Their
culture gains credibility by being the subject of a prison college class’ (2002: 166).
Thus she was able to allay the authorities’ anxieties about pipe smoking, explaining
the meaning and legitimacy of customary religious practices. She was involved in the
design of treatment programmes to tackle drug and alcohol problems in the prison
population; advised the parole board on indigenous cultural approaches to rehabili-
tation; and acted as an expert witness in disputes on prisoners’ rights.
There is still a tremendous need for anthropologists in correctional affairs. Scott
Tighe points to persistent relationships between social dysfunction and the dis-
advantages, such as poverty, lack of educational opportunities, unemployment,
racism, and so forth, experienced by indigenous communities in the USA (2014),
and this picture is echoed in other post-colonial societies.
Communication has been similarly central to Barbara Jones’s advocacy work
with Native-American Bannock and Shoshoni women. When some of the
women were prosecuted for withholding information from social services, her
research showed that cultural misunderstandings had occurred because of differ-
ent usages of English by the women and by the social services staff. The presiding
judge ruled that the women were innocent, and that, in the future, an interpreter
should be used to ensure clarity in communications (in Ervin 2005: 106).
Facilitating culturally appropriate communication is also at the heart of
Kevin Avruch and Peter Black’s work on the role of anthropology in ‘alter-
native dispute resolution’ (ADR), which gained popularity as an informal
‘alternative’ to legal action in America in the 1990s (1996). They point out
that anthropology actually provided the inspiration for ADR, because ‘some
reformers from within the legal profession read ethnography and thought
they had found the perfect template for their reform: dispute resolution in
“tribal societies”’ (1996: 50). Anthropologists, however, have been quite cri-
tical of the misuse of ethnography to construct an idealised image of tribal
social life, and the idea that particular methods of resolving disputes can
simply be ‘lifted’ from one cultural context and plonked down in another. As
ADR has become entrenched in American legal culture there have been
increasing efforts to commodify and export it, and Avruch and Black note
that for the modern ADR ‘missionaries … a concern with possible cultural
differences as having significant effects does not seem to detain them for very
long’ (1996: 53). In examining attempts to introduce alternative dispute
resolution in the Pacific island of Palau, they note the irony of ‘bringing
ADR, an ideological formation partly inspired by misread ethnography …
back to the sort of cultural setting people … thought it came from in the first
place’ (1996: 54).
Such efforts, critics suggest, do no more than remove the conflict/dispute
from the public arena, and fail to acknowledge or remove the underlying
structural causes of the conflict, and Laura Nader warns that plaintiffs, lulled
into a false sense of security by discourses about ‘harmony’, might forfeit their
legal rights (in Avruch 2016). Those more in favour of ADR argue that
greater awareness of disparities in power have made for a more ethical pro-
cess, which also spares groups the high costs of legal alternatives. But Avruch
maintains that:
As complex and contested as these issues are when at least some amount of
social context is held constant, in the domestic US sphere, they become even
more problematic when the technologies of ADR and conflict resolution …
are exported to other contexts, to other societies and cultures.
(2016: 27–9)
Defending livelihoods and knowledge

‘The importance of culture’ also underlies Alexander Ervin’s research assisting
rural farming communities in protecting their way of life. ‘The industrialization
of agriculture has long been a threat to rural North Americans. It undermines the
family farm and community, erodes rural self-sufficiency and self-determina-
tion, and can negatively affect health and the environment’ (2005: 154).
Anthropologists such as Ervin have been speaking up for many decades about
the social effects of industrialisation in agriculture, beginning with Walter
Goldschmidt’s classic work in the 1940s. Goldschmidt compared two Cali-
fornian farming communities: one was largely dominated by factory farms
owned by large corporations based elsewhere. The labour force was migratory
and poor, and the local town had a high crime rate. The other community
was largely composed of independent farmers. They achieved higher levels
of production, had higher household incomes, and their local town had
prospering businesses, churches and family clubs. The research showed the
benefits of protecting community life in rural areas. However, disruptive
patterns of development have often been repeated:
For rural peoples, the decline of community is reinforced by federal and

state agricultural policies that favor the goals and profit motives of major
agribusiness corporations in the supposed interests of efficiency and the
untested assumption that only industrialized agriculture can cheaply feed
the world.
(Ervin 2005: 154–5)
Kendall Thu describes the health hazards to which people living near pig farms
using ‘confined animal feeding operations (CAFO)’ are exposed:
Symptoms experienced by swine CAFO neighbors are generally oriented

toward irritation of the respiratory tract and are consistent with the types
of symptoms among interior confinement workers that have been well
documented in the occupational health literature.
(2002: 175; see also Donham et al. 2007)
Another recurrent bone of contention in contemporary agriculture is the use of

genetically modified crops. Some of these carry ‘terminator’ genes that, by pre-
venting the plants from producing viable seeds for further crops, force famers to
depend heavily dependent on the large corporations that supply GM seed and the
pesticides that these require. Genetically modified crops also marginalise local
knowledge about plant breeding: for example, Glenn Stone examined how the
introduction of GM cotton in India destabilised local knowledge and social
exchange systems, placing immense pressure on farmers and leading to a rapid rise
in the suicide rate among them (carried out, ironically, by drinking pesticides)
(2007: 67). But while opponents stress the dangers to the environment and farm-
ers’ sovereignty, the controversy plays out unevenly, with aficionados pre-
senting such crops as vital to ensuring food security and public health. Stone
believes there is a significant role for anthropologists in mediating the debates:
‘GM crops are not going away, and they will continue to have highly con-
sequential impacts on research agendas and institutional relationships, on IP
rights, on civil society, on rural environments, and on farmers’ (2010: 392).
As in many conflict issues, the GM controversy is what David Downing
describes as ‘a struggle between contested networks of knowledge’ and between
opposing narratives. He conducted ethnographic research with local food
networks in south-west England, in which people feel that GM technology is
a threat to ‘their values and cultural projects’ (2011: n.p.). Investigating GM
experiments with rice in the Philippines and cotton in India, Glenn Stone and
Andrew Flachs note an attendant problem: the representation of ‘farmer attitudes,
opinions, and decisions – in short, the “farmer’s voice”’ (2014: 649).
Plainly, anthropological skills in enabling conversations between groups is
important in ongoing debates about GM crops and in wider concerns about the
need to maintain local knowledges. This is both a matter of making sure that such
bodies of knowledge are maintained through use and of protecting the ownership
of this expertise. As well as having a way of life that they hope to protect, local
communities – whether they farm or make a living in other ways – often have
valuable ecological knowledge. This brings us to another area of advocacy in
anthropology: that concerned with the protection of intellectual property
rights. Working for the International Potato Center (which in Spanish is called
the Centro Internacional de la Papa (CIP)), Robert Rhoades observes that,
with scientists and pharmaceutical and food corporations on the lookout for
new plant breeding opportunities, ‘the topic of ownership of plant genetic
resources is an international minefield of controversy because it concerns
profits, power and politics at the highest levels of international government’
(2005: 77). Anthropologists have contributed to this area in several ways:
First, field-level studies demonstrated that farmers possessed a complex folk

nomenclature of native potatoes … Ethnobotanical studies provided basic
information on farmer selections to assist with the center’s efforts … An
approach called ‘memory banking’ pioneered by anthropologist Virginia
Nazarea … demonstrated how cultural knowledge should be conserved
along with the conventional gene bank ‘passport’ data.
(Rhoades 2005: 76–7)
Industrial agriculture is one of the major stresses on indigenous landscapes, and

another is the widening global search for minerals and resources. As Alan Rumsey
and James Weiner (2004) have shown, mining often heads the list of activities that
have major social and ecological impacts on indigenous communities. In Papua
New Guinea, where mining has been massively destructive, Stuart Kirsch has
written extensively about the indigenous communities’ protests against the
destruction of their local ecosystems (and thus their livelihoods). Charting their
collaborative use of anthropological methods in trying to explain these realities and
communicate their concerns to decision-makers, he also draws attention to the
role of transnational corporations in infringements of human rights:
Corporations … seek to assuage concerns by promoting uncertainty and

doubt. They manage the politics of time by manipulating scientific research,
concealing or delaying recognition of significant problems. They co-opt the
discourse of their critics by promoting themselves as responsible, sustainable,
and transparent. They also seek to enhance their reputations by forging
strategic partnerships with NGOs, fostering division among their critics.
(2014: 3)
As resource extraction around the world continues to intensify, there are other
examples. Nathan Einbinder and Catherine Nolin have collected stories of a
Mayan community’s attempts to resist eviction by a nickel mining company in
Guatemala, and the resultant social and bodily traumas. Their research rein-
forces the importance of bearing witness, and of listening. ‘They were perhaps
the most shattered, lost souls we had ever met. They hugged us, one by one,
thanking us for listening’ (2010: n.p.).
Anthropologist and indigenous scholar Charles Menzies (2015) has spent many
years investigating extractive industries on the north-west coast of Canada and
assisting indigenous communities, and he underlines the importance of remaining
critically aware of the social and political contexts that surround such work. As
he observes, a model that positions the anthropologist as engaged partner and
advocate is very different to other, less benevolent motives for collaboration,
exemplified by corporate consultancies, whose goal is to secure social support for
projects which may not be in the community’s best interests (2015).
One of the best known cases of indigenous resistance to resource extraction is
the Standing Rock controversy, in which – with anthropological support – the
Dakota Sioux forged alliances with social and ecological activists to resist the
imposition of an oil pipeline on their land (Bunten 2016; Droz and Sustainable
Nations 2016; Weston 2016). This points to an important development in this
area, in which indigenous communities and like-minded organisations have
forged international networks and composed larger counter-movements critical
of exploitative practices.
These are the areas that are becoming the center of dissent in day-to-day
protests against the dislocations and environmental contamination caused
by global enterprises. At the same time that populations are forced to
migrate in search of work, global enterprises are going underground,
buried in the underworld of dotcoms and obliterating their tracks with
multiple conglomerate identities.
(Nash 2005: 177)
Michael Cernea has conducted decades of work with displaced populations

and observes that:
Involuntary population displacement and resettlement is one of the major

social pathologies inevitably resulting from numerous development pro-
jects … Social researchers have made major contributions through their
empirical research in revealing the dire impoverishment effects of forced
displacement, in asserting the need for enacting resettlement policies and in
helping in the formulation of such policies. This need remains high on the
public agenda because most developing countries still lack such policies.
(2009: 263–4)
Brooke McDonald-Wilmsen draws on research collected during the development

of the Three Gorges dam in the People’s Republic of China. In addition to the
political sensitivity surrounding the project, its sheer magnitude and complexity
presented challenges for designing and conducting ethnographic research. She notes
that while rich ethnographic evidence was taken increasingly seriously by policy-
makers, it also helped to combine this with ‘the more “prescriptive” approaches of
law, international relations, political studies and welfare economics’ (2009: 285).
Urban developments – especially those demolishing ‘poor’ areas to create
more desirable ‘urban zones’ – are regular causes of displacement (Harms 2013).
Populations are also having to respond increasingly to the environmental
degradation caused by climate change:
Displacement – or migration – driven by climate change is not only a

necessary survival strategy, but has been at the root of increasing levels of
impoverishment, social upheaval and human rights violations … Anthro-
pologists are well positioned to address the potentials of mass uprooting,
migration, and resettlement that global climate change presents.
(Oliver-Smith 2016: 116)
Migration, trafficking and modern slavery

Displacement and the loss of livelihoods leaves populations vulnerable to
exploitation, and anthropologists have turned their attention to how such
dislocation has revitalised human trafficking and modern slavery, including
entrapment in the sex industry. Sophie Day’s research addresses changing
representations of sex work and languages of consent (2010), and Sverre
Molland traces the relationships between development, migration, trafficking
and policy (2011).
Mitali Thakor and dana boyd have focused on sex trafficking in the USA, and
the way in which both people and online images are traded for the purposes of
exploitation. Examining online sites such as Craigslist and Backpage, and attempts
to regulate ‘networked technologies’, their work draws on science and technol-
ogy studies to make trafficking and anti-trafficking networks visible (2013).
Financial pressures and debt-financed migration are similarly implicated in
modern slavery, and Julia Davidson observes that:
Financing migration through debt can be an active choice without also being
a ‘voluntary’ or ‘autonomous’ choice, and migrants’ decisions to take on debts
that will imply heavy restrictions on their freedom are taken in the context of
migration and other policies that severely constrain their alternatives.
(2013: 176)
Livelihoods are also lost in times of war, and a recent multidisciplinary project
reviewing current UK-based research into modern slavery included work by
anthropologist Benedetta Rossi, who has done extensive fieldwork in the
Republic of Niger, investigating the sexual slavery and forced marriage emerging
from contemporary African wars (Bales et al. 2018).
Wars also lead to forced migration, and anthropologists are closely involved
in research examining how societies respond to incoming refugees. Naor
Ben-Yehoyada explores ways in which traditional ideas about Mediterranean
hospitality address the moral and the political dimensions of migration (2016).
Other anthropologists have considered higher death rates among migrant
communities (Hughes et al. 2017), and Jovana Arsenijević and her colleagues
conducted qualitative research in Belgrade, Serbia with young male migrants tra-
velling alone to Western Europe, recording ‘feelings of hopelessness, desperation,
lack of self-value and self-esteem’ (2018: 86).
The pressures that lead to conflict, displacement and disadvantage also
generate protests and efforts to articulate alternate beliefs and values. A
number of counter-movements have emerged that are critical of growing
inequality and social injustice, manifested in the Occupy movement, and
protests at G8 meetings and, in relation to gender inequalities, a series of
waves of feminism and the recent #MeToo movement. Given the relation-
ships between social and environmental justice, there is common ground with
the efforts made by conservation organisations and – more recently – groups
such as Extinction Rebellion to initiate radical changes in human environ-
mental relationships. These counter-movements and their increasing con-
fluence is naturally of interest to a discipline already attuned to diversity in
beliefs and values.
Land rights
Inevitably, concerns about social and ecological injustice overlap with conflicts
over land and resource ownership. Many anthropologists work in the legal
arena, bridging the gaps between specifically cultural ideas about property
ownership, and the national and international legal frameworks that often
override these (see Rodríguez-Piñero 2005).
Globalisation is merely the latest development in a long process of hegemonic
expansion by industrialised societies. Colonisation of many parts of the world in
the 18th and 19th centuries entailed the widespread appropriation of land owned
by indigenous or less powerful groups, and this appropriation continues with
contemporary ‘economic colonialism’. As well as fighting to retain their rights to
water and other resources, many indigenous groups are now battling to reclaim
their land, hoping at least to share in its management and use, or to be compen-
sated for its loss. The result is a number of bitter conflicts over land and water rights
in which, once again, different cultural perspectives are a critical factor (Trigger
and Griffiths 2003). It is therefore unsurprising that this has become a major area of
activity in anthropology. As resources are sought in ever more remote areas of the
globe, threatening the land and livelihoods of previously secure communities, it is
likely that there will be an increasing need for cultural translators who can mediate
conflicts, and for advocates who can assist less powerful groups in articulating and
defending their rights.
Anthropologists have a key role in contributing to a better understanding
about local forms of ownership and tenure, and people’s relationships with
places. This can be communicated in a variety of ways, many of which could be
described as ‘participatory action research’ (PAR), which involves members of
the community in a collaborative research process which enables them to achieve
their own aims: ‘Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a research strategy
whereby the community under study defines the problem, analyzes it, and solves
it. The people own the information and may contract the services of academic
researchers to assist in this process’ (Szala-Meneok and Lohfeld 2005: 52).
Such participatory collaboration, between local communities and anthro-
pologists is now very much the norm (Beck and Maida 2017; MacDonald
2012), and anthropological training increasingly provides skills in such methods
(Batallan et al. 2017; Harper and Gubrium 2017).
Anthropologists have a long record of advocacy in Australia. Rigsby and
Peterson describe early 20th-century scholar Donald Thomson as ‘very much
in the public eye because of his advocacy of Aboriginal rights’ (2005: n.p.).
Anthropologists assisted indigenous people’s efforts to gain civil rights and
citizenship in the 1960s, and supported their first land claims in the 1970s.
Following the passage of the Native Title Act in 1993 many have provided
expert advice in land claims (Merlan 2013; Morris 2013). Ethnographic
research with indigenous Australians is almost bound to involve collecting
data on their relationships with their homelands, and anthropology’s lengthy
record of scholarly research has been invaluable in providing legal evidence of
longstanding customary systems of land and resource ownership.
For example, in conducting my doctoral research with an indigenous
community in Cape York in the early 1990s, I drew on Lauriston Sharp’s
1930s ethnography in the area. He was kind enough, in his late nineties, to
invite me to Cornell University, where we shuffled slowly across a snowy
campus so that he could give me several unpublished book chapters. I also
made use of research by Barry Alpher (1991) and other linguistic anthro-
pologists who had worked in Kowanyama since the 1960s and 1970s. All of
this material and my own research, which entailed the cultural mapping of
many sacred sites, became vital evidence in a land claim made in the 1990s.
Cultural mapping entails recording, in a variety of media, all of the infor-
mation about each group’s sacred sites and important historic places, and their
traditional knowledge about the land and its resources. This collaborative work
with the community has resulted in a detailed collection of cultural informa-
tion, which is now archived in Kowanyama, and provides a key teaching
resource for younger generations. It also became critical in a land claim that,
although it took nearly a decade to rumble through the legal system, allowed
the Kunjen language group to reclaim their land within a national park, and to
regain rights of access and use in other homeland areas.
Similar work has been conducted in Central and South America, and Charles
Hale draws attention to the intrinsic tensions between cultural critique and
activism, making a case for what he calls ‘politically engaged anthropology’:
Activist scholars establish an alignment with an organized group of

people in struggle and accompany them on the contradictory and partly
compromised path toward their political goals. This yields research out-
comes that are both troubled and deeply enriched by direct engagement
with the complexities of political contention. A case in the Inter‐Amer-
ican Human Rights Court, where an indigenous community called Awas
Tingni forced the Nicaraguan government to recognize the community’s
ancestral lands, illustrates the promise of activist research, in spite of the
inevitable contradictions that present themselves even when the struggle
is ostensibly successful.
(2006: 96)
In many parts of the world, conservationists’ aspirations to protect key habitat
areas have created further pressure on indigenous ownership and use of land.
Anthropologists have been central to efforts to persuade conservation organi-
sations that what they fondly imagine as ‘uninhabited wilderness’ or ‘pristine’
areas have, in fact, been inhabited by indigenous peoples for millennia, and that
they need to take on board the cultural and economic needs of these
communities.
An example is provided by Marcus Colchester’s work. He made use of his
anthropological training in becoming the Director of the Forest Peoples
Programme of the World Rainforest Movement and an Associate Editor of
The Ecologist magazine. He has helped to design international campaigns
drawing attention to indigenous rights in Venezuela, and has received
numerous awards for his scholarship and activism.
The emergence of indigenous peoples as a social movement and as a

category in international human rights law has contributed to conservation
agencies re-thinking their approach … A new model of conservation can
now be discerned based on a respect for the rights of indigenous peoples
and other bearers of ‘traditional knowledge’.
(Colchester 2004: 20)
Such advocacy has been vital in ensuring that endeavours such as the
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which seeks to address biodiversity
loss, ensures that areas intended to protect biodiversity are managed ‘equitably’.
It has been shown that gender equality in management can help ensure that
women’s and men’s traditional rights over resource use are not diminished
with the development of projects and programs … The CBD Secretariat
(2011) has described equitable management of protected areas in the follow-
ing terms: ‘protected areas should also be established and managed in close collaboration
with, and through equitable processes that recognize and respect the rights of indigenous
and local communities, and vulnerable populations. These communities should be fully
engaged in governing and managing protected areas according to their rights, knowledge,
capacities and institutions, should equitably share in the benefits arising from protected
areas and should not bear inequitable costs’.
(UNEP-WCMC, IUCN and NGS 2018: 27, 29)
Water rights
The fluid nature of water, and its constant movements through the environment,
make protecting rights in water ownership, management and use much more
complicated than the more readily definable ownership of land and territory
(Strang and Busse 2011). But with intense and increasingly merciless anthro-
pogenic pressure on freshwater in almost every part of the world, this has become
a vital area for anthropological research.
A central concern is access to clean water and sanitation, which the United
Nations declared, in 2002, to be a basic human right, and which underpins its
sixth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) (United Nations 2010). However,
according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF’s joint monitoring
programme, 784 million people (10% of the world’s population) do not have
ready access to clean water and 26% – one in four people – still lack proper
sanitation facilities (WaterAid 2019). Basic rights to water are therefore an
important area for anthropological advocacy in both urban and rural areas
(Aleixo et al. 2016; Anand 2017) and this issue overlaps with broader political
issues about the privatisation of water (Babidge 2016; Strang 2004, 2016;
Winschewski 2017).
The over-exploitation of waterways, and the pollution of rivers and seas,
have caused some indigenous communities to try to regain customary water
rights. In New Zealand, my colleague Mark Busse and I assisted the Ma-ori
Council in its efforts to reclaim indigenous rights to water. Although the claim
made it through the Waitangi Tribunal and the High Court to the Supreme
Court, it did not result in a return of freshwater ownership to Ma-ori iwis, but it
did encourage legislative changes providing them with greater involvement in
managerial control of the rivers and the foreshore (Strang 2014).
In Australia in 2008, anthropologists Howard and Frances Morphy were able
to bring to a successful conclusion a landmark case at Blue Mud Bay. Australia’s
High Court decided that it was illegal for licences to be issued for fishing in
waters that fell within the boundaries of land covered by the Aboriginal Land
Rights (NT) Act, and this decision, asserting Aboriginal sea rights and protect-
ing their fisheries, extended along much of the Northern Territories’ coastline
(Korff 2019; Morphy and Morphy 2006, 2009).
Protecting local human communities also requires us to consider the rights of
the non-human beings who share and similarly depend upon ecosystems.
Around the world, efforts have also been made to promote the rights of rivers as
‘legal persons’ (Earth Law Centre 2017). Though rather a stretch for people
accustomed to Western categories of things, living kinds and persons, the idea of
rivers, mountains and forests as ancestral deities, and sentient beings, is not
uncommon in indigenous cultures. Ma-ori beliefs about rivers as ‘living ancestors’
(Strang 2020a) are echoed in Zuni ideas, in the southern United States, which
regard Mount Taylor as a sacred mountain and as a living being (Colwell 2016).
As Alexandre Surrallés observes, there is also considerable overlap between pro-
tecting the rights of indigenous communities, as defined by the UN’s Declaration
of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, and respecting their beliefs and
values in relation to non-human beings (2017).
There have also been international efforts to persuade the UN to make a
formal Declaration protecting the Rights of Nature (Global Alliance for the
Rights of Nature 2018, Gray and Curry 2016; Schläppy and Gray 2017; Strang
2017); and to have ‘ecocide’ (the destruction of ecosystems) designated as an
international crime by the International Criminal Court (Higgins 2011). Helen
Kopnina is a dedicated activist in promoting non-human rights and the need
for anthropologists to encourage more effective conservation of the habitats
vital to maintaining biodiversity (Kopnina 2016a; Kopnina et al 2018;
Shoreman-Ouimet and Kopnina 2017). Anthropologists are increasingly
involved in such endeavours, and although it may seem odd for specialists in
human behaviour to be advocating non-human interests, it is plain that the sur-
vival of all species depends upon humankind doing more to protect biodiversity
(Matsuoka and Sorenson 2018).
But, for the most part, anthropologists remain focused on providing advocacy
for human communities, many of whom have been unable to regain ownership or
control of traditional land and waterways. All too often they have been displaced
from their homelands.
Refugees
Land appropriations, political conflicts, environmental degradation and other
pressures have created many refugees and economic migrants, and such groups
often need support, most particularly when they are forced to relocate to areas
geographically and culturally distant from their own. There is often a useful role
for anthropologists in providing advocacy and cultural translation for these com-
munities. For example, Lance Rasbridge worked with Cambodian refugees in
Dallas, as a ‘refugee outreach anthropologist’ for a health organisation, coordinat-
ing medical teams and their refugee clients. The cultural translation provided by
anthropologists is often vital, both in familiarising refugees with unfamiliar medical
practices, and in helping Western medical specialists to understand culturally
diverse ideas relating to health and wellbeing (Kemp and Rasbridge 2004).
Recent decades have brought a significant increase in the number of refugees
worldwide. By 2018 there were 20.4 million worldwide, 5.5 million of whom
were in camps in the Middle East (UNHCR 2020). As these examples show,
advocacy can take a variety of forms. At times it becomes very formal; for instance,
when anthropologists act as ‘expert witnesses’ in the legal arena. This happens
regularly in land claims, where they conduct research, compile evidence, and
present this to the land claim court or tribunal. It is also becoming a more frequent
role in relation to refugee communities. Thus Stephanie Schwander-Sievers, who
had conducted lengthy ethnographic research in Albania and Kosovo, found her-
self much in demand as a cultural translator and expert witness in legal cases
involving asylum seekers – people seeking political refuge – from these areas:
In both types of cases, I was asked to explain various issues involving ‘Alba-
nian culture’, either in a written report or, on some occasions, as an expert
witness in court during trial … I was usually asked to comment on the risks
involved if an asylum seeker, were to be returned to his or her home country,
and how socio-cultural issues at home would affect that risk … Regarding
criminal cases I was often approached by police detectives during the criminal
investigation process … I was usually asked to explain … particular aspects of
Albanian culture and how these would give cultural sense to a violent deed
and help explain its motives … In legal procedures and in court, particularly
in asylum cases, individuals from different cultures and legal background
come into contact. Here the anthropologist both participates in, and observes,
relations of power.
(2006: 209–17)
Me an expert? Anthropology, the law and asylum-seekers

Marzia Balzani
I never set out to be of any use in the world and made sure that my first degree
was completely non-vocational: Latin and French literature to be precise. I
spent my time lost in 17th-century French drama, formulating imperfect sub-
junctives, journeying through 19th-century Bildungsromans and perusing the
poetry of the Augustan age. Then I stumbled – via the ancient Roman ‘Luper-
calia’ (an odd wolverine ritual that even Cicero found perplexing) – across a
discipline that studied the rituals of contemporary peoples. My next few years
were sorted: I went off to study social anthropology.
From dead Latin to defunct Sanskrit was a short step, and the prospect of
a few years in India ‘doing fieldwork’ was too good an opportunity to miss. I
headed to the desert state of Rajasthan and hid out in dusty archives and
palaces talking to old men about the former glories of the Raj. This was
fieldwork on kingship, an institution that no longer legally exists in India, and
so my study of the past in the present continued.
Although focused on rescuing dust-laden manuscripts from the ravages of
time and termites, I nonetheless encountered all the usual issues that plague
the world. There was the mistreatment of women and children in the form of
domestic violence, and even the occasional sati (the ritual sacrifice of widows
on the funeral pyres of their husbands). And in a country where half the
population lives below the poverty line, violence against the poor, Dalits, and
increasingly also Muslims, the denial of human rights was, inevitably, part and
parcel of everyday life.
On my return to the UK I found myself subjecting innocent anthropology
students to the intricacies of the caste system, Hindu–Muslim violence, the
glories of kinship charts and the wonders of patrilateral parallel-cousin
marriage. My world was still mediated by text and the careful evaluation
and interpretation of differing versions of the same reality.
Then, one day a colleague asked me to give a paper at a conference on
violence against women in multicultural Britain. Despite protesting that I
knew nothing worth repeating, I was persuaded to offer an anthropological
perspective on domestic violence in British South Asian communities. After
my presentation on ‘honour crimes’, a well-known professor came to talk to
me, and my journey into legal anthropology and the writing of expert witness
reports in asylum cases in the UK began.
In Britain refugees receive a very bad press. If the newspapers are to be
believed, all crime, evil and immorality (and no doubt global warming too)
stem from this numerically rather small group; the British never commit any
evil acts, and if we were to rid ourselves of these ‘money-grubbing, welfare-
scrounging foreigners’, the country would become an idyllic utopia. My work
with refugees, however, leads me to think of most asylum seekers as unfor-
tunate people who have managed to survive some appalling experiences.
When individuals seek refuge in Britain they are interviewed, and have to
provide evidence to justify their requests to remain. This evidence has to show
that they have been persecuted, and also why they would risk further persecu-
tion if forced to return to their country of origin. Many asylum claims are rejected,
and a ‘Reason for Refusal’ letter from the Home Office explains why. Asylum-
seekers sometimes appeal against the decision, and solicitors acting on their
behalf may ask experts to prepare reports explaining to the Asylum and Immi-
gration Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal why a case should be reconsidered.
Anthropologists are consulted when it seems that a cultural explanation
might be of use. For example, if a woman is widowed and has reason to fear
for her life in Pakistan, she might seek leave to remain in the United King-
dom with her naturalised British brother. This was the situation in one of the
first legal expert reports I produced, for a woman who had witnessed a ser-
ious crime and was at risk from the family of those convicted of the crime.
Not only was the strong documentary evidence of persecution rejected as
‘not accepted’ – the Home Office also considered that the ‘right to family
life’ did not mean that adult siblings should be allowed to join each other. It
was held that the kinship bond between an adult sister and brother was not
a primary one, and that the widow in question should therefore return to
Pakistan. If her life was in danger in her own home, then she should simply
move to a different city. After all Pakistan is a big country.
My report showed how, from an early age, brothers and sisters in Pakistan
are raised to behave in culturally prescribed ways, with the understanding that
as they get older the sister will not bring dishonour to the brother, and the
brother will undertake to support his sister in later life. This is a close bond,
much more pronounced than in the UK. I was able to demonstrate that
women in Pakistan do not usually live alone, and that those compelled to do
so may be vulnerable to exploitation and harm. Armed with cultural knowl-
edge, my report set out why, in this particular case, it was not safe for this
woman to return to her home.
Other cases I have worked on include those of persecuted religious mino-
rities such as Christians and Ahmadis in Pakistan, and Muslim women who
have married Hindu men in India. Some require knowledge of customary
practices, particularly where the violence is gender-based. The Home Office
may say that women can return to their country of origin and go to crisis
centres, but the reality is that many may never make it to one of these, and
even the centres may not protect them from further abuse. Further, some legal
systems punish, as criminal, behaviour that in the UK would be considered only
a moral failing. For example, a married woman who commits adultery in Britain
may be considered foolish, may annoy her husband, or may find that her
behaviour generates gossip. In Pakistan, however, such a lapse is not simply a
private matter: it is a crime that can land a woman in prison. In such cases, my
knowledge of the legal system can make this risk clear to an asylum judge.
Then all I can do is to hope that the judge makes the right decision.
One thing I must never do as an ‘expert’ is to say whether I think a case is
true or not. All I am expected to do is to assess the plausibility of any parti-
cular asylum claim in the context of my knowledge of the country and the
position of the individual making the asylum claim. The judges are expected
to decide on the truth of the case. My work is to assist the judges’ decision-
making by producing an account, a narrative of events, and to interpret
these in the light of what I know as an anthropologist. This is where my
earlier years of translation, novel reading, and sorting through archives of
overlapping but never quite matching accounts of events has finally turned
me into someone who is, from time to time, of use to others.
Advocacy is thus an expanding part of anthropological activity, which draws

directly upon the discipline’s strengths: in seeking a deep understanding of other
cultural realities; in translating this between groups, and in ensuring that research is
underpinned by ethical considerations and a concern for social justice. In the
contemporary discipline it is plain that there is a continuing role for ‘the scholar as
activist’, and as the issues change and develop, so too does this role (Rylko-Bauer
et al. 2006).
2 Anthropology and Aid
Crossing boundaries
Anthropologists’ in-depth ethnographic knowledge makes them very useful
advisers for international organisations, whose work crosses cultural as well
as national boundaries. Practitioners frequently work with government
agencies: in ministries of foreign affairs, diplomatic services, and in organi-
sations such as UNESCO or the World Health Organization. There is a
particular need for the skills and insights of anthropology in the govern-
mental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that try to assist people
suffering from famine, poverty or ill-health, or from human rights abuses,
conflicts or persecution (Nolan 2008). As David Mosse observes, of all of
the professional fields into which anthropologists venture, their longest and
closest involvement has been in the area of aid and development, and he
notes ‘the transformations that occur as social scientific concepts and prac-
tices cross and re-cross the boundary between anthropological and policy
making knowledge’ (2011: n.p.).
There are some obvious overlaps between the provision of aid and the
encouragement of development. However, there is an important difference
between ‘helping people in trouble’ and ‘changing the way that they live’.
Humanitarian activities simply aim to help when things go wrong. Most
governments remain involved in the provision of aid, but in the last few
decades there has also been a rapid proliferation of non-governmental aid
organisations, not just internationally, but also at national, regional and local
levels. Peter Hall-Jones notes that the NGO sector now comprises one of the
world’s largest, economic areas, with a turnover of over a trillion dollars a
year and millions of employees, and that many emerged alongside or instead
of trade unions, for example ‘as proxies for unions in countries where the
labour movement is repressed’.
It was civil society activism, led by trade unions, which paved the way for
the rise of NGOs after WWII … The two work together in powerful
coalitions (such as the Global Call to Action against Poverty and the anti-
sweatshop movement), and run joint campaigns … the term ‘social
Anthropology and Aid 33
movement unionism’ was coined to reflect this wider collaborative
approach, which has changed the face of many developing countries.
(2006: n.p.)
In many instances NGOs have taken up tasks that were formerly the direct
responsibility of governments, creating a set of alternative institutional
arrangements.
There is already a whole NGO culture in the world, with its characteristic
symbolism … behavioural patterns … and a special type of leadership …
NGOs develop clustered networks within which there are hierarchies and
competition, especially for sources of funding. The best known among the
biggest global NGO networks are social volunteer, child protectionist,
human rights, ethno-cultural and peacemaking ones, although every
country and every region has its particularities.
(Tishkov 2005: 11)
As this implies, international NGOs now form important transnational networks

(Eriksen et al. 2015a) and, as I found in my own work on water issues, there is an
important intersection between these networks and intergovernmental organisa-
tions such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO and the United Nations
(Strang 2020b).
Aid and ambiguity

The large-scale shift from government agencies to NGOs represents a major
social change, which is in itself of interest to anthropologists, raising questions
about whether these new institutions assist or inhibit effective governance and
democracy. Some analysts have argued that the sharp increase in the number
and scale of NGO organisations is an outcome of people’s disillusionment with
formal governance and bureaucracy, and an attempt to return democratic
power to citizens.
Nongovernmental organisations are now considered heavyweight actors in

the global political arena, as well as in many local and national ones. This
reputation has arrived at a time when professional political actors, such as
parties and governments, have fallen into disrepute. NGOs are valued
because they are viewed as legitimate representatives of civil society … in a
wide variety of issues.
(Acosta 2004: 1)
But other anthropologists are more equivocal about the role of NGOs
(Andersson 2017; Lewis 2014; Lewis and Schuller 2017). They observe that
NGOs are unelected, sometimes circumventing – and thus potentially under-
mining – democratic processes, empowering elites, or allowing governments to
abdicate responsibilities for issues that have traditionally fallen squarely within
their remit. Working with immigrants living in impoverished rural areas in the
USA, Thurka Sangaramoorthy suggests that one consequence of this evasion of
responsibility is ‘putting band-aids on things that need stitches’ (2018: 487),
and Claus Leggewie (2003) has commented that although NGOs can provide
useful inputs to mainstream politics, their lack of a democratic mandate can
raise questions about their legitimacy.
Every situation is different. Celayne Shrestha’s research shows that there
were only 250 NGOs in Nepal in 1989, but then, after a more democratic
government was instituted in 1996, NGO numbers jumped to 5,978 within
a year, as groups saw an opportunity to break with a state that had long
been seen as corrupt and self-serving: ‘For the intelligentsia, as well as many
frontline NGO workers, NGOs offered an opportunity to break with
“corrupt”, personalistic modes of appointment and promotion and access to
services’ (2006: 195). By 2018, this figure had jumped again to 6,089
(NGO Federation of Nepal 2018).
But Valery Tishkov, whose work is concerned with NGOs in post-Soviet
Russia, warns that NGOs cannot be assumed to be an unambiguous reflection
of democratic aspirations: ‘Some pursue hopelessly separatist agendas; others
perform foreign policy functions a state finds inconvenient to accomplish
directly; others install a “benevolent colonialism”’ (Tishkov 2005: n.p.). Steve
Sampson, who has analysed the activities of Western NGOs in the Balkans, is
similarly dubious about their effects, suggesting that they created a new kind of
‘project elite’ that led to a rejection of Western aid, stirring up local nationalists
and weakening the post-Yugoslav states (2003). Ethnographies of NGOs raise
key questions about the political dimensions of civic activities, and how NGOs
define successful developments (Allen 2018; Malafaia et al. 2017).
So, there are many complex questions about the aims of international aid
organisations: what are their effects on the functions of government? Who actually
benefits from their efforts? What are the social and cultural costs of aid-based
relationships? What political and ideological values are being promulgated in the
process? By addressing these ‘under the surface’ questions, anthropologists have
sought to look beyond comfortable everyday assumptions about aid, and to make
deeper analyses of relationships between NGOs and the recipients of their efforts.
There are often major disparities in power in these relationships, and part of the
task of anthropologists and other social scientists is to reveal these dynamics. Thus,
Alnoor Ebrahim’s research focuses on the way that power relations are maintained
through public discourses:
A discourse is a specific and historically produced way of looking at the world

and is embedded within wider relations of power – power that is manifest, for
example, in the scientific ‘expertise’ of development economists, profes-
sionals, and expatriates that serve as advisers, funders and consultants to
Southern Governments and NGOs.
(2003: 13–14)
NGOs can export particular economic models, open up new markets and
resources for donor countries, and export ideologies. For example, Beata Para-
gi’s ethnographic research on humanitarian aid in Palestine and the perceptions
of NGOs in receipt of donations highlights some of the issues surrounding
different cultural approaches to giving and receiving gifts. Framing foreign aid
as a form of ‘modern’ giving, ‘attempts to connect culturally, economically and
politically distinct worlds’ but it also has the effect of linking giving to different
levels of political and financial control. ‘Foreign aid, whether it is a macro-level
programme, a micro-project, voluntary work or other private charity donation,
has the power to influence cultural and political borders by transferring norms
and values from the donor to the recipient’ (2018: 486–7).
Whether anthropologists choose to work directly with groups, or to seek
funding from the (relative) freedom of a university post, they still have to deal
with a slightly tricky reality: that their work is also reflexive and thus potentially
critical of their host/funding organisation and its activities. People working in
NGOs naturally see their efforts as progressive, and can be resistant to critiques.
Amanda Lashaw notes ‘the difficulty of critically examining the moral sentiments
of progressive actors’:
Ethnographies of NGO and nonprofit practices are increasingly focused on

the social lives of middle-class liberals who significantly shape how societies
recognize social suffering and its redress. At the same time, the boundaries
between academic and NGO worlds are blurring ever more as ethno-
graphers prioritize ‘engaged’ projects and as more doctoral students enter
graduate school with NGO experience.
(2012: n.p.)
Focusing their analytic skills on the dynamics of interactions between groups,

anthropologists have therefore tended to have a cautious relationship with gov-
ernment agencies and NGOs alike. In essence, they hope to retain sufficient
independence that they can balance a desire to put their skills to good use in
helping people with an honest appraisal of the complex political and economic
realities of aid/development relationships (Lashaw et al. 2017). Clearly this is an
area in which some diplomatic skills are helpful, and of course some organisations
welcome and recognise the benefit of reflexive feedback.
The applied anthropologist can become one of the few avenues through
which poor rural people have their needs and perceptions communicated
to the wealthy and powerful designing and implementing projects, both
international and national … I do not deny the politics of representation
embedded in the development process, nor that by working on a project I
am placed within this specific field of power relations. However, some
development projects benefit local people regardless of how flawed the
epistemological ground from which they have grown.
(Grace 1999: 125)
Jocelyn Grace’s experience as a consultant in Indonesia showed her that the
recipients of aid are rarely passive subjects, and often have considerable agency
in directing the process:
Women in rural Indonesia want nearby and clean water supplies, and do not
want their babies to die within a week of being born, or their children to
suffer polio or Hepatitis B. They take what they want from such projects,
and ignore or reject what they do not want.
(1999: 127–8)
These examples suggest two major roles for anthropologists in relation to

international and national governmental and non-governmental aid agencies.
One is to ‘step back a bit’ and examine the social, economic and political realities
of the interactions between agencies and the recipients of aid; and the other is to
give more direct assistance to organisations that they feel are genuinely trying to
help people in need. Mary Ellen Chatwin, who worked as a community adviser
for the US Development Agency, argues that aid and development projects
should employ anthropologists:
Anthropological input is often appreciated by local populations and

communities, as they immediately realize that a ‘special kind of under-
standing’ is there, which is not the case in the usual development style
of interventions. Anthropology should be applied at a national level to
all development programmes that intend to make changes in the lives
of countries in need (such as disaster relief, poverty reduction, and
programmes for vulnerable communities and the elderly).
(2009: 30)
NGO-graphy
Exploring the interactions between aid agencies and recipients has a number
of potentially useful outcomes. Greater transparency leads to better
informed decision-making and illuminates the different perspectives of the
parties involved, assisting communication between them. Researchers in the
Department of Anthropology at Durham University, for example, ran a collective
research project concerned with NGOs in Ghana and India. Their work explored
the different perspectives of the state, the NGOs and the donors, and looked at the
impact of their relationships on the poverty eradication programmes that have
become the major focus on NGO activity in those areas (Alikhan et al. 2007).
In Ifugao, in the Philippines, anthropologist Lynn Kwiatkowski examines the
interactions between transnational organisations and local communities:
Some of these global institutions have financially supported, and in some

cases directed, local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to
improve the conditions of everyday life in Philippine communities … I
discuss some of the cultural issues, political contestations, and contradictions
that can arise for progressive NGOs working in ‘cultural communities’, or
among indigenous cultural groups, as the NGOs operate within a broader
context of national and international political and economic processes.
(2005: 1)
Sometimes – as well as looking at the bigger picture – an anthropological

perspective on the internal dynamics of institutions is useful and anthropologists
have begun to do more ‘close-up’ ethnographic work within NGO organisa-
tions. Thus, Laëtitia Atlani-Duault spent ten years among aid workers, studying
them and their state and non-state partners, as they attempted to ‘export
democracy’ to post-Soviet countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus. This
close ethnographic engagement not only gave her an understanding of the
realities of their lives, but also enabled her to step back and consider the wider
political implications of their activities (2007).
This kind of work draws on a well-established area of anthropology
concerned with organisational analysis, initiated by Elton Mayo’s work on
‘human relations’ in industry in the 1920s (in Roethlisberger and Dickson
1939), Sue Wright’s early research on the Anthropology of Organisations
(1994) and Mary Douglas’s work on How Institutions Think (1987). Many
anthropologists are involved in this kind of work today. Alberto Corsin-
Jiménez, for example, has long-term research interests in the anthropology
of organisations, in particular the ‘moral projects’ of capitalist organisations
and the way that ethical and moral issues are negotiated in purportedly
ethically conscious institutions. As he says, ‘the institutionalisation of power
has been a central concern of the anthropology of organisations from its
earliest days’ (2017: xiii).
This approach is well suited to the NGO-graphy being undertaken at the
International NGO Training and Research Centre (INTRAC 2020). Under
INTRAC’s aegis, James Staples has used ethnographic examples to show how
NGO intentions are often subverted by the political and personal interests of
stakeholders. Although such subversion is often blamed for NGOs’ failures to
meet their aims, it is also a crucial part of how such organisations function
(INTRAC 2007).
INTRAC’s principal consultant, Rod Macleod, writing about the recent
Covid-19 crisis, stressed the importance of Civil Society Organisations in
ensuring that vulnerable groups should not be left behind in terms of support:
Civil society organisations (CSOs) need to keep monitoring and championing

human rights so that they are protected as much as possible and marginalised
groups are not ignored. As a primary means to reach local people, it is essential
then that funders and supporters of CSOs in the Global North act promptly
and decisively at this critical moment.
(2020: n.p.)
Assisting aid
Many anthropologists are keen to assist aid agencies directly, and their professional
associations have often encouraged their members to make use of their skills in this
way. Some years ago, the Royal Anthropological Institute created the Lucy
Mair Medal of Applied Anthropology, which recognises excellence in using
anthropology for ‘the relief of poverty or distress, or for the active recognition
of human dignity’. An obvious area of application is concerned with the pro-
vision of food and medical aid in times of famine or other forms of disruption
(such as earthquakes, floods and tsunamis). Thus there is work, for example, on
the ways that floods affect mental health, and what kinds of interventions
might alleviate these effects (Butler et al. 2018).
In 1984, the American Association of Anthropologists (AAA) set up a Task
Force on African Hunger, Famine and Food Security, on the basis that
‘anthropologists offer unique perspectives and capabilities that might improve
performance of intergovernment (IGO) and non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) that monitor and respond to hunger problems’ (Messer 1996: 241).
Even – perhaps especially – in times of famine, a systemic view is useful,

and anthropologists think carefully about how food is managed within
societies and how this can be assisted and optimized … It is useful for the
community and donors offering and delivering food aid programs, or
development programs more generally, to have better understandings of
the objectives of the aid community.
(1996: 243, 255)
As a member of the AAA Task Force, Art Hansen stressed the need for
research that engages with local complexities:
Our original mandate was to work out better ways to utilize anthropologists
and anthropological knowledge to help Africa and Africans during that major
famine. Our concern at the time was that the planners and staff of assistance
programs often had little appreciation or knowledge of how Africans helped
themselves. That ignorance could result in assistance being less effective or, at
worst, becoming itself a secondary disaster.
(2002: 263, 273)
Hansen’s work highlighted some of the dangers of short-term-introduced solu-

tions, and the reality that even apparently ‘local’ communities and economies
remain subject to external pressures. Working with villagers in north-eastern
Zambia, he observed that their intense cultivation of cassava had enabled them to
absorb a rapid population increase with an influx of refugees, but then an invasion
of the cassava mealybug triggered a famine. Major changes in agriculture and
technology followed, and the community became reliant on maize and the
expensive fertilisers needed to grow it. This reliance led to further famine.
Sustainability and famine are complex conditions, created and influenced
by political, economic and ecological factors. Apparent sustainability can
be fragile, and locally self-sufficient sustainability is a fragile illusion.
Localities are not isolated and self-sufficient; they are incorporated and
vulnerable.
(Hansen 2002: 261–2)
Adjacent to work relating to food and famine is a fast-growing area of

research relating to medical humanitarianism (Abramowitz and Panter-Brick
2015), in which medical anthropologists work collaboratively with humani-
tarian organisations such as Médecins sans Frontières. As in other research
with NGOs, there is a productive tension between providing assistance and
critical analysis (Beshar and Stellmach 2017). For example, Ieva Jusionyte’s
ethnographic research with paramedics on the US–Mexico border observes
that many of the traumatic injuries associated with unauthorised border
crossings ‘are not only routine but also deliberate’ (2018: 89).
Dealing with displacement

Anthropologists have continued to be involved in famine relief, and in the
dislocation that often results from food or water shortages (Sadliwala and de
Waal 2018). Population displacement is also caused by political conflicts,
environmental degradation, urban expansion, economic pressures and large-
scale infrastructural developments (such as dams). Where refugees arrive
without resources – in refugee camps or in other countries – there is a need
for humanitarian aid, which, like other forms of assistance, can be delivered
most effectively when there is an understanding of the recipients’ cultural
beliefs and values.
It is also critical to appreciate the effects of displacement and migration.
Michael Cernea’s early work on displacement remains relevant. He defined
eight basic problems that can arise when people are displaced: ‘Landlessness,
joblessness, homelessness, marginalisation, food insecurity, increased morbidity,
loss of access to common property resources, and social disarticulation’ (2009:
19). Resettlement schemes can be very inadequate: for example, Kedia and
Van Willigen (2005) observe that when dams were built on the Amazon, many
communities located in its river valleys were left to fend for themselves further
upriver and along the trans-Amazon highway, with consequent disease out-
breaks (malaria and leishmaniasis) and the breakdown of formerly stable social
communities. Displacement also has major impacts on people’s capacities to
compose a robust and stable sense of identity, with commensurate impacts on
their social cohesion and wellbeing (Akwasi and Abrampah 2017).
An appreciation of the effects of displacement are particularly important
when refugees or economic migrants move to countries very different from
their own, and many anthropologists work with ethnic minorities located in
societies far from their homelands.
For example, drawing on experience as an advisor to the Overseas
Development Agency, Katy Gardner worked with Bengali elders in East
London, exploring their experiences of migration to the UK, and the
implications this has for their management of ageing and illness (2002).
Aihwa Ong has investigated the cultural changes taking place in diasporic
Chinese communities around the world (2002).
Migrant communities of a very different kind are the focus of Christopher
Griffin’s work (2008). He first used his anthropological training in a post as the
warden of Westway, a permanent encampment in west London, used by travellers
and gypsies. Here, alongside his job as the caretaker of the site, he was able to
conduct long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and to write extensively about the
history of the gypsies, their lives as nomads, their narratives of migration, and their
sometimes difficult experiences of race relations. Judith Okely’s well-known
research on gypsy communities also considers the tensions between travellers and
local communities (Okely and Houtman 2011) and Sarah Buckler looks at how
‘gypsiness’ is defined in the north-east of England (2011).
Understanding race and racism

The cultural understandings provided by anthropology are particularly important
in understanding issues around race and racism, and a number of practitioners
work in agencies devoted to upholding human rights and encouraging
cross-cultural tolerance (Spencer et al. 2014).
Conflict resolution depends heavily on understanding – and so tolerating – ‘the
other’. In racial and other conflicts anthropologists have an important public role
in challenging the essentialising stereotypes that perpetuate conflicts. Religious
differences often provide a putative basis for conflicts, and anthropologists can help
to make visible the more complex social, political and economic factors that sit
under the surface of these. Jonathan Benthall, for example, has focused on the
politics of aid in the Muslim world, and the emergence of religious NGOs,
studying the ideas and practices of charitable work in Muslim cultures, and the
political and religious forces that shape it (2016). Hastings Donnan and Neil
Jarman have conducted extensive research on the long-running ‘religious’ conflicts
in Ireland, and their ethnographic insights have been useful in presenting a more
subtle view of inter-group relations (2017).
In a contemporary world, ideas about ‘terrorism’ have come to the fore.
Daniele Moretti (2006) suggests that anthropologists can address these fears by
drawing on their fieldwork experience in areas or with groups that appear to be
the source of terrorist activities; and by contributing to analyses of the causes
and effects of terrorism. Just such an analysis has been undertaken by Mary
Douglas and Gerald Mars (2007), whose collaborative research considers the
factors that lead (or enable) dissident minorities to create political enclaves and
generate terrorist activities.
Although there are various places in which terrorism occurs, the major focus
in the last decade has been on Muslim cultural groups, both in Islamic regions
and as minorities elsewhere. Anthropologists have been called upon to close the
‘culture gap’ by:
(1) providing Western audiences with a nuanced picture of the complexity and
flexibility of Islam and Muslim culture … (2) exposing the socio-economic
and political processes that foster Islamic extremism and terrorism … and (3)
demonstrating that Muslim and Western culture are not as radically different as
some appear to believe and that either is just as capable of tolerance and
extremism as the other.
(Moretti 2006: 14)
Moretti doesn’t comment on the potential for Muslim anthropologists to

perform similar tasks, but clearly in an international discipline such as
anthropology there is scope in all countries for researchers to offer more
informed views of other societies. Moretti’s own fieldwork has been conducted
in Oceania, where many small nations receive US aid, and have expressed
support for its ‘war on terror’. However, each has its own perspective on the
issues. In Papua New Guinea, for example:
Reports on ‘terrorism’ and the ‘war on terror’ were followed and debated
with concern. In these discussions, some claimed to be supportive of
‘the terrorists’, who they regarded as freedom fighters engaged in a just
war of liberation. For many more, the Americans and their allies had
no business invading Iraq … With a local history of colonialism which
included over five decades of exploitation, land alienation and natural
resource pillage at the hands of other Western powers, it was not that
hard to see why many could sympathise with the Iraqis and Osama,
who they saw as Iraq’s foremost protector against the West. Yet, in
spite of such apparently widely held sympathy for their struggle, ‘the
terrorists’ were viewed with a degree of ambiguity and anxiety.
(Moretti 2006: 14)
Birgit Bräuchler’s research on Islamist groups in Indonesia considered how

fundamentalist ideas are disseminated and promoted through cyberspace,
observing that ‘the Internet has become an important instrument for the
information politics of radical Muslim groups’ (2004: 267). Since this early
recognition of the influence of social media, the internet’s capacities to
disseminate extreme ideologies and ‘fake news’ have become central to
debates, not only in relation to religious extremism, but in issues such as the
2016 US election or, closer to home, the notorious Brexit debates (Laterza
2018; Miller et al. 2016).
Since the earliest descriptions of ‘other’ cultural beliefs, such as those in Sir
James Frazer’s compendium, The Golden Bough (2009 [1890]), the study of
religion and spiritual being has been centrally important to anthropology.
Understandings of local religious ideas and practices are integral to most
ethnographic accounts. But – on the basis that it is a social science – the majority of
anthropologists do not support the use of their discipline to proselytise their own
religious beliefs. Many have written critically about the imposition of religious
ideas within colonial and neo-colonial contexts, describing missionaries as ‘ideo-
logical shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them’ (Andrews
2010: 665) and as colonialism’s ‘agent, scribe and moral alibi’ (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2010: 32). This is not the whole of a complex story, of course: in some
areas, for example, in northern Australia, mission stations also provided some pro-
tection from and critiques of colonial violence, but the missionaries nevertheless
required those seeking sanctuary to accept Christian authority (Strang 1997).
There remains, however a small number of practitioners who do missionary work
and aim to bring a Christian perspective to the study of societies (Howell and Paris
2011; Rynkiewich 2011). The Evangelical Missiological Society suggests that the
social sciences are a tool for enabling these activities:
The study and practice of mission stands on three foundations. First is the
Bible, which is the basis of all we do – providing vision, giving us our
marching orders, and maintaining the standards against which we measure
our standards in mission. The second foundation is the social sciences, the
use of which enables us to better understand people’s cultures and socie-
ties, providing the tools enabling us to communicate clearly the message of
Christ found in the Scriptures. The third is the great story of God’s work
through the Church over the course of history.
(Bonk 2003: 13; see also Santos and Naylor 2013)
Clearly there is much to debate on this topic, but whether driven by religious
fervour, or by moral concerns about social justice, the alleviation of inequality,
poverty and disease depends heavily on work that enables cross-cultural
understanding. There is much that needs to be done in this area, but those who
undertake this kind of work can at least feel that what they do is worthwhile,
and hope that it makes a difference.
3 Anthropology and Development
Critiquing development
Development has long been a key area of interest for anthropology. It has
much in common with the anthropology of aid in that it entails interactions
between different cultural groups, and a consequent need for cross-cultural
translation. However, although there is a strong overlap between these areas,
a key difference is that while the provision of aid is intended to restore a
(presumably) faltering status quo, the fundamental principle of development is
one of initiating change (Olivier de Sardan 2005). So although – like aid –
development is generally presented as dealing with a problem that needs solving,
or a condition that needs to be improved, it is more accurately defined, according
to Hobart’s foundational work on this topic, as ‘a synonym for more or less plan-
ned social and economic change’ (1993: 1). ‘Development has often been linked
to, or equated with modernisation; that is the transformation of traditional societies
into modern ones, characterised by advanced technology, material prosperity and
political stability’ (Hobart 1993: 5).
Historically, ‘development’ is a largely European and American idea that
emerged in the post-war era (Arce and Long 1999). The implication was that local
traditions were a bar to ‘progress’ and should be discarded, and a ‘developmentalist’
relationship was created with Third World countries, requiring that they replicate
European and American models in what Escobar famously described as ‘a western
imperialist enterprise’ (1991: 659). Attitudes and policy were based on assumptions
about the superiority of nations that had successfully modernised themselves,
and ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’ countries were described as a ‘the
Third World’, representing an earlier stage of technological and educational
attainment. Development would help them to ‘catch up’.
The idea of development therefore rests on longstanding assumptions that
there are technological, material, educational and political goals to which all
societies should aspire, and that wealthier countries should assist others in
achieving these. It is hard to fault this principle when many groups around the
world are plainly struggling even to subsist, but there are some important
questions to ask. Quite apart from the pragmatic reality that aspirational high
energy-and-resource-consuming lifestyles are not ecologically sustainable, even
for a minority of the world’s people (and we have yet to address that problem
successfully), there are more complex questions about the values being pre-
sented as ‘ideals’ and the social and cultural costs of transforming ‘traditional’
ways of life into a homogenous ‘modern’ vision reliant on constant economic
growth and industrial modes of production.
Because anthropologists work with a variety of cultural groups, they are
keenly aware that there are many alternatives to this dominant model, and –
as social analysts – they also observe that there are some highly differential
power relationships involved in development and, at times, some less than
altruistic aims.
Because the prevailing rhetoric is of altruistic concern for the less fortunate,
it is useful to remember that development is big business … In one form
or another, development is very profitable not just to the western indus-
tries involved, but to those parts of governments which receive aid, let
alone to development agencies. And the giving of development aid and
the extension of markets for manufactured products is more than balanced
by the processes … by which the countries to be developed make up the
major source of cheap raw materials and labour.
(Hobart 1993: 2)
Working in the highlands of Sulawesi, Tania Murray-Li traces the ways in

which colonial ideas have been carried forward into contemporary develop-
ment interventions, sometimes causing shifts from wealth to famine, and
encouraging local populations to move from compliant acceptance to political
activism and their own more critical view of development goals (2007).
Thus, as with the provision of aid, anthropologists have also analysed and
critiqued the process of development, as well as providing assistance in various
parts of that process with governmental and non-governmental agencies and
the recipients of their developmental efforts. This has produced what Lewis
calls an ‘uneasy relationship’ with development agencies (2005; see also Escobar
1995; Mosse 2013).
A critical analysis about larger social and political process in which develop-
ment takes place involves examining what is actually going on between the
parties involved, deconstructing the narratives and the ways that groups are
represented, observing what actually happens to resources, and making visible
the underlying dynamics. This critique has been immensely useful in engen-
dering a much greater awareness of the complex issues in this area (see Mosse
2005; Mosse and Lewis 2005; Nolan 2002; Venkatesan and Yarrow 2012).
Empirical, ethnographically informed research involves articulating local reali-
ties and communicating these to development agencies. This enables all parties
to create appropriate designs for projects; to ensure that they are carried out
with an appreciation of local cultural beliefs and values; and to evaluate their
progress and outcomes (Butcher 2017).
Anthropology and Development 45
Figure 3.1 Using PRA tools for community resource mapping, Vietnam.
Informing development
James Taylor
Technical specialists in development, metaphorically speaking, draw straight

lines on spreadsheets. People, however, do not always think in straight
lines. Practising anthropologists need to interpret how people think, feel and
act, taking into account internal viewpoints (not our own thoughts imposed
on them). These days there is a somewhat better understanding of what
anthropologists can contribute to international development, though techni-
cal experts sometimes think they know what is best for development bene-
ficiaries without the need for time-consuming consultation. However,
learning is a two-way process and grounded in the particular (holistic) cir-
cumstances of people’s lives.
Among other tasks, anthropologists work to understand differences (as
multiple voices) and to show how diverse stakeholder interests can be inte-
grated into effective project planning and implementation. But the work
involves more than just listening. It entails understanding the complexity of
planned social change in relation to the project in question, its anticipated
objectives and goals; that is, being able to articulate or interpret local under-
standings up to higher level institutions, and vice versa. Development-speak
refers to a knowledge hierarchy of ‘uppers’ and ‘lowers’ (delivering assistance

downwards), but our thinking must involve ‘inversions’, turning things around.
How do we do this? We challenge the notion of knowledge and start by finding
out what people know, rather than assuming what they do not know.
Many indigenous peoples for instance have impressive practical know-
how in the management of agro-ecosystems, fine-tuned to community
needs. It is often only when outsiders start to make demands on their land
and resources that problems arise. Sometimes inversions are stated as
putting the small farmer first, rather than the outside specialist. That is why,
these days, development ‘partnerships’ are important.
A means to ensure equity and that the variety of local voices are heard is
to conduct participatory field workshops or participatory learning and action
(PLA), earlier called participatory rural appraisal (PRA). The field tools used
involve lots of visualisations (maps, descriptive pictures etc.) and enable the
primary stakeholders to articulate their interests, potentialities and concerns.
These are translated in specific frames of reference that the outside techni-
cal specialists can understand, and which are then interpreted into action.
I had the advantage of earlier training in agriculture before I became an
anthropologist, which has helped me to communicate in interdisciplinary
contexts in rural development. I have worked on numerous short- and
long-term projects mostly in the Asia-Pacific region over the last 40 years,
involving nomadic herders in Inner Mongolia; Papua New Guinea high-
landers; copra-cacao growers in the western Pacific; and ethnic minorities
in Vietnam. Projects have focused on social forestry and socio-economic
analysis in hydropower projects in countries of the Mekong River Basin
(Lao PDR, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand); on community and rural
development in Thailand; on large-scale irrigation projects in Bangladesh;
and on cultural heritage with Australian Aboriginal people.
Anthropology is a holistic discipline, taking in multiple viewpoints at local
to global levels. As many project managers may have little familiarity with
social anthropology (though this is now changing) we are often labelled
‘sociologists’, though anthropologists tend to focus more on qualitative than
quantitative information. We must also know how to use quantitative soft-
ware, statistical analysis and data processing (as generated for instance
from large-scale household surveys) as well as mapping methods such as
GIS. But, for us, there is no substitute for the ubiquitous field notebook (and,
take note, being able to read your own handwriting).
Much of the generic work in development is in what we call ‘poverty
reduction’, to improve life ways and encourage greater participation through
empowerment (of women and men). There are a wide range of tools for this
purpose, such as workshopping and focus groups; observing; and taking
notes in the field. The aim is to provide ethical, timely and cost-effective
inputs (this is important to justify funding) and to generate relevant shared
information or knowledge. We are co-learners in the field, gaining knowledge

both from technical experts and local people.
As anthropologists, we must be able to understand what specialists in
other fields such as health, agriculture, economics, are talking about, and be
able to ‘translate’ the technical terms and concepts located in other profes-
sional domains into the local idiom. For example, in recent times, the ‘sus-
tainable livelihoods approach’ has become one of the most important buzz
words in development. This describes a means of making a secure living
which encompasses people’s capabilities, assets, income and activities
essential to secure the necessities of life.
With the best intentions in the world, interventions in ‘targeting’ house-
holds or communities, do not always work. They may leave the poorer
quartile more vulnerable to being further marginalised or exploited by
national and international elites (examples include logging in community
protected forests, or the building of dams for large hydroelectric schemes
in rivers on which local fishers depend). Anthropologists also ensure that
ethnicity and gender matter.
We may work in one of a number of ways, via commercial or institu-
tional research; with national NGOs, or with multilateral agencies (UNDP,
regional or global finance institutions such as World Bank/IMF, Asian
Development Bank, African Development Bank). The work of anthro-
Figure 3.2 Learning to harvest rice with ethnic Black Tai in a Vietnam participa-
tory irrigation management project.
pologists for multilateral banks may include ‘social safeguards’, con-

cerned with protecting indigenous people or mitigating the effects of
involuntary resettlement. We are not revolutionaries, but we can advocate
in the interests of affected peoples. At the end of the day, we know that
our recommendations may not even be acted upon by the funding
agencies or project managers. There is often a fine line between agency
obligations and the interests of local people, and we must balance our
tasks with responsibilities and obligations first and foremost to the com-
munities affected by development.
I have learned a great deal over the years working alongside women and
men in the majority world, perhaps more than I could ever give back to
them. The work of anthropologists in development must make a positive
difference.
Collaborative development
As in other areas, anthropology has also brought into the field of development
an important shift in emphasis, from ‘top-down’ institutional approaches to
engagements that acknowledge the agency of the communities involved, which
seek their full and active participation in the process, and which draw on their
traditional knowledge (Aronson 2007; Leach and Fairhead 2002; Peters 2016;
Reidy 2017).
Promoting meaningful participation in development

Paul Sillitoe
I have worked as a consultant for bilateral and international agencies (DfID,
FAO, UNESCO, GTZ) and international oil and mining companies. I have also
had research grants to facilitate the incorporation of indigenous knowledge in
development programmes (abbreviated to IK in the acronym-littered world of
development). This has entailed working with development practitioners and
natural resource scientists to inform their work with a local perspective.
Development projects are organised into stages: project identification;
planning and preparation; appraisal of proposals; project implementation;
monitoring; and final evaluation. Anthropology is well placed to contribute to
each of these. Knowing regions and communities intimately through exten-
ded periods of research, anthropologists are well qualified to assist with
project identification, and are likely to be able to engage local people
meaningfully in the process. The success of projects depends on the real
participation of the intended ‘beneficiaries’, but all too often projects are
devised by agency experts with little local input. For instance, I recall a
meeting with an IFAD team on a project identification mission for the whole
of South Asia. They were visiting some half a dozen countries in a month,
spending a day or so in each place. It was no way to identify potential projects,
let alone involve people. Some use the derogatory term ‘development tourists’
for such consultants.
Anthropologists can also make valuable contributions to planning and
preparation, and the appraisal of project proposals. They have the mindset
to promote meaningful participation and not impose a pre-conceived model.
The inclusion of anthropology in projects leads to an appreciation of local
views and ensures that local voices are heard on their own terms. For
example, during an irrigation engineering project in Bangladesh, it became
evident that a finely tuned understanding of local land-holding rights and
village power structures was necessary to plan a scheme that would be
workable. It was not simply a case of engineering deep tube wells and canals,
but also of coming up with a way of operating and maintaining the scheme
that made sense locally. The importance of local consultation was starkly
evident following the multi-billion-dollar Flood Action Plan (FAP) programme in
which dykes and canals were constructed. I recall a DfID Fisheries Advisor
asking in amazement why local farmers had dug through a new embankment,
breaching the expensively engineered flood protection arrangements:
‘What possessed people to do such a thing?’ It turned out that the
embankments were not allowing the monsoon flood waters to drain away,
and were preventing farmers from planting their next rice crop.
Anthropologists also work on project implementation, and this often involves
managing other staff, including local participants. Here again anthropologists
have a particular contribution, being familiar with other cultural ways of working
and not expecting to impose a ‘Western’ regime. Anthropologists can also
make useful contributions to the monitoring and evaluation of projects, asking
questions that do not occur to others.
Most development practitioners and the natural scientists in this area are
committed to tackling the poverty that blights many lives, and are sympa-
thetic to our endeavours, realising that in the past large sums have been
wasted on initiatives that ignored local ideas. Nonetheless, they find
anthropology puzzling: as one natural scientist colleague put it: ‘Doing
research with you is like jumping from an aeroplane without a parachute and
hoping that things will work out on the way down’. We therefore have to
work hard to make anthropology readily intelligible to others, so that they
can see its contribution.
It is always challenging to integrate indigenous knowledge into the devel-
opment process. We need to meet demands for development to be cost-
effective and time-effective, generating anthropological insights that are
readily intelligible to non-experts, while not downplaying the complexities. The
uniqueness of indigenous knowledge – small-scale, culturally specific and
geographically local – hampers its incorporation in development, impeding the
formulation of generalisations that might inform wider policy and practice. We

need principles that facilitate generalisation without transferring ideas that
may be inappropriate in other contexts, and my colleagues and I have tried to
set out some methodologies that will assist this process (Sillitoe et al. 2005).
An interdisciplinary approach is central to IK research, combining the cultural
empathy of social scientists with the technical know-how of other specialists.
An integrated perspective requires learning from other disciplines, as well as
from local people. There must be a genuine flow of ideas and information
between all parties. For example, it is increasingly realised that rainforests in
Papua New Guinea are not ‘pristine’ environments but have been subject to
human interference for millennia, so the idea of creating conservation areas
from which people are excluded does not make ecological sense (even if it was
practicable politically), as they have long been part of local ecosystems. To
meet conservation interests it is therefore necessary for biologists to work clo-
sely with anthropologists to understand local forest-use practices. Success
depends on fostering consensus, joint ownership and open debate. It is
necessary to promote a collaborative atmosphere in which neither scientific nor
local interests feel threatened, all parties having a role in negotiations, and
contributing vital skills and knowledge.
In working in the development field, it can be useful for anthropologists to
specialise in fields such as health, demography, governance, natural
resources, engineering and education. My own interests encompass natural
resources management, appropriate technology, and development, with a
particular focus on sustainability and changing social and political relations.
At first sight IK work may seem straightforward: we just have to ask local
culture bearers about their views. But we soon encounter cross-cultural
issues that challenge what we think we know. Knowledge is diffuse, and it is
not homogenous; there is often little local consensus. Much information is
transferred through practical experience, and people are unfamiliar with
expressing all that they know in words. Knowledge may be passed between
generations using alien idioms: symbols, myths, rites and so on. Translating
it into foreign words and concepts may misconstrue other’s views and
actions. The dynamism of IK also presents difficulties: it cannot be docu-
mented once and for all. We therefore need an iterative strategy, closely
linking ongoing IK research with development interventions.
It can take several years (not months or weeks) to achieve meaningful
insights into local knowledge and practices, and from this perspective to pro-
vide ‘cultural translation’ for development agencies. This is often problematic in
contexts with politically driven short-term demands for quick results. And it is
not just a question of the time it takes to learn language, cultural repertoire,
social scenario and so on, but also the investment of time and energy needed
to win the trust and confidence of local communities who frequently have good
reason to be suspicious of foreigners and their intentions.
We cannot understand cultures by looking at individual parts of them in

isolation: we have to consider the whole picture. For example, in oil field
developments in Papua New Guinea, it would seem unlikely that religious
beliefs could be an issue, but this is exactly what happened with people
talking about the oil coming from the body of an enormous multi-headed
subterranean snake that the oil drill had speared. The idea originated in their
belief that spirits sometimes manifest themselves in the form of frightening
snakes. They consequently became increasingly anxious at the cosmologi-
cal implications of oil and gas developments and their potential to lead to
disasters. Such views may seem bizarre to people in the petroleum industry,
but they clearly need to be aware of them to understand the reactions and
demands of the landowners whose agreement is necessary for production.
We also need to beware of accumulating ethnographic information not
directly related to development issues, and of potentially disempowering
people by representing their knowledge in ways beyond their control, maybe
infringing their intellectual property rights. These are issues that anthro-
pologists are trained to be aware of, and where they are well placed to make
significant contributions to development endeavours.
As Paul Sillitoe implies, development is by no means a one-way street.

Indigenous knowledges have much to offer, for example, in assisting environ-
mental conservation and medical research, and anthropologists have often been
influential in ensuring the preservation and valorisation of local forms of
expertise. Anthropologists have therefore devoted considerable energy to
recording local systems for classifying and understanding the world, and there is
now a large body of literature on ‘traditional ecological knowledge’ that not
only provides a rich lexicon of information about habitats and species but also
describes some very diverse ways of thinking about these, producing localised
expertise which has sometimes been described as ‘ethnobotany’, ‘ethnobiology’
or ‘ethnoscience’ (Bicker et al. 2004). The late Darrell Posey spent many
years recording the ethnobotany of indigenous groups in South America, and
highlighted the relevance of this expertise for contemporary ecological
management (2002). Rajiv Sinha and Shweta Sinha recorded local knowl-
edge about therapeutic plants in India (2001), and Michelle Hegmon and
her colleagues provide accounts of Native American ethnobotany from
prehistoric times to the present, pointing to some of its lessons in relation
to current farming and conservation practices (Hegmon and Eiselt 2005).
Rajindra Puri highlights the need for conservation organisations to engage with
the traditional knowledge of hunter-gatherers: ‘Local environmental knowledge
underpins … the choices people make about what and where to hunt, fish and
gather plant resources’ (2011: 146). His work with Gotzone Garay-Barayazarra
underlines the relevance of long-term traditional knowledge for contemporary
farming (Garay-Barayazarra and Puri 2011). Anthropologists are well placed to
mediate between local farming communities and food science researchers. For
example, Robert Rhoades did pioneering work with the International Potato
Center, establishing five main objectives: increasing potato production; protecting
the environment; saving biodiversity; improving policies; and strengthening
national research. Anthropologists have worked with the centre’s interdisciplinary
research teams in all of these areas, and have had a critical role in bringing local
perspectives into the equation.
Anthropologists helped a team of post-harvest technology scientists generate a

new system of storing potatoes that was subsequently adopted by thousands of
farmers in over 20 countries. Serving the team as cultural brokers, the
anthropologists demonstrated that the scientific preconceptions of farmer
conditions were incorrect and then pointed to common ground upon which
both scientist and farmer could communicate.
(Rhoades 2005: 72–4)
The anthropologists succeeded in highlighting the farmers’ real concerns and

demonstrating the advantages of using methods of storage that, as well as being
practical, fitted into local social and cultural traditions. By ‘translating’ the
farmers’ experience and demonstrating its utility, they were able to convince
the scientific community that there were major gains to be made from more
collaborative approaches. The productive relationship between cultural
knowledge and food science is similarly emphasised by Virginia Nazarea’s
work, which focuses on potatoes (and poetry) (2014), and Todd Crane makes
the important point that collaboration between communities and scientists
needs to be recognised as an encounter not between local culture and ‘science’,
but between local and scientific cultures. Earlier work
left the ‘expert’ practice of science and technology as an implicitly practical

and apolitical space rather than as a subject of ethnographic study. The
increasing and diverse articulation of farmers’ livelihood practices with the
professional practices of agricultural scientists demands theoretical tools
that bring them all into the same frame of analysis … The integration of
agricultural anthropology and science and technology studies provides a
well‐balanced toolkit for analysing participatory technology development
as a space of cultural encounter.
(2014: 1)
Farming is a precarious way of life at the best of times and not all development
projects are successful. Davie Simengwa observes that
huge sums have been invested in development projects in the postwar

period, yet the vast majority of these projects have been viewed as failures.
Donors and development aid workers are increasingly concerned that their
assistance has not significantly impacted the economic wellbeing of most
developing countries.
(2017: 1)
He stresses ‘the need for adopting anthropological approaches by both the

donors and the recipients of aid’ if such failures are to be avoided (2017: 1).
Many development projects involve the provision of loans to boost eco-
nomic activity. This support has major potential to create not just economic
change but also to rearrange social, cultural and political relationships. In many
cases local economic systems are brought into conjunction with globalised
markets, providing opportunities for greater wealth generation but also creating
dependencies on external organisations (Eller 2016; Little 2013a). There are
also broader attempts to ensure that developments also deliver social justice, in
the form of Fair Trade (Lyon and Moberg 2010).
As in other aspects of development, the economic aims raise some key
questions: who is enriched or empowered by loan schemes and economic aid?
Who loses out? How do such schemes affect cultural beliefs, values and prac-
tices? Conducting research in Bangladesh, Sidney Ruth Schuler and Syed
Hashemi observed that in loan schemes, as in other development projects, there
are some major issues around gender and equality. Their research looked at the
relationship between women’s participation in rural credit schemes, the
empowering effects of self-employment on women’s status and autonomy, and
control over their own fertility (2002; see also Schuler et al. 2010).
Feminist approaches in anthropology have paid particular attention to gender
relations, and have often been linked to aid and development activities hoping to
assist women and children. For example, Soheir Sukkary-Stolba has worked in
19 different countries in Africa, Asia and especially the Middle East, in projects
designed to assist poor rural women, especially single mothers and widows. She
has helped to design family planning training sessions for midwives, interviewed
rural women about water issues, and collaborated in research investigating
childhood diseases (in Gwynne 2003: 123).
Health-related development, like other forms of development activity, benefits
from ethnographic knowledge. Thus Elliot Fratkin and Eric Roth, in working
with formerly nomadic cattle herders in northern Kenya, considered the wide
range of social, economic and health effects created by their settlement in more
permanent sites (2005). Steven Feierman and his colleagues underlined the
importance of collecting and valuing local knowledge to ensure the effectiveness
of global health programmes. Their study examines ‘the relative knowledge and
power of impoverished patients and global decision-makers, all within a single
frame’, and they suggest that ‘anthropological research is capable of providing
new and important insights on the diverse meanings of patient decision-making,
informed consent, non-compliance, public health reporting, the building of
political coalitions for health and many other issues’ (2010: 122).
Indigenous communities have their own ways of thinking about and under-
standing health and medical issues, and do not invariably embrace medical
models, practices and pharmaceutical products from elsewhere. Thus Kate
Hampshire and her colleagues have made use of game theory and ethnography
to explore health-related trust issues in Ghana and Tanzania (2017). There are, of
course, important links between economic security and health and, examining
efforts to tackle malaria over time, Clare Chandler and Uli Beisel note how a
strong focus on technical solutions, ‘excludes other social, infrastructural and
economic aspects that affect health systems capacities to adopt standardized solu-
tions’ (2017: 411).
Conserving cultural diversity

A common external pressure on local communities is the growing worldwide
support for wildlife and habitat conservation. While conservation efforts are vital
for the maintenance of biodiversity, they have tended, sometimes, to neglect the
needs of local people who may rely on access to the same land and economic use
of its resources for their food and livelihood. Attempts to replace local modes of
production with a transnational model combining conservation and the develop-
ment of a tourism industry have led to some major conflicts (Homewood 2017).
In addition to highlighting the issues of social justice that these conflicts raise,
anthropologists have argued that cultural diversity is as important as biodi-
versity, not just for the wellbeing of human populations, but also that of other
species. They have shown that, in maintaining biodiversity, the low-key
environmental management of small-scale societies can be as effective as – and
sometimes more effective than – a mixture of ‘national parks’ and more
intensive surrounding development. Peter Little provides an example, drawing
on his research with Maasai herders in Kenya:
I was invited by the Kenya Wildlife Services (KWS) to help establish a socio-
economic monitoring unit to look at project impacts and to gather ongoing
data in a community-based conservation project … The role that pastoral
livelihoods in East Africa play in shaping the savanna landscapes and their rich
biodiversity cannot be understated. East Africa possesses a rich historical and
archaeological record documenting the significant influences of pastoral land
on savanna habitats and the wildlife herds that inhabit them … This evidence
strongly suggests that the savanna ecosystems of East Africa, which support the
richest variety and density of large mammals in the world, were shaped by
human activity and were not the ‘wilderness’ areas so often considered by
early explorers and naturalists … Current communities of herders, who
played such important roles, are increasingly impoverished by the expansion
of national parks and game reserves, as they have lost access to valuable ran-
gelands and critical water points. At least 20% of critical Maasai grazing lands
have been taken over by wildlife reserves and parks since the 1940s … For-
tunately, the KWS was headed by the well-known anthropologist, Richard
Leakey, who pointed out that the Maasai pastoralists are ‘par excellence con-
servationists … if the Maasai had not been so tolerant, we wouldn’t have any
wildlife in the Maasai Mara today.’ … Confronted with the prospects of
large-scale subdivision and capital-intensive agriculture near some of Kenya’s
most important wildlife areas, international conservation groups and the
government now embrace pastoral land use … for its positive benefits to
wildlife conservation.
(2005: 48–9)
With his colleagues John McPeak and Cheryl Doss, Little observes that
although the role of pastoralists in Africa is typically underappreciated and
misunderstood by development agencies, external observers and policy makers,
nearly half of the continent’s land mass is comprised of arid and semi-arid land
used predominantly for livestock grazing (McPeak et al. 2011).
Both realism and justice demand that efforts to conserve biological diversity
address human needs as well. The most promising hope of accomplishing
such a goal lies in locally based conservation efforts – an approach that
seeks ways to make local communities the beneficiaries and custodians of
conservation efforts.
(Little 2013b)
The involvement of anthropologists in these debates has encouraged

international conservation groups to think more carefully about the role of
local communities, and to work with them in trying to protect wildlife and
wider ecosystems. Similar progress has been made in Australia, where con-
servation organisations are increasingly willing to work with Aboriginal
people. With input from anthropologists such as Bob Layton, Uluru (Ayers
Rock) and Kakadu National Park are now managed jointly by National
Parks rangers and local indigenous communities (Layton 1989). In Far
North Queensland, where I have conducted research for many years, a local
Aboriginal community established one of Australia’s first river catchment
management groups, bringing together different groups of water users and
initiating more collaborative management in the Mitchell River watershed
areas (Strang 1997, 2001). More recently they have been successful in
reclaiming the Alice-Mitchell National Park and now co-manage the area
with the Queensland National Parks Service. The park has been renamed,
to acknowledge its traditional owners, as Errk Oykangand National Park
(home of the Oykangand/Kunjen people).
Legislation acknowledging native title to land has also assisted indigenous Aus-
tralians in requiring that the development of resources through the extractive
industries must now respect their cultural heritage and the sacred sites and stories
embedded in the landscape. Jim Birckhead, whose early work was with Appa-
lachian communities, continued his career in Australia, where describes his role in
helping to record cultural information for local communities during the mining
boom in the Pilbara desert ‘when there was a shortage of anthropologists’.
From Appalachia to the Outback

Jim Birckhead
This is orange and yellow ‘high vis’ vests, steel capped boots ethnography,
where you fly across the country on short notice, fly into a mining camp with
its workforce on a company-chartered Boeing 737, (inductions and training
certificates under your belt), meet Traditional Owners (‘TOs’) on the survey
team, go bush to identify areas of spiritual and cultural concern, stay in
remote mining camps (in ‘dongas’), and depart back across the continent. It
usually takes 14 hours of travel to arrive at the field site, where a survey may
take as little as four hours or as long as a week.
As a seasoned ethnographer of deep meanings, it sometimes seems
incongruous to me, that after hours of flying around in a helicopter tracking
Dreaming tracks with a GPS with the old fellas, or bush-bashing for hours in
a Toyota Land Cruiser (sometimes getting bogged in sand or mud, getting
tyre punctures – or the odd vehicle rollover), that they may simply say,
‘Nothing here. No Story. OK’ (thumbs up). This is a good outcome for the
companies as it means that
there are no ethnographic reasons why their proposed exploration and

development cannot proceed as planned – be it a rail line, road, port
facility, mining camp, water target, pipe line, airport, drill pad or a full
scale open pit iron ore mine can proceed without infringing on Indigen-
ous rights or ‘country’.
For Traditional Owners, (male and female) it means that they have exercised
their right ‘to speak for country’, based on their authority and knowledge of ‘the
Law’, and to negotiate trade-offs for restricted or no access to more significant
country. And companies sometimes provide employment and training schemes,
or employment for Aboriginal mining service contractors, or at times benefits
such as a dialysis machine for a remote community, and mining royalties.
As TOs mostly no longer live ‘on country’, but in government-subsidised
housing in regional towns, these surveys are a welcome opportunity to ‘get
back to country’; receive pay at a daily rate, plus the adventure of circumnavi-
gating their country in a chopper. It is also a time for young people to go bush
and leave behind for a while the temptations and lures of regional centres, and
to learn about their country. And for all to see firsthand what companies are
doing (or planning to do) on their lands. When the TOs identify ‘ethno’ sites of
significance, the anthropologist’s task is to record and map as far as possible,
the significant, often ‘intangible’ values of these sites and to work with them
and perhaps Native Title lawyers, to negotiate with the company, alternative
paths around an area of concern, or for ‘no-go areas’.
Unlike traditional ethnographic research, ‘ethno’ surveys begin with a scope

of works set by the mining companies, e.g. ‘The proposed programme consists
of 120 reverse circulation drillholes and associated access tracks, drill pads
and sumps for collection of any groundwater produced when drilling … ’ The
proponent company then organises appropriate Traditional Owners selected
by their local language group and native title corporations, provides the maps
and logistics (led by heritage ‘fieldies’) and it is off to the field.
As an experienced ethnographer and as a student of Aboriginal culture,
history and economics, I look beyond the narrow focus of the scope of
works. The survey – its contexts, outcomes, participants – is part of a larger
critical ethnographic frame that includes the mining company, camps, the
anthropologist, government policy, etc. that illuminates many aspects of the
racial and cultural politics of people speaking and fighting for their country.
While these one-off surveys seem to belie the anthropological ideal of
working with one community over a long period of time, the reality is that over
years, you end up working with mostly the same TOs and get to know them and
their ways over time; and they, yours. There are sometimes moments of ‘post-
modern’ joy and bemusement. I recall on one survey with people I had worked
with over a number of years, sitting around a fire with the old fellas, below the
BHP Iron Ore railway trestle, while they were cooking seven goannas they had
hunted, served with Helga’s Bread, Zero Coke, and Slim Dusty (country) music
playing. They confidently waved as the 2-km-long ore train passed overhead,
Figure 3.3 Vehicular Heritage Survey Team, Pilbara, Western Australia. Photo-
graph: Phil Czerwinski.
Figure 3.4 Helicopter Ethno Survey Team, Pilbara Western Australia. Photo-
graph: Phil Czerwinski.
blowing its horn back at us. What a good time that was. In some ways, these
people are getting their own back. This may be on a mining company tene-
ment, but it is their ‘country’, over which they hold customary rights and are
deeply connected to through songlines and Dreaming stories.
But, in the end there are poignant moments. Whenever we fly over mas-
sive open-cut mines, the TOs muse ‘Is this is what we are leaving the young
ones – big holes in the ground?’
Positive changes have also been achieved in New Zealand, where Garth
Harmsworth, Shaun Awatere and Mahuru Robb describe the major role that
Ma-ori iwis now have in the co-management of waterways (2016). As they
point out, while there are different factors in each context:
Internationally, there is an increasing trend to engage with indigenous

communities for research and collaboration, including indigenous
groups as active participants in resource management decision
making … The indigenous rights of Ma-ori in New Zealand are stated
in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi and in many forms of New Zealand’s
legislation. Local and central governments are eager to include local
indigenous Ma-ori groups (iwi/hapu-) in freshwater management plan-
ning processes through meaningful engagement and collaboration. Key
to the success of collaborative planning processes for Ma-ori are endur-
ing relationships between local government and Ma-ori, along with
adequate resourcing for all partners contributing to the collaborative
process.
(2016: 1)
Infrastructural developments
Ideas about development are most often materialised in major infrastructural
endeavours. In recent years the topic of infrastructure itself – what it means and
how – has become a lively area of research in anthropology (Harvey and Knox
2012). Infrastructures are a way of thinking as well as doing. Slow and rarely
impulsive, they take time to build and develop, thus manifesting and embedding
the long-term, dominant beliefs and values of societies and the primary aims of
their governments (Strang 2020c; Wagner 2013). Yet, in comparison to the
complex and intricate ways that ecosystems have evolved, infrastructures are fast,
often imposing rapid and simplified engineered solutions to meet human needs
and interests. They have major impacts on local environments and the social
groups who inhabit them, and, in both the country and the city, they shape peo-
ple’s everyday lives and manifest social and political relationships (Anand 2017).
Contemporary thinking on infrastructure is not merely about engineering: it
incorporates digital infrastructures, and – sometimes – considers the physical
environmental more generally as having an infrastructural role in a complex
relational system composed of people, human-made things, and the non-
human world. Work by Penny Harvey and her colleagues therefore points
to the connections between
digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises

and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns
about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency
around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility,
and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly
shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand
more clearly.
(2016: abstract)
However, while it is useful to recognise the complex systems in which they are
embedded, it is the big engineering projects that most obviously (and literally)
concretise societal intentions and are generally the focus of infrastructural con-
cerns. Conservation organisations and indigenous communities sometimes find
themselves on the same side when confronted with large-scale infrastructural
development schemes. Major dams and hydroelectric projects are among the
most controversial of these, and as in other forms of development, an under-
standing of the different perspectives of the various groups involved is vital, as is
some anticipation of the potential social impacts of such schemes, which often
displace whole communities. These kinds of developments benefit from ‘social
impact analysis’, which is a way of systematically considering the kinds of impacts
that they will have on local groups (Goldman 2000). Thus in Canada, when a
large hydroelectricity development was proposed in James Bay, a team of
anthropologists conducted research with the Cree tribe:
The Programme in the Anthropology of Development at McGill University

provided a wide range of socio-impact studies of the consequences of the
hydroelectric project. These allowed the Cree to prepare their case so as to
emphasize the threats to their subsistence base. This resulted in measures such
as the James Bay and Northern Quebec agreement, which set aside certain
territories for the exclusive use of the Cree, reserved some twenty-two species
of fish and game for the exclusive use of Cree people, and instituted a pro-
gram for Native game wardens that enabled the Cree to monitor the effects of
the white man’s incursion into their hunting territories more effectively. The
Cree also acquired a stake in outfitting operations in the region, and joint
control of decisions concerning sport-hunting quotas. The agreement estab-
lished the right of the Cree to the yield of meat, and the Income Security
Programme for Cree hunters and trappers provided an economic safety net
that evens out fluctuations in the hunting yield.
(Hedican 2008: 180)
But major infrastructural projects around the world continue. Sanjeev Khagram
(2004) has highlighted the social and cultural issues raised by the building of the
controversial Narmada Dam in India. Other ethnographers have traced the
effects of the major dispossessions created by the Three Gorges Dam in
China, demonstrating that insufficient farmland available for redistribution in
the surrounding areas forced many communities to relocate to cities, and that
only a minority gained from government efforts to develop benefit-sharing
initiatives (Wilmsen et al. 2011: 1).
In Ethiopia, Daniel Mains considered the opposing narratives of groups
promoting and opposing developments, in which the government presented
the hydropower dam as a symbol and manifestation of modernity and progress,
while opponents drew attention to its impact and the destruction of traditional
lifeways, which also underpinned tourism in the area (2019). Danielle DeLuca’s
work on dam building on the Patuca River in Honduras, in a highly biodiverse
region, recalls the tensions that surfaced when Cultural Survival launched a
letter writing campaign to oppose the development:
After a 14-hour bus ride from Guatemala City to La Ceiba, Honduras,

made longer by a protest blockading the Guatemalan-Honduras border
along the way, I finally boarded a small plane and an hour later arrived at
the landing strip in dusty Puerto Lempira, the entryway and capital of the
Moskitia region. I was surprised to find military presence greeting the
arrival of passengers. I had already gone through airport security in La
Ceiba, but upon arrival in Lempira, two men in army fatigues took my
passport, wrote down my information, and questioned: What am I doing
here? Whom do I represent? What are my interests in this region? I felt
like asking them the same questions.
(2011: n.p.)
In Australia there is a useful contrast between the traditionally low-key diversions of

water that were undertaken by indigenous people, and the more drastic social and
ecological effects of major infrastructural developments. Marcus Barber and Sue
Jackson describe the weirs and subtle water diversions made by Aboriginal groups
on the Roper River, and how this long history of water management feeds into
current debates about indigenous autonomy and tradition, colonial dispossession
and resistance, and – more recently – intercultural collaboration (Barber and Jack-
son 2014). In the more heavily populated and intensively farmed areas of Australia,
such as the Murray–Darling Basin, conflicts tend to focus on the overabstraction of
freshwater for irrigation, and tensions between major transnational irrigation com-
panies, smaller farming enterprises and conservation groups (Strang 2009, 2013).
With water for irrigating crops now absorbing over 70% of the world’s
freshwater, and the World Bank and UN predicting major shortfalls in the near
future, the production of thirsty but profitable crops such as cotton in arid
regions in Australia and the USA has become highly controversial, particularly
in the face of greater commoditisation of water. Anthropologists often find
themselves mediating between local groups of water users, NGOs and govern-
ment agencies trying – and often failing – to balance sustainable water use with
agricultural growth. As Andrea Pia’s work illustrates, state officials in Yunnan,
China face major ethical dilemmas in resisting the pressure of marketisation of
water to protect the supplies of rural communities while also hoping to achieve
sustainable levels of water use (2017).
Irrigated agriculture also manifests inequalities between affluent and
‘developing’ nations. Christian Zlolniski’s research highlights the reality that
producing fresh crops in north-western Mexico entails
‘virtual water flows,’ the transfer of high volumes of water embedded in

these crops across international borders … Although export agriculture has
fostered economic growth and employment opportunities for indigenous
farm laborers, it has also led to the overexploitation of underground finite
water resources, and an alarming decline of the quantity and quality of
water available for residents’ domestic use.
(2011: 565)
Globalisation
Clearly one of the major pressures for development is the process of globalisa-
tion itself. The global picture retains many of its colonial-era wealth and power
divides, but it is greatly complicated by new information-based technologies,
rapid transport and communications, and flows of capital and commodities.
Anthropologists have therefore turned their analyses to considering how
development activities function within these wider processes. As well as creat-
ing expanding markets and new demands for resources, globalisation has
required the formation of many new cross-cultural relationships: between
transnational corporate networks and local communities; between large and
small societies; and between materially rich and poor countries. In this intensi-
fying global interaction, there is both a need for effective cross-cultural ‘trans-
lation’, and for a thoughtful analysis of its social and cultural effects.
Akhil Gupta and Aradhana Sharma have considered how globalisation
changes ideas about the state, nationhood and identity. Studying call centres in
India, and the issues created by the ‘outsourcing’ of jobs to countries with
cheaper labour, they observe that:
Outsourcing is seen as both a sign of state ‘openness’ modernity, and good

macroeconomic liberalization by the defenders of transnational capitalisms,
and as a charged symbol of decreasing state sovereignty and control by eco-
nomic nationalists … As a symbol of economic globalization, call centers have
come to occupy a central place in debates on the ‘outsourcing’ of jobs from
the North … One of the most important fears fuelling the backlash against
outsourcing is that high-end, white-collar workers in the North are now in
danger of being displaced by cheaper labor in the South (and especially in the
Indian subcontinent). Some of those who cheered the ‘efficiency’ of global
competition in hastening the decline of the heavily unionized ‘smokestack’
industries in the North have now become economic nationalists, as they find
themselves in danger of being displaced by the same capitalist forces. The
emergent transnational economic order is transforming the relationship
between citizenship, national identity and the state.
(2006: 2, 4)
Transnational trade takes many forms, sometimes with widely dispersed effects.
One of the world’s fastest-growing industries, for example, is international
tourism. Bringing different cultural groups into contact and exerting a range of
developmental pressures, this is an area of major interest to anthropologists
(Gmelch and Wallace 2012). As Tim Wallace says:
The anthropology of tourism is a recent but rapidly growing subdiscipline.

Early research tends to focus on the impact – often assumed to be nega-
tive – that tourism has on local communities and the environment, but
there is increasing reflection on the ways in which anthropologists can
contribute more positively to tourism studies … Anthropologists of tour-
ism now work as consultants, teachers, internship advisors, project
researchers, analysts, community development workers, and brokers
between NGOs or private enterprises and the community.
(2009: 11)
As in other areas of ‘development’, much depends on the extent to which local
communities are able to participate in and direct decisions. Susan Stonich,
conducting tourism research in the Bay Islands of Honduras, underlined the
importance of ensuring community participation in decisions relating to tour-
ism and tourists; the difficulties arising from the relationship between eco-
tourism and conservationism, and the gap between ‘the public rhetoric of
international environmental organizations and their true intent’ (2009: 14). With
research conducted at a community-based ecotourism lodge in the Peruvian
Amazon, Amanda Stronza and Fernanda Pêgas unpack the complicated deci-
sion-making relationships between communities, researchers, governments and
businesses (2008).
Anthropology is well suited to assisting efforts to conserve cultural heritage.
Working with Appalachian mountain communities, Mary Lalone and her
students developed an ‘anthro-planning approach’ which has since been
repeated in other communities concerned about local heritage tourism. The
success of anthro-planning is underpinned by its focus on community parti-
cipation, and the use of robust anthropological field methods during the
project design phase (2009).
Aided by these kinds of approaches, tourism can assist local groups in main-
taining a way of life: ‘The cultural survival of indigenous groups … and the
survival of the environment and wildlife are closely interlinked and, according
to some, can result in new types of tourist activities (including ecotourism) that
benefit local development’ (Little 2005: 50). Writing about the scepticism that
often surrounds terms such as ‘ecotourism’, Andrew Russell notes the potential
for tourism to make a positive contribution. Drawing on research conducted in
three wetland areas, in Greece, Lithuania and Romania, he provides examples
of economic, social and ethical ‘good practice’ that underpins responsible eco-
tourism. ‘Anthropology for ecotourism, which takes local people’s views and
opinions into account in the search for appropriate forms of tourism develop-
ment that can transform people’s lives and environments for the better, is as
important as the anthropology of ecotourism’ (2007: 225).
Andrea Murray considers the value of tourism to small islands such as Oki-
nawa. The influence and impact of ecotourism is felt not only in the pre-
servation of ‘language, landscapes, and wildlife’ but also in the identities that
Okinawan’s take on, as a host community. ‘In Okinawa, “ecotourism” pro-
mises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while
preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride’ (2017: 10).
However, tourism does generate some challenges in intercultural and inter-
species engagements. Georgette Burns, studying dingo management on Fraser
Island in Queensland and Penguin Island in Western Australia, notes a growing
need to manage tourist/wildlife encounters (2009), and John Knight, whose
work focuses on human–primate interaction, considers the problematic use of
monkeys as a tourist attraction (2011) and the extent to which wildlife tourism
can be utilised to control problems such as crop-raiding and other forms of
damage (Knight 2017).
Elizabeth Garland, who specialises in African environment and development
issues, writes about the growing trend of volunteer tourism, and the controversial
issues that can arise:
As an anthropologist specializing in African environment and development

issues, I have been delighted to see young people interested in a part of the
world that means so much to me, but I am also increasingly troubled by
the sense that working first-hand on African poverty has become a kind of
credential for these (mostly American, mostly privileged) students, a box to
be checked off in their preparation for success within the global economy.
(2012: 5)
Tourism is most often imagined to be located in the tropical areas of Global

South, but there has been a surge recently in tours to arctic areas, such as
Greenland, where the Northern Lights that draw visitors to the area flicker over
a fragile landscape much impacted by the climate change caused, in part, by
global travel (Abram and Lund 2016). Tourism can also have major impacts on
limited local resources. Thus Thomas Wright’s ethnographic work in Bali
explores tourism and water consumption. Describing the ambience of a recently
opened Australian-owned beach club, he warns that, ‘beneath the glamorous
surface of cocktails, swimming pools and beach holidays lies an environmental
threat that may cause the island to face a water crisis in less than four years’
(2016: n.p.). The use of groundwater by tourist businesses and domestic homes is
so great that water tables are so dangerously low that Bali could run dry within
the next few years. ‘The damage could become irreversible once aquifers suffer
saltwater intrusion, rendering the groundwater useless for domestic purposes’
(2016: n.p.). Wright also considered the impacts of waste and plastics pollution,
and his account of his first decade working as an anthropologist shows how a
career in the discipline can lead from one area to another.
A curious journey
Thomas Wright
Anthropology has taken me to some extraordinary places – both intellec-
tually and physically – in an always curious, never boring journey over the
last ten years. I started my academic training as journalist, while studying
anthropology alongside it, and wanted to delve deeper into the practices of
‘deep hanging out’ and seeking to understand people who come from a
social background that differs from mine. Why and how do they do particular
things? How do they understand and make sense of the world around
them? And perhaps most profoundly: what does it mean to be human?
Initially, I worked with the Queensland Museum and their indigenous
curators to research the values and customs of exchange and material cul-
ture of dhari, a headdress worn by men from the Torres Strait Islands. I
interviewed the donors and other elders of the Torres Strait Islander com-
munity in Queensland, to ask them about what significance the objects had
to them and why they donated them.
For my PhD dissertation I conducted fieldwork in Canggu, Bali, document-
ing how the rapid expansion of tourism in the area is changing the ways that
Bali Hindus relate to their surroundings. While rice farming and fishing
used to be the main economic activities in Canggu, tourism has tre-
mendously reshaped the area in the last few years. To learn more about
this socio-economic and environmental transition I ‘hung out’ with surfers
and beach vendors, sat with priests and village leaders and generally
sought to integrate myself into daily village life. I attended cremation
ceremonies, temple festivals and village meetings, went surfing and
helped clean beaches from plastics and other pollution.
The topic of tourism growth and concerns over its environmental impacts
grew consistently during my stay there, and after I returned to Australia I
drew on my research to highlight the potentially negative consequences of
the unregulated tourism economy prevalent in Canggu and across Bali.
I currently work in Indonesia for an international innovation agency. As
part of an interdisciplinary research team I have drawn on my ethnographic
training to develop a mixed-methods methodology to research the chal-
lenges and opportunities in waste management and innovation in Java. We
meet with stakeholders from government, business and community groups
to consider waste management practices and develop innovative solutions.
Indonesia is currently the second-biggest contributor to marine plastic pol-
Figure 3.5 A waste management site visit in Surabaya, Indonesia. Photograph:

Thomas Wright.
lution, discarding an estimated 3.22 million metric tonnes of plastic waste

per year. Social science is particularly useful to waste management in my
opinion, because technical and financial solutions exist but are often hin-
dered by socio-cultural factors such as attitudes, behaviours and habits. By
researching the anthropological factors of waste, I hope that my research
can contribute to reducing plastic pollution in Indonesia and beyond.
I think the strength of anthropology lies in its emphasis on human actors.
With ethnography as its central methodology, I think it has been most
accurately described by Alfred Kroeber as ‘the most humanistic of the sci-
ences and the most scientific of the humanities’.
The pressures of large numbers of foreign visitors can lead to ‘tourismphobia’

as described, for example, in Claudio Milano’s work on ‘overtourism’ in cities
such as Barcelona, Venice and Berlin, where key areas of concern include the
unsustainable nature of mass tourism, with perceptions of congestion, loss of
access to public spaces, rising prices – especially since the arrival of AirBnB –
and a detrimental effect on a ‘local’ identity sense of identity (2017). Protests
against overtourism increasingly take the form of social movements:
This has led to the formation of organisations such as the Assembly of

Neighborhoods for Sustainable Tourism (ABTS) and the Network of
Southern European Cities against tourism (SET). They are at the forefront
of the fight against overtourism and the impact it has on local residents.
(Milano et al. 2018; see also Mansilla and Quaglieri 2018)
In making wealthy societies more aware of the realities of others, international

tourism has also assisted less advantaged groups in demanding ‘Fair Trade’.
Peter Luetchford’s work examines the way that ethically motivated trade
operates. He has conducted ethnographic research on the relationships between
cooperatives of coffee producers and the various NGOs and other agencies in
Costa Rica who negotiate with Fair Trade counterparts and commodity mar-
kets in the north.
Although I have shown that as policy fair trade does not operate as envi-
saged, it is at least implementable. Fair trade opens up moral, economic,
and political possibilities in development … from ethnography we can
begin to see how policies take shape in practice.
(2005: 144)
There is, however, a much darker side to globalised markets, for example, in
the area of commercial organ donation in which international markets intersect
with individual physical resources. Even in countries where organ donation is
based on altruism, follow-up care for donors can be inadequate, and, working
in Egypt, Debra Budiani-Saberi and Amr Mostafa note that for commercial
donors this type of much-needed care rarely exists at all (2011: 317). Nancy
Scheper-Hughes assisted an international Task Force looking at the issues raised
by global traffic in human organs for transplants. She carried out ethnographic
research in Brazil, South Africa and India, ‘examining the ethical, social, and
medical effects of the commercialization of human organs, and accusations of
human rights abuses regarding the procurement and distribution of organs to
supply a growing global market’ (2002: 170).
A practice regarded by some as ‘neo-cannibalism’ raises many ethical and social
issues. Scheper-Hughes notes Veena Das’s comment that ‘a market price on body
parts – even a fair one – exploits the desperation of the poor, turning their suffer-
ing into an opportunity’ (in Scheper-Hughes 2002: 280) and reflects that:
The social scientists and human rights activists serving on the task force
remain profoundly critical of bioethical arguments based on Euro-Amer-
ican notions of contract and individual choice. They are mindful of the
social and economic contexts that make the choice to sell a kidney in an
urban slum in Calcutta or in a Brazilian favela anything but a free and
autonomous one.
(Scheper-Hughes 2002: 280)
In Bangladesh, Monir Moniruzzaman studied the increasing demand for illegal

human body parts, investigating the narratives and experiences of ‘victims’
whose poverty drives them to sell their own organs to unscrupulous buyers. ‘I
therefore argue that the current practice of organ commodification is both
exploitative and unethical, as organs are removed from the bodies of the poor
by inflicting a novel form of bioviolence against them’ (2012: 62). Just as
international markets in organs exploit individuals, globalisation creates markets
for resources vital to local communities and the ecosystems upon which they
are other species rely.
Whether in the form of tourism or trade, globalisation inevitably places
greater pressure on resources, and creates more competition for these. A major
consequence has been a general intensification in efforts to commoditise, pri-
vatise and exploit, in particular, vital resources such as water and land (Cohen
2002; Goldman 1998; Wagner 2013). This has had important social, political
and environmental implications in every cultural context, and has often led to
bitter contests between groups even in affluent Western nations: as demon-
strated, for example, by Margaret Thatcher’s 1989 water privatisation in the
United Kingdom (Strang 2004) and ongoing conflicts over the de facto privati-
sation intrinsic to water trading schemes, for example in Australia (Strang 2009,
2013).
As Clay Arnold observes, the appropriation of water resources can create
tensions within nations, as well as between them:
Given its lasting influence, one example, the Owens Valley, stands out. It
is the story of Los Angeles’s acquisition of river water via land purchases in
the Owens Valley, California, located 250 miles to the northeast, and the
subsequent construction of an aqueduct. Frequently described as the ‘Rape
of the Owens Valley’, the transfer amounted to, as one scholar (Libecap
2007, 12) summed it up, ‘theft of the valley’s water; destruction of the
local agricultural economy; and colonization (hydrocolonialism) of the
region by a remote, disinterested city’.
(2017: 66)
Violent protests also resulted from more recent attempts to privatise water in
Bolivia. Robert Albro (2005) investigated the ‘water wars’ – the violent civil
revolt that followed, exploring the relationship between regional and global
activist networks. This work is part of an important and expanding body of
anthropological research concerned with understanding the new transnational
social movements, which are often the source of ‘counter-development’ –
resistance to globalising forces and imposed development schemes that we
considered in Chapter 1.
While there are no easy solutions to these kinds of problems, anthropological
research can assist groups in communicating different perspectives, potentially
defusing and enabling some resolution of conflicts. A key contribution lies in
understanding the particular local context and why pressures on resources and
conflicts over ownership arise in the first place. As members of interdisciplinary
teams, or as individual researchers, anthropologists are closely involved in every
aspect of development, working with communities and networks around the
world as they, in various ways, welcome or resist social and economic changes
and negotiate their relationships with others.
4 Anthropology and the
Environment
Environmental issues
Societies around the world are facing increasingly pressing environmental pro-
blems: more volatile weather patterns; floods; droughts; compromised air and
water quality; soil degradation; ocean pollution; and the mass extinction of
plant and animal species. But it is plain that, although most of the challenges
we face are framed in terms of ‘climate’ or ‘ecology’, their causes are anthro-
pogenic – they are caused by human activities. This points to an urgent need to
understand ‘why people do what they do’ in relation to the environment. Why
do societies develop economic practices that degrade land, overuse resources,
and threaten the wellbeing of other species and indeed entire ecosystems? Why
don’t they rein in population growth and resource use to sustainable levels?
What enables some groups to have much smaller ecological footprints than
others? What makes human–environmental relationships change over time?
And what can environmental anthropologists do to support positive change?
These questions are not ecological: they are social and cultural, and involve
particular beliefs, values and practices that lead to different ways of interacting
with the material world (Kopnina and Shoreman 2011).
Although environmental anthropology has come to the fore in recent years,
this is not really a new focus for the discipline. The localised grassroots
approach that generally characterises ethnographic research has always involved
paying close attention to the relationships between human groups and the
places that they inhabit, and to the ways that people think about, make use of
and manage resources. There is ample opportunity to learn from the past: for
example, anthropologists Geoff Harrison and Howard Morphy (1998) have
considered how cultural adaptations fit into longer evolutionary processes.
Alfred Crosby has charted the long-term social and environmental effects of
movements of seeds, plants, animals and germs around the world (2004); Jared
Diamond has looked at why societies ‘collapse’ (2005).
Ethnographic research focusing on environmental issues with diverse societies
raises some key questions: how do particular groups understand the relationship
between human beings and the material world? How do they arrange the
ownership and management of land and resources? What are their ideologies,
70 Anthropology and the Environment
beliefs and values, and how do these affect their capacities to sustain particular
lifeways? For example, research with hunter-gatherer communities in Africa,
Australia and the Americas, and in colder parts of the world, such as Alaska,
reveals cosmological beliefs in which ancestral beings inhabit the land and
water, often appearing as non-human species (Fienup-Riordan 2005; Gérard
2015; Wills-Perlo 2009). Their relationships with local environments therefore
tend to be based on ideas about partnership with these beings and a responsi-
bility for mutual support. In such societies, ‘traditional’ wealth and power lie in
ecological knowledge, as hunter-gatherers depend on knowing every detail
about the surrounding landscape and its resources. Similarly, intimate knowl-
edge about local ecosystems is often held by small-scale communities that rely
on shifting horticulture or forest ‘gardening’. This in-depth ecological knowl-
edge, coupled with values that place limits on growth and expansion, have
sustained such societies for many thousands of years (Vandebroek et al. 2011).
Today, many of these small groups are under pressure: as we have seen, their
lands and resources have often been appropriated, and their way of life has been
subsumed by large-scale societies and industrial economies. Anthropologists have
directed their energies towards recording the extraordinary cultural diversity of
indigenous societies, partly to assist them in preserving traditional ideas and
Figure 4.1 Kunjen Elder Alma Wason at Shelfo (Errk Ikow), a sacred site on the
Mitchell River, Far North Queensland, Australia. Photograph: Veronica
Strang.
Anthropology and the Environment 71
knowledges, and also to chart the various processes of change and adaptation
through which such communities try to ‘hold their own’ in larger societies and a
globalising world. But in relation to environmental issues, such collaborative
research also raises useful questions about the values and characteristics that enabled
them to maintain sustainable lifeways for so long – and to consider whether there
is scope for larger contemporary societies to learn from this experience.
Conducting research with communities who do not see ‘nature’ as something
completely separate from themselves encourages anthropologists to think criti-
cally about the way that Western societies treat ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as separate
categories, and how this allows ‘nature’ to be objectified in ways that many
Figure 4.2 St Mary’s Church in Dorset, with ‘well head’ gravestone representing ideas
about water, life and spiritual renewal. Photograph: Veronica Strang.
environmentalists regard as exploitative (Descola and Sahlins 2013). Insights into
different ways of understanding the world enables people to step back and con-
sider their own in a new light, and this reflexive view is essential if we are to
understand – and potentially change – the factors that create socially and ecolo-
gically unsustainable relationships with the environment (Johnston et al. 2012).
Waterways and lifeways

Veronica Strang
The question about ‘why people do what they do’ in relation to the environ-
ment is what brought me to anthropology in the first place. After working as a
freelance writer for a number of years in various parts of the world, I found
myself in Canada, focusing on environmental and health issues: acid rain,
water pollution and so forth. All the emphasis was on the ecological problems:
the prematurely autumnal forests; the ‘elephant snot’ algae in the lakes. No
one seemed to be asking what made people develop different environmental
values and decide to conserve or exploit natural resources. Not long after-
wards, I spent a year in the Australian outback, working with a stock team
composed of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. It was plain that although
they were doing the same job in the same place, they had very different rela-
tionships with that environment, and very different values about how land and
resources should be used and managed. How did that happen?
On returning to England, I thought – naively – that I might get an answer
to that question by spending a year or two studying anthropology. The
experience mainly served to make me realise that the question was much
larger than I had imagined. Further study was clearly in order, and by then I
was hooked anyway because, after a dozen years of travelling the world,
living in other cultural spaces, I finally had a way of making sense of the
things that I had observed. My doctoral research took me back to Queens-
land to compare different groups’ relations to land along the Mitchell River,
and it did make visible some of the factors which lead to the development of
different environmental values (Strang 1997). That work led to a couple of
part-time jobs in Oxford, one teaching anthropology at the Pitt Rivers
Museum (a magical place – seize any opportunity to go there), and another
at the University’s Environmental Change Unit, with a research team looking
into domestic energy use. My task there was to consider why people would
(or wouldn’t) make efforts to conserve energy, and to contribute to the policy
advice that the team was providing to the government.
An opportunity to help start a new anthropology department tempted me
to the University of Wales for a few years, where I returned to my earlier
research interest in water (as one might well do in Wales). I persuaded a
number of UK water companies to fund some research in Dorset, on the
River Stour. As in Queensland, this involved interviewing the various groups
of water users along the river, so that the ethnographic data could be
considered alongside the ecological issues. But in this case I was more
interested in the cultural meanings encoded in water. I chose the River Stour
in order to work with an arts and environment group, Common Ground, who
were composing music and poetry about the river with local community
groups. Water has very powerful and emotive meanings. The research
looked at how people interacted with it, why they wouldn’t conserve it, and
why (more than a decade after the water industry was privatised) they were
still mad as hell about losing public ownership of it (Strang 2004).
A year or two later I was back on the other side of the planet, with a Royal
Anthropological Institute Fellowship in ‘Urgent Anthropology’. Returning to
the Mitchell River, I did some more work with the Aboriginal community in
Kowanyama, looking at the way they presented their relations to land in the
political arena, and doing a lot of cultural mapping with the elders, recording
data about their sacred sites and story places, in part to assist their efforts
to reclaim their traditional ‘country’.
I had barely unpacked again in the United Kingdom when I accepted a uni-
versity post in New Zealand. Based in Auckland, I was able to spend more time
back in Queensland, investigating the wider social and cultural aspects of
increasingly contentious water issues along the Brisbane and Mitchell Rivers.
My ongoing ‘water works’ also led to an invitation to join the Scientific
Advisory Committee for UNESCO’s International Ecohydrology Programme. As
its name suggests, this brings together researchers in ecology and hydrology
from many different countries. However, the group had paid little attention to
the social and cultural aspects of human engagements with water. My task was
to assist the programme in encompassing these dimensions. I also became
involved, with other anthropologists, in a major UNESCO project on water and
cultural diversity, and this produced a major compendium of different cultural
engagements with water (Johnston et al 2012). Being a tiny cog in the wheel of
one of the world’s largest intergovernmental agencies was a new and intriguing
experience, and in 2016 I was happy to return to this kind of work by providing
the United Nations High Level Panel for Water with a background document
describing cultural and spiritual relationships with water, and then assisting
them in defining some new Principles for Water to underpin the UN’s existing
Sustainable Development Goals.
With water resources coming under increasing pressure, most countries are
introducing new systems for governing and managing water, and trying to find
new technical solutions to water shortages. Often this is very ‘top down’, and
my concern, as an environmental anthropologist, is to ensure that the views of
the people most affected by these changes are clearly represented, and that
reforms are developed with respect for the diverse cultural beliefs and values
about water. This has become more challenging as powerful private inter-
ests – including transnational corporations – have bought up water and irri-
gation companies. Their disregard not just for less powerful human
communities, but for local ecosystems and their non-human inhabitants, and
other factors leading to mass extinctions, has led me to pay more attention to
non-human needs and interests, and to contribute to the widening debate
about ‘rights for nature’ and the need for less anthropocentric relationships
with the non-human world (Strang 2017, 2020a).
With an awareness that indigenous relationships with environments are
often more reciprocal and respectful of non-human interests, I have also
maintained a long-term interest in beliefs about water beings, such as
Rainbow Serpents and other aquatic deities, and how these can illuminate
alternate ways of thinking about and engaging with water. My research
therefore ranges across many areas of anthropology concerned with cos-
mological belief systems, sustainability, human and non-human rights, water
ownership and management, governance, and national and international
policy development. I would like to be able to claim prescience in focusing
on water, but the truth is that it was simply a serendipitous choice that, over
the last three decades, has provided opportunities to work with – and learn
from – a wonderfully diverse range of communities in trying to address some
of the world’s most vital issues.
Environmental relationships
One of the most important things that anthropology brings to the environmental
arena is an appreciation that resource management emerges not just from specific
cultural ideas about ‘what resources are for’ but from whole belief systems and
the structural arrangements of a society, which includes its forms of governance
and decision-making, its economic practices, its social and spatial organisation,
and its laws concerning the ownership of resources and access to them. ‘Gov-
ernance’ is not just a matter of political parties: in many societies, religious beliefs
and traditional practices play an equally important role. Stephen Lansing’s classic
ethnographic study of rice growers in Bali showed that the hydrological man-
agement of water flowing from a mountain lake through weirs and channels into
farmers’ rice paddies was actually conducted by the priests responsible for a series
of ‘water temples’ placed at key points in the streams (1991). Lansing’s major
challenge was to translate this reality for the ‘development experts’ who wanted
to come in and tell the farmers how to manage their resources better. As it
turned out, the priests’ local hydrological experience, and the farmers’ knowledge
about planting, pest management and so on, assisted by a social and religious
framework that maintained fair access to water for all, was shown to be con-
siderably more in tune with the realities of local ecosystems, and with local social
needs, than the ideas promoted by external agencies.
Lansing has continued to unpack the complex relationships between local
and external knowledges, cultural beliefs and values and the real dynamics of
ecosystems, His more recent work has explored the archaeology of water
temples as well as their ecological functions and he notes that
the temple networks are fragile, vulnerable to the cross-currents produced
by competition among male descent groups. But the feminine rites of
water temples mirror the farmers’ awareness that when they act in unison,
small miracles of order occur regularly, as the jewel-like perfection of the
rice terraces produces general prosperity. Much of this is barely visible
from within the horizons of Western social theory.
(2006: n.p.)
Lansing was also one of the first anthropologists to make use of modelling tech-
niques. Following his early forays into this area (Singer and Lansing 1989), he has
continued to use modelling, now accompanied by spatial imaging, to reveal why
the traditional systems of rice terracing in Bali are robust and sustainable:
The spatial patterns observable in centuries-old Balinese rice terraces are also
created by feedback between farmers’ decisions and the ecology of the pad-
dies, which triggers a transition from local to global-scale control of water
shortages and rice pests … The model shows how feedbacks between human
decisions and ecosystem processes can evolve toward an optimal state in
which total harvests are maximized … It helps explain how multiscale coop-
eration from the community to the watershed scale could persist for centuries,
and why the disruption of this self-organizing system by the Green Revolu-
tion caused chaos in irrigation and devastating losses from pests.
(Lansing et al. 2017: 1)
Diverse cultural groups have their own ways of understanding concepts of

sustainability too. For example, Thomas McNamara’s work with rural com-
munities in Malawi describes how ‘sustainability is reworked through locally
salient economic and social understandings’, but is also used by NGOs
to delegitimize villagers’ criticism of development projects and to obfuscate

the power dynamics through which developers’ expectations are con-
firmed and entrenched at a local level … Field staff discounted villagers’
critiques of development projects as rejections of sustainability and there-
fore as ignorance. Villagers were only seen to understand sustainability
when they accepted NGO project dictates.
(2017: 1)
Many environmental anthropologists find ourselves facilitating communications,

not just between indigenous communities and development agencies, but
between multiple groups involved in resource management: mining and manu-
facturing industries, government and non-government agencies, natural scientists,
catchment management groups, recreational land and water users, conservation
groups and such like. Each of these groups has its own perspective on resource
management issues; its own ways of understanding local ecology; its own forms of
knowledge and expertise; and its own aims and values. Cross-cultural translation is
thus vital to ensure that each group has a ‘voice’ in the proceedings, and that all can
gain an understanding of the other perspectives involved.
Reflections from Australia on what anthropologists do, and what

others do with anthropology
Sandy Toussaint
When thinking and writing about what anthropologists do, I contemplate
contemporary anthropology’s various guises (cultural, economic, legal,
medical, environmental, forensic, cross-disciplinary), and the mix of persons
who become anthropologists. Privileging inquiries into the complexities and
contradictions of culture and the human condition, alongside a concern for
ethics, contextual interpretation and integrity of purpose, I’ve conducted
research among Australian Indigenous groups, as well as with researchers
from other disciplines: architects, archaeologists, archivists, envir-
onmentalists, artists, lawyers and medical doctors. Remaining mindful that
choosing to ‘do’ anthropology relies on a constant balancing of ideas and
requirements within and outside the academy is paramount. When investi-
gating and reporting on unexplained deaths for the Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, for instance, cultural, political, emotional and
economic matters that are not evident from legal, historical and/or medical
research made anthropology’s strengths visible.
Identifying the provenance of material culture for art exhibitions, and
undertaking research about cultural as well as environmental flows to
understand human/environment interactions, also enabled layered contribu-
tions to land and water-based project design. Providing testimony in court
cases dealing with family matters and estates, and advocating for improve-
ments in health and service delivery, are also examples where being an
anthropologist mattered. To have learned from and been involved with Indi-
genous women and men has been an enduring privilege. Central to my long-
term thinking, doing and publishing, is also teaching, mentoring, supervising,
and learning alongside students new to anthropology.
Michelle Pyke
Working on water conservation and planning in central Australia, I was intri-

gued with the connection between Aboriginal people and water. For my PhD
I collaborated with two Kimberley Aboriginal groups and their Indigenous
ranger teams. I wanted to know how these groups perceived wetlands and
wetland management through their particular worldviews, and how this dif-
fered from conventional natural resource management (NRM). Indigenous
rangers have been a strong part of Australian NRM for some time and yet,
for many groups, an imbalance remains with conventional NRM priorities
and strategies unduly influencing management efforts.
I lived in one Aboriginal community and worked with Indigenous rangers and
Elders as co-researchers across several communities. We interviewed Elders
and Traditional Owners about wetlands: how they interacted with wetlands
when they were young; how those wetlands had changed; and what they
wanted for those places. Where we could we took our participants to wetlands
for interviews, travelling through thick bush, soft beach sand, boggy marshes
and even across seas to islands that used to be the Elders’ homes.
Sandy Toussaint, my anthropology supervisor, helped me to carefully
consider the challenges I encountered. These were emotional, as I lived
and worked in a culture so different to my own; practical, developing my
skills to learn from interactions; and ethical, inspiring me to consider how
my research was respectful of and benefited its participants. Working
with these groups was not only a privilege, but changed my view of
nature, particularly wetlands and their management, a perspective that I
am trying to convey through scientific papers to shift other perspectives
and influence the implementation of NRM. Anthropology offers a pathway
into the self, into the unknown, and into new places and cultures.
Arjati Schipf
Being an anthropologist is a way of life: being embedded and critically
observing people’s way of life, is a unique and creative place. I’ve lived and
Figure 4.3 Members of the Bardi Jawi (Indigenous) Ranger teams including
Kevin George (centre right), and Cecelia Tigan (left), with Michelle
Pyke (right), preparing to interview the late and much-missed Tra-
ditional Owner and Elder, Paul Sampi (left).
worked in remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia, working as a

professional in community development, native title and cultural heritage for
the last twenty years. The work I do is mostly governed by legislation and
government policy: I witness the daily interactions between people and the
invisible hand of structural frameworks.
Anthropology continues to challenge my own world view and intellect. I am
regularly amazed by the complex tapestry of humanity, especially those mino-
rities that push against the weight of a hegemonic society. What aspects of
research stand out for me? Being immersed in and intimate with another cul-
ture: for example, a recent field visit included participating in an Aboriginal
women’s ceremony for a week in a remote desert region. I learnt so much
about the sustainability of cultural life. I see as a privilege the ability to work with
people from different backgrounds and cultures, and to create, present, and
interpret from inside and out, and most importantly, on people’s own terms.
The question you may ask is, will I get a job after completing my degree?
What if academia is not the ultimate goal? Is it possible to earn a living, feed
one’s passion and soul? Will my work be practical and useful? My answer is
yes, yes and yes! I recently attended a Google Indigenous Mapping Work-
shop, showcasing anthropology’s technological collaborations with Indigen-
Figure 4.4 Preparing body decoration Martukuru (grass) for Junba (ceremonial
dance) at Ngumpan Aboriginal Community, Kimberley, Western
Australia, September 2018. Left to right: Ari Schipf, Jean Tighe,
Bianca Nargoodah. Photograph: Jess Ford.
Figure 4.5 Annette Kogolo and Ari Schipf sharing lunch at Karnparrmi Community
outside Fitzroy crossing, Western Australia. Photograph: Leo Thirkell.
ous communities from around the world, mainly in the areas of cultural, lin-
guistic and land management mapping. The workshop managed to fore-
ground Indigenous voices, alongside anthropology’s interpretive and
translational expertise, resulting in boundless potential, a refreshing reminder
of how to engage diverse voices and ideas.
Human–non-human relations
While it is natural to assume that anthropology is about people, there is a rich
literature in the discipline exploring human–animal relations. Classically, this has
explored the various ways that cultural groups categorise and relate to animals
(for example as totemic beings) or examining how societies have made use of
animals in systems of production, either hunting them as prey, or domesticating
them to varying degrees. However, contemporary anthropology approaches
human–non-human relationships more holistically:
Our lives, as humans are intimately connected with the lives of nonhuman: as
companions, family pets or working animals; as sources of food, clothing,
research and entertainment; in religious practices, literature and art … The
ethical treatment of animals as subjective beings and within the wider context of
ecological conservation, is a source of increasing political, legal and social debate.
(DeMello 2012: 4, 6)
Rane Willerslev and his colleagues have considered the cosmological ideas
of hunters and reindeer herders in Siberia, and how relationships changed
with shifts from hunting to pastoralism (2015). Garry Marvin’s research
addresses the contradictory role of the wolf in indigenous hunting and
farming societies, both as a ‘fellow hunter’ and a predator of domestic ani-
mals. He found that increased reliance on animal husbandry led to cultural
representations of wolves as ‘a creature of monstrous and evil intent’, but
these have more recently given way to images of the ‘newly understood
scientific wolf … a highly intelligent and complex social creature that posed
no threat to ecosystems’ (2012: 7–8).
Marvin has also explored the social and cultural meanings of hunting for
English fox hunting to inform highly contentious debates on whether this
activity should be banned. Rather than taking sides in the conflict, he sought to
articulate the deeper meanings and ideas located in hunting:
I sought to understand the social and cultural processes that constituted

foxhunting … It seemed to me that at the heart of hunting were some
complex configurations of such relations … I regularly heard those who
participated in foxhunting defend it against attacks from the outside but
that defence never seemed to tally exactly with how they spoke about
hunting, the experiences they had of it and the meanings it had for them
when they were talking amongst themselves.
(2006: 193, 194)
As an anthropological consultant in the Home Secretary’s inquiry into ‘hunting

with dogs’, Marvin was asked to produce a neutral account interpretatively
describing a typical hunting day with comments on its cultural meanings. This
was considered by the enquiry alongside material from both pro- and anti-
hunting groups. He was then hired by the Countryside Alliance to help with a
legal challenge to the banning of fox hunting by producing a report on the
potential social and cultural impacts of the proposed ban on rural communities.
Thus several of the parties involved in the debate made use of his ethnographic
research, and the deeper understandings that it provided.
In more recent research on this topic, Katherine Curchin uses the failure in
the UK of the Countryside Alliance to defend the sport of fox hunting with
hounds, and the subsequent creation of the Hunting Act 2004, to illustrate that
minority groups claiming a right to preserve their culture and identity are not
necessarily vulnerable or disadvantaged.
Opponents of the hunting ban consciously echoed arguments about cultural

survival and cultural diversity made by indigenous hunters with the goal of
fighting animal welfare legislation. These cultural arguments had little per-
suasive force when deployed by this relatively powerful and affluent group.
(2018: 503)
Samantha Hurn’s work explores diverse human–animal relations and con-
siders the anthropological implications of changing attitudes towards animal
personhood, and the more general rise of a post-humanist philosophy in the
social sciences:
‘Culture’, we are often led to believe, elevates humans above other animals
and the natural world. Such polarized thought becomes unsettled how-
ever, when confronted with the increasingly widespread recognition that,
in addition to biological continuity between humans and animals, many of
the defining characteristics of ‘being human’ (such as the possession of
‘culture’, language, conscious thought and so on) are also found, in varying
degrees, outside the human species … The ways in which humans regard
other animals – as pets, food, sources of work, exploitation, worship or
entertainment – are wide ranging, complex and often inconsistent. In
addition to the sheer scale of the diversity of attitudes and actions which
humans experience and exhibit towards animals, the historical longevity of
such interactions also makes anthrozoology an immensely interesting
emergent sub-field within anthropology.
(2012: 4, 7)
As this implies, animals are often considered as persons, and as kin (Arluke
and Sanders 2008). Following his influential early writing on domestic pets
(1996), James Serpell, working with Elizabeth Paul, has located his research in
a framework of adaptive evolution, in which ‘pets present us with a paradox
comparable to – though even more puzzling than – that posed by the phenom-
enon of adoption’ (Serpell and Paul 2011: 297).
Environmental anthropologists often find themselves mediating between
environmental groups and local communities whose view of animal (or other)
species may be less protective. These issues have been articulated, for example,
in debates over the protection of big cats (Mathur 2016; Somerville 2018), an
issue that crystallised in the controversies over the shooting of ‘Cecil the Lion’
(King 2015; Somerville 2017). Catherine Hill and her colleagues have explored
a range of conflicts about wildlife, including wolf management in Norway, and
the struggles of farmers in Uganda to protect their crops from devastation by
other species (2017). They make the important point that assumptions about
‘wild’ animals and their animosity to humans obscures the human ideas and
practices that lead to problems (such as the expansion of farming at the expense
of vital habitats), and the reality that interspecies conflicts are often driven by
differences between human groups.
Debates on these issues have been illuminated by a new approaches in
environmental anthropology that, rather than merely considering how humans
engage with animals, aim to produce ‘multi-species ethnographies’ that make
imaginative leaps into the lifeworlds of non-human species, and how these
interact with each other, and ourselves. Augustin Fuentes’ influential work on
interactions between humans and monkeys in Bali recognises the agency of
both, and underlines a reality ‘in which the two species are simultaneously
actors and participants in sharing and shaping mutual ecologies … Humans are
animals and members of a global ecology’ (2010: 600–601). Similarly, Piers
Locke’s research focuses on ‘interspecies intimacy’ and elephants in Nepal.
Based on his experiences of building collaborative relationships with working
elephants, he proposes that ethnographic research should be extended beyond
its human-focused tradition: ‘I explore not-just-human figurations of person-
hood and argue for the methodological inclusion of nonhuman informants as
subjective actors and contributing participants in ethnographic research’ (2017:
353). These imaginative approaches seek more compassionate and empathetic
relationships with non-human beings. Thus Lisa Moore and Mary Kosut write
about ‘multi-species participant observation’ in their work with beekeepers in
New York:
Figure 4.6 Conducting fieldwork with beekeepers and bees, Mellifera e.V., Germany.
Keeping in mind the intra-active nature of human/insect entanglements,
we interpret and translate the actions of another species while resisting
anthropomorphic descriptions … This work is in dialogue with the field of
multispecies ethnography, network theory and critical animal studies,
positioning the bee though networks ethnographic data and translation.
(2014: 516)
Daksha Madhu Rajagopalan describes the shifts in human–non-human relation-

ships enabled by engaging empathetically with bees.
Honeybees – the sweetness of anthropology

Daksha Madhu Rajagopalan
Studying the physical sciences, including physics and geology during my

undergraduate years, I had the fortune to take two anthropology classes. They
opened my mind, and I just knew that anthropologists had a unique way of
listening and mediating difference. Four years later, during a master’s program,
I found myself talking to beekeepers and scientists, working at an apiary, and
even trying to communicate with honeybees. On the Maltese island of Gozo, in
the Mediterranean, I interviewed shopkeepers on their trade and the changing
economy, helped beekeepers, and visited their hives. I watched honeybees
within multi-floral and geologically shaped landscapes and tasted so many
varieties of honey. I learned about recent politics, honeybee immigration, and
how different groups of people were affected by transnational and Europe-wide
policies. I saw first-hand the butterfly effect that bees in Australia or Indonesia
could have halfway across the world. I discovered the rich weave between
large-scale events and the everyday lives of bee colonies on this small island.
Anthropology helped me to see life, with all of its down-to-earth detail.
Yet the smallest of observations tied into the largest of big-picture per-
spectives. It showed me that the details of lived experience can lead to the
most profound and humbling perspectives: details, interwoven with context.
With this context, I was able to create something useful.
I spent another summer with organic beekeepers in southern Germany
and visited biodynamic beekeepers in Scotland and England. They
espoused a different philosophy towards beekeeping: listening to the bees,
being as non-intrusive as possible. One beekeeper knew exactly when to
take honey and where it would be, without ever opening his hive. Instead he
kept meticulous notes on the weight of his colonies, the flying pattern of the
bees by the entrance, and how laden with nectar they were. He even built
little glass peepholes into each box, carrying a torch instead of the typical
hivetool. Other beekeepers experimented with nine or ten different types of
hives and had innovated practices that allowed them to harvest honey while
minimally interfering with the lives of honeybees. A third beekeeper practiced
only ‘bee guardianship’: caring for colonies but never taking from them.
Figure 4.7 Researching the world of bees. Photograph: Daksha Madhu

Rajagopalan.
What was common among them all was the awareness of the umwelt or
world of bees. They all reported that this awareness had honed their intui-
tion, capacity for care and love for another species, and their connection to
nature. When I understood the potency of getting to know the world of
another species, I set about creating spaces for non-beekeepers and non-
anthropologists to share this experience. I organised three honeybee empa-
thy workshops for the general public during National Insect Week. Children,
adults, families, and individuals all came to a workshop room and experi-
enced the hive: sounds from a beehive, the smell of wax, and the taste of
honey. They visualised what it might be like to be a bee and learned how a
colony works together to help the collective. I taught a meditation class,
trying to translate the sensory experience of standing in front of an open
hive. Both classes helped people connect with and learn more about the
natural world. Hopefully, events like this lead to more compassion and
empathy towards pollinators and bees, which in turn might lead to new
policies that could help them thrive in the currently pesticide-heavy world.
One of the things I love about anthropology is its unique capacity to
reveal hidden knowledge. While other disciplines seek an objective version
of truth, I find that the heart of anthropology is about listening to the myriad
ways that life can be lived. In a process of patiently listening – also known as
rigorously grounded participant observation and ethnography – a space is
born. I believe that some of the most valuable discoveries in our time will
come not from laboratories but from honing our human, ethnographic
capacity to listen ever more deeply and patiently. This is what anthropology
taught me. To turn these insights that arise into policy, business, or activism
will have the greatest positive impact for humankind.
As noted in Chapter 1, contemporary environmental anthropologists are

also engaged in debates about the need for non-human interests to be repre-
sented and taken into account in decision-making, with an expectation that a
less anthropocentric approach will encourage societies to make more sustain-
able choices. The urgency of encouraging better choices has become very
plain, as information about the mass extinction of other species has come to
the fore. A number of anthropologists have explored what extinction means
(Ceballos et al. 2015) and the potential for critical tipping points in this pro-
cess (O’Riordan and Lenton 2013). As ever, anthropology brings a uniquely
comparative view, thus Genese Sodikoff’s work considers the idea of extinc-
tion itself, and what means to lose languages, ways of life, cultural groups
and – of course – non-human species (2011). Non-human beings across the
whole spectrum of species are at risk, including primates of which 60% are
now threatened with extinction.
This situation is the result of escalating anthropogenic pressures on

primates and their habitats – mainly global and local market demands,
leading to extensive habitat loss through the expansion of industrial
agriculture, large-scale cattle ranching, logging, oil and gas drilling,
mining, dam building, and the construction of new road networks in
primate range regions. Other important drivers are increased bushmeat
hunting and the illegal trade of primates as pets and primate body parts,
along with emerging threats, such as climate change and anthroponotic
diseases.
(Estrada et al. 2017)
But these concerns present anthropologists with a major dilemma. Many of

these destructive activities also represent the livelihoods of human communities
who may have few alternatives.
A transition into primatology

Katherine Scott
I didn’t start off life as an anthropologist, in fact I was a zoologist to begin with.
From zoology, I quickly made the transition into primatology and found that the
behavioural studies I immersed myself in had their roots deep in the field of
anthropology. My current PhD work focuses primarily on orangutan behaviour in

oil palm plantations. Palm oil has hit the media in a big way over the last few
years. Every story that you read talks about the plight of orangutans and other
species; however, there is very little (if any) focus on the human dynamic.
Millions of people are reliant on oil palm both directly, and indirectly, for
their income. If we removed oil palm from the international market, where
would this leave them? There are a myriad of human rights issues surrounding
this crop, yet we have thus far not offered any appropriate alternatives or
viable solutions. We appear to find compassion for animals when it comes to
environmental destruction, but there are ramifications for people too.
I found myself venturing deeper into this more anthropological way of
thinking during my time in Indonesia. Kalimantan is a complex matrix of
culture, religion and socioeconomic issues. Transmigration (where people
from overcrowded islands such as Java were relocated to Kalimantan) has
played a huge role in shaping the landscape, causing vast amounts of con-
flict. Working with NGOs, government offices and activists (both local and
foreign), I have been welcomed into longhouses, treehouses and tents, but I
have also been met with suspicion. The narrative presented in the media is
that ‘indigenous’ people don’t care about the environment, but the reality is
that they do, however they usually lack the means to do so. This creates a
paradox for conservationists.
My current work has taught me that large Indonesian companies have
money, and in a lot of cases want to take conservationists on board, how-
ever they find it difficult to recruit them. We must work together to make
sure that the environmental protection that we advocate is financially viable,
and not detrimental to either people or animals.
Concerns about human impacts on other species has also led to a major shift
in ideas about food and food practices, towards vegetarian and vegan ideas
often generated by concerns both for non-human rights and the social and
ecological costs of meat and dairy consumption (Barnhill et al. 2016; Caplan
2008, 2013; Hurn 2013). There is similar concern about the chemicals used in
crop production. If we return to the topic of bees, for example, there are major
controversies about the impact of pesticides such as neonicotinoids on bee
populations, which have collapsed in areas where such chemicals are used
(Mitchell et al. 2017).
Catherine Phillips, via an ethnographic study of beekeeping in Australia, calls
for the social sciences to pay more attention to the global loss of pollinators
caused by the plant monocultures and chemical methods of producing industrial
agriculture (2014). She is right to be concerned, and not just for the bees. As I
have pointed out elsewhere:
About three quarters of the crops planted by humans are pollinated by bees,
and these crops comprise about a third of the world’s food. In the UK,
recent controversies have drawn attention to the use of neonicotinoids to
control crop pests, and their potential to endanger bee populations, and yet
their use continues.
(Strang 2017: 266)
The debate continues, and bans on such chemicals were extended in Europe
following confirmation of their dangers from the European Food Safety
Authority.
Most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides represent a risk to wild bees and

honeybees, according to assessments published today by EFSA. The
Authority has updated its risk assessments of three neonicotinoids –
clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam – that are currently subject
to restrictions in the EU because of the threat they pose to bees.
(2018: n.p.)
Erik Stokstad observed that ‘the decision pleased environmental groups and was
greeted with trepidation by farming associations, which fear economic harm’
(2018: n.p.). Some farmers argue that the use of fertilisers and pesticides are central
to their capacities to produce sufficient food to ‘feed the world’. Clearly this view
is contested: there is little prospect of feeding the world beyond the short term if
farming practices destroy the insects that pollinate the crops. Similarly, as early
agricultural societies learned to their cost, over-dependence on monoculture is
risky. In a contemporary world, there is better recognition of the need for diversity
in and beyond agriculture, and of the relationships between social ideas and values,
technologies and ecosystems, and much potential for anthropologists to collaborate
in agricultural research (Sarker 2017).
Political ecology
Environmental anthropology overlaps with what is commonly described as
political ecology, which recognises the relationships between political, social,
economic and ecological systems. While understanding the economic and
social pressures faced by farmers, anthropologists have also drawn attention to
the reality that in many places food and water security are not assured. For
anthropologists such precarity intersects with issues of power and social justice
(Caplan 2017; Mello 2018), and with fundamental rights, for example the right
to clean water and sanitation declared by a UN Resolution in 2010 (Boelens
and Seemann 2014; Wutich and Brewis 2014). Rights to water, land and other
resources are inevitably entangled with issues of ownership and access, and
these are particularly tricky when the ‘resource’ itself is not readily located
within material boundaries. The difficulties of ‘owning’ the water that runs
through environments are obvious (Strang and Busse 2011), but similar
problems attend other things that are difficult to fence in. An illustrative
example is provided by the growth of the commercial fishing industry. There
are major issues about the ecological sustainability of fish populations, as well as
the social sustainability of the many small-scale communities who depend on
fishing for their livelihoods. But with a ‘resource that has no owners’, this is
very much an arena in which power and politics are critical. At an international
level, this is evident in negotiations over quotas, much complicated by issues
such as Brexit and EU fisheries policies, which Said observes have enabled the
growth of industrial scale fishing at the expense of small-scale fishing com-
munities (Said et al. 2018; see also Kamat 2014). Bonnie McCay and her
colleagues also focus on the decision-making processes that inform fisheries
policy (2011), and note the importance of implementing marine protected
areas (MPAs):
in the past two decades there has been a rapid increase in MPA research
and implementation throughout the world. If the governance of MPAs is
improved in ways we describe here, MPAs and other place-based approa-
ches will continue to be important tools for the management of marine
resources.
(McCay and Jones 2011: 1130)
The need to protect small-scale indigenous rights from industrial-scale practices

can also help to conserve non-human systems. Susan Stonich’s research in
Honduras examined what happened when the government attempted to boost
the economy and pay off foreign debt by expanding shrimp farming along the
coast, without considering the traditional landowners. Coastal land was given
to investors – often government officials, military leaders and urban elites.
There was a massive leap in shrimp production (1,611% in ten years), but also
major social and environmental consequences. The previous small landholders
lost their access to newly privatised ponds and wetlands that they had relied on
for fishing, harvesting and firewood. There were few jobs to replace these local
economic practices. The shrimp farms devastated the habitats essential to other
species and, in effect, the government’s decision created the conditions for ‘a
permanent human and ecological crisis in the region’ (in McGuire 2005: 94).
Similar dynamics can be seen in relation to the logging of forests: for example,
Ben Wallace has written about the social pressures that have led to deforestation
in the Philippines (2006). Similar patterns – the clearance of land for farming or
urban development, demands for wood and other products – pertain in many
parts of the world, most notably in the Amazon, where John Bodley describes
the massive clearance driven by policies ‘to build the Trans-Amazonian highway
and convert the Amazon from forest to cattle pastures … industrial agriculture’
(in particular soy production) ‘and logging for the global market’ (2012: 45).
Ethnographic research is generally conducted with a view to assisting the
development of better agricultural and forestry strategies, and in each instance,
researchers bring the social and cultural dynamics to the fore. Thus, conducting
research on a strawberry farming cooperative in California, Miriam Wells
highlighted the differences between a ‘top down’ purely economic assessment
of its success, and the local perspectives of the participants, which pointed to
the cooperative’s importance in providing disadvantaged Mexican farmers with
social status, security, and more stable family and community lives, as well as
better access to education and other social services (in Ervin 2005).
Michael Painter comments on the correlation between poverty and injustice
in relation to conservation and the vital role played by indigenous peoples in
protecting their ecosystems.
We have … witnessed the destruction of these places through encroachment

and appropriation of land and resources by mines, farms, ranches, plantations,
oil fields, roads and dams. While we see this loss through the eyes of con-
servation, it has also been clear that transformation of land, biodiversity, and
ecosystem functions often begins with their appropriation from people for
whom they historically have been sources of livelihood and identity …
Degradation of biodiversity is a double injustice that destroys ecosystems and
impoverishes indigenous peoples.
(2017: n.p.)
As he and his colleagues observe:
One way to conserve viable populations of many animal and plant species
is to create areas that are off-limits to industrial-scale development. But
reducing human pressures does not mean that an area must be entirely free
of people. In fact, evidence shows that many of nature’s remaining
strongholds have maintained high natural values precisely because of the
stewardship of local people over generations.
(Painter et al. 2019: n.p.)
But the stewardship of local people is rarely prioritised: more often land,
water and resources used relatively sustainably by small-scale communities
have been appropriated in order to impose industrial-scale activities. As well
as devastating traditional lifeways and local ecosystems, such activities are
not even sustainable for the larger societies initiating them, leading to a
massive pattern of intensification, or what Thomas Hylland Eriksen
describes as a widespread ‘overheating’ of human activities (2015a, 2018).
Thus as Barbara Johnston makes plain, humans have shifted from being
subject to normal environmental constraints to trying to survive their own
impacts on ecosystems:
The environmental constraints faced by our ancestors were in large part

defined by the biophysical parameters of nature, such as water availability,
soil fertility, altitude, and temperature. Today human survival is increas-
ingly constrained by the biodegenerative products of humanity: growing
deserts; decreasing forests; declining fisheries; poisoned food, water, and
air; and climatic extremes and weather events such as floods, hurricanes,
and droughts … Powerless groups (race, ethnicity, class, gender) and their
rights to land, resources, health, and environmental protection are socially
and legally sanctioned casualties of broader state and multinational agendas
to protect national security and develop national resources (agricultural
land, minerals, timber, water, energy).
(2016: 10, 12)
Energetic anthropology
While food production constitutes a major part of human activities in relation to
the material environment, an equally significant area of interest for environmental
anthropologists are the industries focused on providing fuel and energy, and of
course the ways in which these are consumed. Anthropology provides ways to
consider how decisions are made about fuels and forms of transport, as in
Catherine Lutz’s work on cars in the city (2014), and in Caroline Jones and her
colleagues’ exploration of how people engage with public transport:
Increased use of public transport (and a corresponding reduction in car use)

has the potential to contribute to achieving a variety of goals in environ-
mental, health and transport policy. Yet what happens when new public
transport infrastructure is introduced, and how it is experienced and inte-
grated (or not) into daily practice, is little understood … Our rich qualitative
account highlights the varied and creative ways in which people learn to use
new public transport and integrate it into their everyday lives … Addressing
these issues could help to promote uptake of other public transport interven-
tions, which may contribute to increasing physical activity and improving
population health.
(2013: 1)
Many anthropologists are now involved in societies’ efforts to generate energy,

and to reduce the social and ecological impacts of its production (Boyer 2015;
Reno 2011). Like other resources, access to energy often expresses unequal
social and political relations (Gupta 2015): as Tanja Winther and Hal Wilhite
observe, ‘electricity needs anthropology’ (2015). Energy production and use
benefits from close-up ethnographic investigation, for example into the
dynamics that affect household energy consumption (Astbury and Bell 2018;
Bell et al. 2015), or in helping to reveal the complex relationships between
energy use and the impacts of dams and hydroelectric schemes on the world’s
rivers and their inhabitants (Holland et al. 2015).
As societies try (in some cases not very hard) to move away from their
dependence upon fossil fuels, there is scope to consider why some make more
efforts than others, and how different groups think about alternative energy
sources. A recent focus for controversy has been the emergence of hydraulic
Figure 4.8 ‘Stop + Smell the Democracy’: Research at an anti-gas event organised by
local residents, 2015. Photograph: Martin Espig.
fracking, which has generated concerns – and thus multiple conflicting per-
spectives – about its potential impacts on aquifers and on the contiguous
communities (De Rijke 2018; Short and Szolucha 2019; Simonelli 2014;
Willow and Wylie 2014). Martin Espig describes his experiences of being
involved in fracking controversies.
Living with limits: fracking in Australia

Martin Espig
For most of us hardly a day goes by without hearing about pressing envir-
onmental issues. Climate change, sustainability or plastic pollution: the list
seems endless. As an anthropologist I try to understand how humans think
about and engage with their environments. Central to this engagement are
debates about how to extract the natural resources used in our daily lives
without over-stressing the ecological limits of surrounding environments and
the planet as a whole. Extractive industries mine the minerals required to
make things, and produce the fossil fuels we burn to produce electricity or
move our cars. While most societies around the world rely on these indus-
tries, many people protest against extractive projects or advocate divesting
from fossil fuel companies altogether. Others stress that without these
resources ‘life as we know it’ would be impossible, and that states’
economies need the financial profits and employment that extractive indus-
tries generate. My work seeks to unpack the social complexities of such
debates and to contribute towards more balanced discussions about how
we can live within ecological limits.
One environmental debate that has intrigued me since I was an anthro-
pology student concerns the emergence of an industry that extracts natural
gas from underground rock formations. While conventional gas is located in
reservoirs that are easier to access, extracting gas from coal seams or shale
requires additional infrastructure, affects larger areas, and has the potential
for bigger environmental impacts due to controversial extraction techniques.
One of these is hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) in which mixtures of water,
sand and chemicals are pumped underground at a high pressure to pump
the gas out. Over the last two decades, this industry has developed on a
large scale in Australia and the USA. I have conducted research in rural
agricultural regions in Queensland, where coal seam gas (also coal bed
methane) is extracted via thousands of wells. However, groundwater is also
used by the regions’ farmers to irrigate crops and water their cattle. The
rapidly developing CSG industry therefore sparked complex debates about
risk, water scarcity and environmental pollution, not just among nearby
residents but in the wider public arena. Similar issues have emerged with
unconventional gas developments in North America and the UK.
Fascinated by this controversy, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in
areas with CSG projects. It was important to me to engage with a diverse
range of informants, including opposing and supporting community mem-
bers, government officials and industry staff. My aim was to understand how
those involved in CSG debates experience this new industry, make sense of
its environmental risks and negotiate disputes.
I was able to directly engage with many different community members
and to gain nuanced insights from multiple angles. My research unpacked
some of the complexities and social processes that are involved in CSG
debates, including aspects that might not be immediately apparent. For
example, I showed that arguments over whether there is enough information
about the environmental impacts of gas extraction also involves people
negotiating what good scientific research might look like, and how commu-
nity members’ legitimate concerns can be acknowledged rather than
ignored. So addressing an environmental risk controversy requires not just
technical and scientific solutions, such as better extraction techniques, but
also conflict resolution processes that recognise the need for meaningful
dialogue between those involved in resource developments, so that a
mutually acceptable outcome can be achieved. Doing so, however, requires
understanding the specific circumstances of an environmental dispute in the
first place, which is the strength of anthropological theories and methods.
Anthropologists draw out insights that inform the specific case they work on,
but which can also be applied in other contexts. I contributed to a productive
exchange of knowledge between anthropologists engaging with unconven-

tional gas developments in Australia, the United States and other regions
across the globe. It is also possible to transfer these insights to other extractive
industries. For example, I applied my knowledge of Australian fracking debates
in a think tank for a European mining equipment manufacturer. Together with
another anthropologist and mining engineers, we investigated innovation
opportunities that might improve the mining industry’s social and environ-
mental performance. While we learned much from the engineers, they often
commented that they had never thought about social or cultural realities when
designing mining equipment. Our work directly influenced the company’s
innovation agenda and even prompted them to design a machine that can help
small-scale miners in developing nations. Anthropologists therefore have much
to offer even beyond the specific contexts of their work.
There is a growing awareness in many organisations and industries that
socio-cultural factors are crucial in almost any context, whether people are
protesting against a gas project, or when companies try to focus on ‘user
experiences’. As an environmental anthropologist, I welcome the realisation
that pressing environmental challenges cannot be solved by technical or sci-
entific experts alone. Anthropologists present alternative perspectives that are
indispensable for addressing these challenges. They do so not just by thinking
about problems, but by directly working together with people on the issues that
affect them. Studying and practising anthropology is therefore about appre-
ciating that people’s lives and social phenomena can be messy and sometimes
incoherent. This grounded perspective is what has always fascinated me about
the discipline, what keeps my research interesting and rewarding.
Bringing together the findings from my CSG research demonstrated that
there are no clear-cut right or wrong sides within the debates. This is why
you will often hear anthropologists say that ‘things are complicated’,
because, well, humans are complicated. But this is what makes working with
them so interesting, unpredictable and rewarding.
Pollution
As well affecting local communities and ecosystems, industrial patterns of production
and consumption produce multiple forms of waste and pollution. While attention
has turned recently to fracking and its potential damage to water bodies, anthro-
pologists have regularly conducted research on a mining industry with a long history
of allowing chemicals such as cyanide (used to separate minerals from ore) to leach
from tailing dams into waterways, with major ecological and social costs (Rumsey
and Weiner 2004). Stuart Kirsch, for example, has conducted research on mining
in the Andes, Guyana, the Solomon Islands and Suriname. He was involved in a
major lawsuit against the Ok Tedi gold and copper mine in Papua New Guinea,
whose operations had devastating impacts on the Ok Tedi and Fly rivers and the
communities dependent upon them. His writing explores the risks that the inter-
national mining industry poses to people and nature, describing the Ok Tedi
conflict and the international network of indigenous peoples, advocacy groups,
and lawyers that sought to protect local rivers and rain forests. He also considers
how corporations promote their interests by manipulating science and invoking
the discourses of sustainability and social responsibility. His work is comparative,
demonstrating how similar dynamics operate internationally: ‘The mining industry
is defended on both economic grounds, in terms of the creation of wealth and
employment, and on technological grounds, in terms of the widespread need for
and use of metals’, and ‘as a mode of development that can help alleviate poverty’.
In recent years, however, economic and technological opportunities have been
viewed from the perspectives of sustainability and environmental responsibility,
and found wanting. ‘Communities dependent on natural resources for subsistence
are especially vulnerable to the environmental impacts of mining’, and resistance to
mining projects increasingly leads to conflict (Kirsch 2014: 4, 6).
Both water and air pollution compromise the health of ecosystems as well as
that of their human and non-human inhabitants. Medical anthropologist Anna
Lora-Wainwright has conducted research on ‘cancer villages’ in China (2010).
Helen Kopnina has examined the connections between vehicular air pollution and
asthma, highlighting ‘the lack of public awareness about the direct link between
vehicular dependency and asthma’ (2016b: 142), and ‘the unequal power balance
between patient groups and polluting industries’, and the influence that these
industries exert on government policy (Kopnina 2017: 38). Chisato Fukuda’s
fieldwork in Mongolia explored the link between air pollution and ill health, and
how public awareness grew into a global protest movement.
On January 28th 2017, thousands of protesters chanted and marched through

Mongolia’s capital city … Hundreds of Mongolians living across the globe
from New York to Virginia, Chicago to Paris also joined in on the cause,
using social media hashtags #BreatheMongolia and #mongolsaresuffocating
to call for immediate government action to combat air pollution.
(2017: n.p.)
Studies of environmental impacts on health also benefit from the long-term

view provided by Archaeology. Bioarchaeologist Charlotte Roberts, for
example, takes a very long view via paleopathology, which entails using pat-
terns in health and disease to understand human–environmental interactions in
the past, and the long-term effects this has had on human populations. The
effects of air pollution and its adverse effects on human health, for example,
increased with the Industrial Revolution and with greater numbers of people
living in urban environments (C. Roberts 2016). She considers the implications
of air pollution in terms of human rights:
Air pollution is reported to be responsible for the premature death of seven

million people each year. At the Human Rights Council, David Boyd,
Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, stated that
‘every hour, 800 people are dying, many after years of suffering, from
cancer, respiratory illnesses or heart disease directly caused by breathing
polluted air’.
(C. Roberts 2019: n.p.)
Unpacking garbage
Social analysis is also illuminating in considering what American researchers call
‘garbology’ – the study of waste. William Rathje’s work in Tucson, Arizona hit
the headlines by applying archaeological thinking to household waste.
All archaeologists study garbage … our data is just fresher than most …
What we do not have and what we need are specialists to study the
crucial relationship between people and things, especially now, as the
need to manage resources efficiently becomes essential. The Garbage
Project studies household garbage because, whether dealing with ancient
Maya or modern America, the household is society’s most commonplace
and basic socioeconomic unit.
(in Podolefsky and Brown 2003: 98–9)
Anthropological research on garbage, and more specifically on food waste, has

obvious relevance in waste management, both at a household level and in larger
cycles of production, consumption and distribution (Church 2012; Lehmann
2015; Reno 2015, 2016). As Carl Zimring puts it: ‘What we classify and dispose of
as wastes provides rich insight into our behavior, social structures, and treatment of
our environment’ (in Zimring and Rathje 2012: xxv).
Joshua Reno’s research focuses on waste disposal and landfill sites. His early
ethnographic work involved working as a labourer at a landfill site on the
outskirts of Detroit, and participating in a local activist group seeking to raise
awareness about the ‘transnational waste trade’, which in this case was coming
from Canada to the United States. His perspective extends beyond the social
and technical lessons to be learned from waste management to consider matters
of global pollution and environmental justice.
There is yet more waste will tell us, especially as more studies continue to
document the many ways that our wastes are not only our problem, but
become entangled with the lives of nonhuman creatures and the future of
the planet we share.
(2015: 557)
As this implies, an increasingly problematic waste issue is the vast amount of

plastic produced for packaging and many kinds of products, and how, as detritus,
such plastics travel into human and animal bodies, and into ecosystems at every
scale. Lucy Attala argues that:
A fundamental shift in production (NOT consumer) behaviour should be
the pivot and direction of any campaign. The young are angry at big
business; they maintain that the producers need to be made accountable
for their actions in continuing to bring these polluting and destructive
items to the public.
(2017: 2)
Kim de Wolff’s interest in cultures of consumption and waste led her to write an
ethnography of the ‘trash vortex’ (2014: 99). Her research explores the circulation
of plastic waste through the world’s oceans, in particular ‘the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch’. ‘By tracing the intersecting trajectories of multiple materials, I take
a problem often blamed on activist exaggeration or media misrepresentation and
show how the garbage patch emerges with a diversity of collective practices’
(2014: xiv). She illuminates the ‘growing realm marine ecologists call the
‘plastisphere’, where sea life and plastics meet’ (2017: 23).
Environmental change
As will be clear from the preceding sections, there are multiple anthropogenic
pressures on ecosystems. While climate change tends to dominate the headlines,
environmental anthropologists stress the need to recognise that this is a direct
outcome of unremitting intensification in human activities – and who better
than anthropologists to provide insights into these (Barnes and Dove 2015;
Crate and Nuttall 2016)? As Renée Hetherington and Robert Reid put it:
‘Our growing obsession with, and economic dependency on fossil fuels, com-
bined with our penchant for consumerism, has resulted in humans becoming a
climate-change mechanism’ (2010: 269).
Han Baer and Merrill Singer call for anthropologists to address climate
change as ‘a grave risk to humanity’ (2014: 1) and (citing Barnes et al. 2013)
suggest that the discipline’s major contribution lies in:
(1) the discipline’s long tradition of carrying out in-depth field research gives
anthropologists the tools needed to develop insight into the cultural values
and political relations that structure the creation and flow of climate-related
knowledge; (2) a concern with diversity and with local populations positions
anthropologists to witness many on-the-ground adverse consequences of
climate change, as well as the wide range of human responses to it that are
unfolding around the world; (3) anthropological work on development
projects like dam- or road-building efforts provides a foundation for assessing
the unforeseen consequences of mitigation efforts; and (4) anthropology’s
holistic view of society unveils the complex interactions across sectors that it
will be necessary to understand in implementing successful public policies
concerning climate change.
(Baer and Singer 2014: 3)
Paul Roscoe points to some challenges in working in this area, and the need for
anthropology to expand beyond localised and culturally particular approaches to
encompass ‘a more global and holistic perspective’, noting that ‘insights from
anthropologists and archaeologists have the potential to improve climate change
models … to fully consider large-scale social dynamics and human behaviours
that drive or are affected by climate change’ (2014: 535–536).
At the same time, researchers continue to emphasise the need for indigenous
communities’ rights and concerns to be heard in relation to climate change
(DeLuca et al. 2016), and to understand what drives (or discourages) environ-
mental concern in larger societies (Milton 2014). Eva Berglund also notes the
relationship between environmental anthropology and design anthropology, in
the need to promote design practices that address climate change (2015).
Environmental anthropology therefore examines many different aspects of
human–environmental relationships, bringing the social and cultural aspects of
these to the fore, and providing insights into the diverse ways that cultural and
sub-cultural groups engage with the equally varied social and material environ-
ments in which we live.
5 Anthropology and Governance
The big picture

Anthropologists have always asked questions about how societies form and are
governed. Political anthropologists consider the multiple forms that governance
takes, from small-scale societies led by elders, to the emergence of the
modern State (Bouchard 2011; Dundon and Vokes 2020). They look at how
governance is administered through bureaucracies (Bear and Mathur 2015)
and through everyday practices (Blundo and Le Meur 2009); how it can be
corrupted (Torsello and Venard 2015); and how it is policed (Garriott 2013).
Social relations are invariably also power relations, and thus – building on earlier
work by Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault – there is a considerable litera-
ture on the anthropology of power (Gledhill 2009) and political elites (Rothkopf
2008; Shore and Nugent 2002).
There are many different career paths for anthropologists to follow in
working with government agencies. Some of this is at a ‘big picture’ macro
level, in government ‘think tanks’ and senior administrative bodies, becoming
involved in policy development and planning, and assisting political decision-
making processes. Some practitioners do more specialised work with the
agencies responsible for urban planning, environmental management, housing,
health and welfare, education and childcare, or engage with pressing social
issues, such as poverty, homelessness, prisons and crime. With examples from
anthropologists working with the Department for International Development,
the UK Border Agency, the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office, and
contributing to prison governance, Jeremy MacClancy describes increasing
opportunities for employment in the public sector, and notes the potential for
anthropologists to set new agendas in this area – and revise old ones (2017).
Parliamentary research
Sophie Haines
It was largely serendipity that led me to a position as a parliamentary

researcher. Having submitted my PhD thesis, I had planned to take up some
teaching duties while I prepared for my viva examination, and explored
Anthropology and Governance 99
research opportunities. Then one of my former lecturers passed on news

about a vacancy for a researcher in the office of a recently elected Member
of Parliament. I applied for the post and started work in Westminster.
In terms of my previous involvement with ‘Politics’, I had kept my eye on
national and international news and was a regular voter. My general interest in
social sciences, and my anthropological work during my doctoral studies, were
driven by questions about power dynamics. However, I had no connection to a
particular party, and was not versed in the detailed and idiosyncratic processes
of debate and law-making that underpin the work of Parliament. Parliamentary
culture involves some very specific language and ritual elements: while there
was a lot to learn for a new arrival in this world, I felt that my ethnographic
training and experience helped me to adapt and to learn through immersion
and observation. Doing my job with attention to the roles of language, bureau-
cracy and alliance-building in the UK political system was a way to bring the
practical, transferable skills of an anthropology doctorate together with my
intellectual curiosity about the interface of research and policy.
MPs in the House of Commons have some flexibility in how they organise
their offices and staff. Different roles include office and diary management,
constituency casework, and research. My responsibilities were focused on
research. On a day-to-day basis this involved preparing written and oral
briefings for topical debates; scrutinising draft legislation and policy docu-
ments; formulating questions to be asked in the debating chamber; and
drafting correspondence to ministers and constituents regarding casework.
To undertake the research that underpinned all these tasks, I reviewed
data and literature available from the (incredibly helpful) House of Com-
mons Library, supplemented by other sources including studies by aca-
demics, think tanks and NGOs. I undertook qualitative (and occasionally
quantitative) analysis and synthesis, with careful critical attention to the
reliability of the sources and the provenance of statistics and claims. I
had to make a considerable shift away from my academic tendency to
‘thick description’ and lengthy prose towards one-to-two-page bullet-
pointed briefing notes that were clear and concise enough to be read and
interpreted on the move. Attention to detail and time management were
crucial. Debates were often scheduled with only 48 hours’ notice to
gather and prepare the relevant background information to allow the MP
to contribute in an informed way, knowing that their comments and
arguments might be included in the permanent record. Being a party
member was not a requirement: my role was to conduct rigorous
research that would inform the MP about the background and different
perspectives on the issue at hand.
MPs each have their own interests in terms of policy areas and con-
stituency issues. The MP I worked for was a backbencher and a member of
the Health Select Committee. The research associated with their Select
Committee work was an opportunity to develop in-depth engagement with
this policy area, scrutinising changes proposed by the Health and Social
Care Bill that was progressing through Parliament at the time. Beyond the
Select Committee work, the topics for research were incredibly diverse: as
well as becoming familiar with fast-moving developments in health policy, I
worked on projects and cases covering topics such as foreign policy, local
obesity and diabetes programmes, parental leave, railway planning and
museum funding. One of the most rewarding aspects of the job was sup-
porting constituency casework that required policy-related enquiries and
actions. Seeing practical outcomes that could improve someone’s life, or
solve a particular problem, brought home the connection between policy
and everyday life and the potential for productive change.
Thinking anthropologically enabled me to empathise and communicate with
different audiences (constituents, other MPs, ministers, local politicians, and
the media). More unfamiliar was carrying this research into action through
parliamentary procedures. Though my own role was as a participant rather
than a participant observer, other anthropologists (for example Emma Crewe)
have produced illuminating ethnographies of both House of Lords and House
of Commons. Now, more than ever, I think it is crucial to improve under-
standing of the way that Parliament works as an institution made up of people
navigating diverse sets of rules, interests, values and relationships.
Though I eventually returned to academic research, it was with a heigh-
tened awareness of the day-to-day workings of Parliament. This has helped
me understand a lot more about political processes and how academic
research can feed into policy development, how to conduct effective eth-
nographies of science-policy interfaces, and how to cultivate a personal
sense of engagement with politics.
Why are anthropologists useful to governments and their agencies? In

essence, this kind of work draws on core skills in anthropology: a commitment
to examining the social context in depth, and to understanding the different
perspectives and relationships of the people in it. This can also be applied on a
smaller scale, within single institutions; at a community level, or on a much
larger scale, to consider regional, national or even international concerns.
As we saw in Chapter 1, anthropologists have often acted as advocates for
community groups and networks, mediating between these and government
agencies and, as Catherine Besteman observes, the disparities in power between
indigenous or community networks and the State can make such work quite
challenging (2010). Being directly employed by government agencies presents
particular ethical and practical challenges for anthropologists, not least because of
the very different epistemological approaches of anthropologists and policy-
makers. However, being ‘on the inside’ can also enable anthropologists to support
positive social activities in different ways. Thus Keely Maxwell describes working
at the National Homeland Security Research Centre in the USA.
A general anthropologist
Keely Maxwell
When I tell people that I work as a General Anthropologist in the National
Homeland Security Research Center in the US Environmental Protection
Agency’s (EPA) Office of Research and Development, the most common
responses are: ‘I didn’t know that anthropologists work in EPA’; and ‘I didn’t
know that EPA works in homeland security’. Despite having been involved in
environmental activism, education, and research since college, I never
thought I’d wind up at EPA. It was too establishment, too technical. Yet I’ve
found working at the crossroads of natural and social science research, the
environment and homeland security, to be a rewarding career track.
An anthropologist conducting ethnographic fieldwork in my office would
likely mention: the array of cubicles packed into the workspace; the cacoph-
ony of conference calls and conversations from neighboring cubicles; a
population consisting largely of chemists, microbiologists, engineers, ecolo-
gists, and toxicologists, with a few social scientists, IT specialists, and
administrative support staff; discourses about ‘data quality’, ‘rad decon’ and
other scientific lexicon; rituals of retirement parties; EPA’s mission-oriented
nature and organisational hierarchy; the endless supply of bureaucratic pro-
cedures for getting things done; and the daily rhythms of work – quiet early
mornings, followed by a full schedule of in-person, teleconference, or video-
conference meetings.
EPA’s intersection with homeland security centers on ‘CBRN’ (or chemical-
biological-radiological-nuclear) incidents. If there is an oil spill, chemical plant
explosion, nuclear power plant accident, bioweapon attack, or even a natural
disaster, EPA has responsibilities to protect human health and the environ-
ment, which means keeping drinking water systems safe, determining what
contaminants are present, using techniques to clean up (or decontaminate) the
area, and to dispose of waste and debris. The National Homeland Security
Research Center was established following the September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks and the 2001 Amerithrax incident. It conducts research on topics such
as: detecting contaminants in drinking water systems, sampling and analysing
for contaminants in areas affected by a CBRN incident, and decontaminating
indoor and outdoor environments.
What does an anthropologist do at EPA, and where does social science fit
into homeland security research? I initially arrived in this office through an
American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Tech-
nology Policy Fellowship, which places PhD scientists and engineers,
including social scientists, in federal agency offices for up to two years. I
liked doing this research so much I applied for a federal job. My work
includes one project on community resilience to natural and CBRN dis-
asters. A second project is on the social dimensions of environmental
remediation and decontamination. On a daily basis I might manage extra-

mural contracts; prepare a Quality Assurance Project Plan; analyse data;
write reports; input information into the agency’s workflow systems for get-
ting things done and tracking progress, and of course attend meetings.
While I do conduct research, I’m no longer immersed as a lone ethno-
grapher in a field site for months at a time. Instead, I find myself doing a lot
of project management. I do miss fieldwork and try to involve myself in
active research as much as possible. EPA research is almost always colla-
borative. I am on several project teams, which are interdisciplinary (both
intra-social science and social-biophysical science), as well as participating
in working groups aiming to coordinate efforts within and outside the
agency. All this coordination slows research down on one level and facil-
itates its ultimate application on another.
The products I create go beyond journal articles and books: they also
include reports, databases, decision-support tools, and technical briefs.
This requires me to consider a wide array of audiences. It has also chal-
lenged me to go out on a limb and propose solutions to environmental
problems. Second, I apply research methods and theory to different
aspects of my job. I’ve started to use design anthropology, bringing end-
user experiences and needs to the forefront of product development. I’ve
held focus groups as part of product evaluation to understand why the
product looks like it does, and how we might change the process the
next time around.
One of the challenges of working as a social scientist in a federal agency
comprised primarily of biophysical scientists and lawyers is feeling a constant
pressure to be able to articulate the validity and value of social science
research. A benefit of bringing anthropological sensibilities to the federal
workforce is that you make what seems like an obvious statement: ‘we need
to understand why people make the decisions they do to recycle/ conserve
energy/ evacuate during a disaster/ return after a site is cleaned up’ and find
that it sparks an ‘aha’ moment for others at the table. Ethnographic attention
to the cultural norms, power relations, and social dynamics of your workplace
can also help you get established in your career.
How am I making a difference? I get to see how my research helps pro-
tect human health and the environment. Being surrounded by colleagues
similarly dedicated to this mission is energising. Working at the EPA has
helped me go beyond making recommendations for an undifferentiated
body of policy-makers or decision-makers. Instead, I can identify the many
decision pathways and forms of policy through which to enact change:
budget setting, contract management, and risk communication, to name a
few. I get to put an anthropological stamp on different tasks and see the
research office’s social science capacities increase. Now if you’ll excuse me,
I’ve got to go to a meeting.
Governing conflict
The ethical and moral issues that attend ethnographic research in any context
are greatly magnified in conflict situations, generating some deep anxieties
about anthropologists undertaking work with military agencies, and the
potential weaponisation of the knowledge produced through their research
(Gallagher 2017). Montgomery McFate and Janice Laurence explore the
experiences of social scientists involved in the Human Terrain System
introduced by the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan to seek information about
the human dimension of the conflict zone (2015; see also McFate 2018).
David Price points to the complexities for practitioners trying to assist the
delivery of humanitarian aid in war zones, where such aid may have a dual
role in supporting counterinsurgency (2014), and notes the influence that
the American Government has had on anthropology since the Second
World War. ‘Ultimately’, he says, ‘the moral issues raised by these activities
prompted the American Anthropological Association to establish its first ethics
code’ (Price 2016: n.p.). Similar debates have informed the development of
anthropology’s professional ethical code in the UK, which is regularly updated
by our professional body, the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK
and the Commonwealth.
Conflicts also require processes of conflict resolution, in which anthropology’s
capacity to provide insights into diverse cultural and sub-cultural perspectives
has obvious utility (Avruch 2008). Ida Hydle observes that categories of what
constitutes peace/normal and war are not always clear, and notes the impor-
tance of asking for gender perspectives in peace studies (2006). Working in
Central and Southern Africa, John Janzen focuses on how anthropology can
contribute to breaking pervasive cycles of violence, suggesting that ethno-
graphy and anthropological analysis offer tools for policy-makers, therapists and
leaders in achieving political reconciliation, healing, ritualised memory, and the
restoration of justice (2016).
Populism and polarisation

Not all conflicts entail widespread violence, and anthropological perspectives can
also illuminate social and political tensions within and between societies. With
the rise of populism and the polarisation of public debates, there is an ever more
pressing need for thoughtful social analysis which requires anthropologists to step
up, as public intellectuals, to assist societies in resolving internal conflicts. Keir
Martin and Katherine Smith have examined the phenomenon of populism itself,
looking at the impact of UKIP (the right-wing UK Independence Party) on
British politics and the anti-immigration message that influenced the subsequent
Brexit referendum (2014).
The divisions over Brexit exposed international tensions (Eriksen 2016) and
multiple issues of identity, class, race and culture that have long been of interest
to anthropologists (Green 2016b, 2017; Stein 2016). Gillian Evans considers
how British class politics have been reconfigured into cultural nationalism
(2017). Anna Tuckett looks at some of the ways in which this was manifested
in Britain, during the Brexit debates, in polarised attitudes to immigration
(2017), and Michael Buchowski reflects on how populist debates encouraged
xenophobia and racism towards migrants in Europe: ‘One could say that things
like this happen everywhere … But the fact that such occurrences are becom-
ing increasingly common is sufficient reason for us, as anthropologists, to be
appalled, alarmed, and ready to react publicly’ (2017: 520).
In the Trump era, Christine Walley unpacks the real diversities within
what has been described as the white working class in the USA (2017),
where Hugh Gusterson has described both Brexit and Donald Trump’s
election victory as ‘symptoms of a new nationalist populism in western
Europe and the United States’. He calls for anthropologists to turn their
attention to groups that are advantaged, beyond their more common focus
on those who are not:
This political and ideological movement has arisen in reaction to

reconfigurations of power, wealth, and identity that are endemic to
global neoliberalism. In the United States, however, the media’s
dominant ‘blue-collar narrative’ about Trump’s victory simplifies the
relationship between neoliberalism and nationalist populism by ignoring
the role of the petty bourgeoisie and the wealthy in Trump’s coalition. An
anthropology of Trump requires ethnographies of communities largely
shunned by anthropologists as well as reflexivity about the unintended role
of universities in producing support for Trump.
(2017: 209)
The production of knowledge

Populism has been greatly enabled by digital technologies and social media,
and a major contemporary concern is the extent to which they support the
spreading of misinformation. The circulation of misinformation is not new of
course: folklorists have always studied how fictional narratives are invented
and disseminated around societies. But the use and effects of fake news now
appear to be everywhere: in political smear campaigns (Turner 2018); on
anti-vaccination websites (Kitta 2018); and in attempts to cast doubt on
journalistic integrity (Mould 2018). Tom Mould notes that
there is fake news that is created knowingly as false with the intention to
mislead, fake news created knowingly as false with the intention to satirize,
and fake news that is deployed rhetorically as a label to dismiss stories that
we do not like or do not believe to be true. But once ‘fake news’ leaves its
creator and moves out into the world through digital, visual, written, and
oral modes, its forms and meanings multiply, in many cases, mirroring or
mimicking genres that folklorists have studied for years: legends, rumors,
jokes, beliefs, songs, and, more recently, internet memes.
(2018: 373)
Carole McGranahan homes in on the issue of political lying:
It has long been a truism that politicians lie, but with the entry of Donald
Trump into the US political domain, the frequency, degree, and impact of
lying in politics are now unprecedented … How do we understand lies and
liars in their cultural, historical, and political context? Asking this question
allows us to see clearly the work of lies, including their meaningful and
sometimes violent consequences. By thinking anew about the anthropology
of lying, anthropologists can show the unexpected ways that community can
form around lies.
(2017: 1)
As a forensic anthropologist, Benjamin Schaefer points to the relationship

between fake news and fraudulent science, and the challenges that this poses to
educators:
It is important to recognize that the material that is covered in class can be

taken as scripture by students. This is increasingly problematic in the era of
‘fake news’, where dubious material often gains a reputation for accuracy
and academic rigour simply because it has been frequently shared across
various social media platforms.
(2018: 61)
The tool of social media is not the message though: it is simply a fantastically
efficient communications vehicle. It may encourage populism, attract fake
news, or invite the political manipulation of public audiences, as for example
in Cambridge Analytica’s use of social media to influence the Brexit debate
(Laterza 2018), but it also provides extraordinary capacities for information-
sharing and social networking, which is naturally of interest to social scientists
(Miller et al. 2016).
A major emergent area for research is how social media enable counter-
movements and activism. Anthropologists have a longstanding interest in
social movements and political counter-movements, and Tom Salman and
Willem Assies note that in considering these, it is necessary to move beyond
simple notions of grievance to consider the cultural contexts of such
movements, and how these change over time; the perceptions of the parti-
cipants; and the wider social and environmental context from which they
arise (2017). Today, it is also important to consider how they communicate,
as digital media make it possible for people to ignite large-scale political
action, as, for example, in the 2011 Egyptian uprising, and more recently
by the Occupy protesters.
The mobilising role of social media … has already been duly noticed by a
number of pundits and journalists … Tweeting on the 27th of January
about the Egyptian revolution, American author Jared Cohen cited one
Egyptian activist summing up activist media use as follows: ‘facebook used
to set the date, twitter used to share logistics, youtube to show the world,
all to connect people’.
(Gerbaudo 2012: 3)
John Postill, whose research focused on the ‘indignados’ movement in Spain,

comments that advances in mobile and internet technology offer activists and
protesters an opportunity to engage with and shape the wider narrative of events,
providing alternate accounts that challenge the narrative of authoritarian regimes
(2014). Liana Chua, working with activists aiming to protect orangutans in
Borneo, similarly emphasises the way that access to social media enables them to
shape the tropes and discourses of debate (2018).
The internet also provides opportunities for subverting communications
more radically. Steven Klienknecht conducts research on the transnational
subculture of computer ‘hackers’ whose common interest lies in breaching
the boundaries of institutions and their systems (2005). Such activities may
be aimed at theft, for example of intellectual property. Gabriella Coleman’s
recent work has focused on the culture and ethics of computer hacking and
its diverse goals, in raiding intellectual property, whistle-blowing, spying,
and inciting political activism (2013, 2014). There is also work on the new
conflicts enabled by cyber warfare. Paulo and Jana Shakarian, and Andrew
Ruef have used case studies to explore cyber warfare from military, socio-
logical, scientific and computer science perspectives, with examples that
range from the hijacking of a company’s systems by terrorists in order to
spread propaganda, to the installation of malware, or the blocking of digital
communications prior to military incursions (2013).
Anthropologists online
With a growing expectation that academics will intervene in public issues, the
discipline itself – as noted in the Introduction to this book – is increasingly
engaged with digital media. Sarah Pink and Simone Abram consider how
opportunities to disseminate ideas in new ways and to new publics have the
potential to create new forms of public anthropology (2015). These efforts take
place with a context of public discourse that has been reframed in neoliberal
terms as a ‘knowledge economy’ (Eriksen and Schober 2017). David Mills and
Richard Radcliffe have therefore turned a reflexive eye on how ethnographic
methods and practices are being reworked as a result: ‘UK policy expectations
that research (and its impact) can be measured, monitored and accounted for in
monetary terms place particular demands on qualitative social research’ (2012:
1; see also Stein 2018).
Education
Other anthropologists have raised more fundamental questions about the
‘knowledge economy’ and what highly utilitarian visions of education mean for
universities. Building on Marilyn Strathern’s prescient work on ‘audit cultures’
(2000), Cris Shore and Susan Wright ask whether current developments in
higher education, and uncertainties about its future, may lead to the ‘death of
the public university’ (2017). Along with many academics, anthropologists have
responded with dismay to the UK Government’s marketisation of education
(Collini 2018), which costs students dearly (both financially and in terms of
educational experience) and directs them towards disciplines that – at least
perceptually – offer job security and high salaries (Fardon 2011; Newman
2011). Tami Navarro suggests that more research is needed to reveal how
neoliberalism and allowing market forces to rule affects the priorities and
autonomy of academic institutions (2017).
Debates about the future of universities build on a well-established area of
anthropology more generally concerned with processes of education in societies.
Many people think that education is simply a matter of going to school and
acquiring knowledge and skills, but it is also an important part of how nation-states
construct themselves, ensuring that schooling also teaches students allegiance to the
State – hence American rituals such as flag raising in schools, and the inclusion of
‘citizenship’ in the UK curriculum. Globalisation and commoditisation have had a
major effect on this process:
Public education remains the nation-state’s foremost instrument of forging

citizens. But the emergence of ‘international education’, a system explicitly
based on the ideology of globality and outside the purview of national
curricula, provides a way to circumvent the citizen-making machine.
(Nyíri 2006: 32; see also Cooper 2004)
There are more fundamental aspects of education to consider too. Anthropology

has long been concerned with understanding human processes of cognition and
development. How do people learn? How do societies transmit information
between generations? How are cultural ideas communicated – and contested –
between groups? How (and why) are different kinds of knowledges valorised or
set aside? In a contemporary multicultural educational domain there are many
new questions to answer, and a major need for cross-cultural understandings.
Educational anthropology has therefore become a distinct sub-field within
the discipline. It emerged in Western nations in the post-war era, when
there was an influx of diverse veterans (with equally diverse educational
needs) into higher education institutions. In America, another important
step was the creation of a Council on Anthropology and Education (CAE)
in the 1960s. Ideas at the time, about how a ‘culture of poverty’ could be
alleviated by education, tended to assume that this meant a white, middle-
class kind of education. The CAE challenged this view and ‘advocated for
equity, diversity and amelioration of problems affecting education’ (Kedia
and Van Willigen 2005: 273).
The need to encompass diversity within the educational system has
grown steadily as many societies have become more multicultural. This
makes education an area in which the cross-cultural translatory skills of
anthropologists are particularly helpful and, as in other areas of knowledge,
anthropologists have been key to debates about the need for pluralism and
acknowledging cultural specificities.
Educational anthropologists know that beliefs about what is best for ‘the
good society’ and what is envisioned as ‘the good society’ vary between
and within cultures … One cannot live in these times without realizing
that notions of good or effective education are disparate. The choices for
educational policy usually reflect the assumptions and perceptions of the
powerful and do not necessarily benefit all.
(Greenman, in Kedia and Van Willigen 2005: 271)
Some anthropologists have focused on specific areas of education. For

example, one of the early researchers in this area, Gerry Rosenfeld (1971),
conducted detailed ethnographic research in inner city schools, and this work
was seminal in defining racial issues in the educational system. Yvonne De
Gaetano (2007) has considered the importance of involving parents in the
schooling process and ensuring that it has a culturally relevant approach.
In multicultural societies, language is also an educational issue both in terms
of assisting the children of new immigrants in acquiring sufficient language to
participate in the educational process, and in maintaining indigenous languages.
Thus Lotty Elderling, working with immigrant families in the Netherlands,
highlighted the need for immigration policy to address language acquisition
among immigrants, to improve their children’s performance in school and their
overall social mobility (in Kedia and Van Willigen 2005: 283).
Many indigenous communities, inhabiting larger societies and economies,
struggle to uphold their own cultural traditions, and keeping languages alive is
central to these efforts (Reyhner et al. 2003). Linguistic anthropologists have
often focused their research on understanding and documenting languages not
previously written down, in order to elucidate the diverse worldviews that they
express. There is a broader role in assisting the integration of these languages
into educational systems. Anthropologists have been closely involved in this
work, and countries such as Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand have
now made major efforts to introduce indigenous educational material to their
curricula, along with indigenous languages and pedagogies.
Thus, in the indigenous community with whom I work in northern Aus-
tralia, elders from each of the local language groups participate in the school as
advisors and educators, focusing on traditional knowledge, which is also
incorporated into the school’s literacy material. Working for the Australian
Council for Educational Research in the Learning Process, Nola Purdie notes
that a National Plan for education affirmed the need to value indigenous
languages:
Such recognition must be heartening for indigenous people. Their languages

have a unique place in Australia’s heritage and in its cultural and educational
life. For indigenous learners they are fundamental to strengthening identity
and self-esteem. For non-indigenous learners they provide a focus for the
development of cultural understanding and reconciliation.
(2008: 1)
In New Zealand schools and universities have fully incorporated Ma-ori and
Pasifika languages and pedagogies alongside European educational methodolo-
gies, and similar work is being done in North America. Teresa McCarty, for
example, works with Lucille Watahomigie under the wing of the American
Indian Language Development Institute at the University of Arizona, con-
ducting a range of projects designed to reverse the ongoing language loss in
Native communities (2002). Anthropology has been influential in encouraging
this more diverse approach and Donna Deyhle notes that in a Dine/Navajo
school district:
One issue that has changed, and is very exciting, is that the district seems
to be coming full circle – moving from a racially based decision – no
Navajo language or culture – to using Navajo language and culture in the
school curriculum to enhance student success.
(in Kedia and Van Willigen 2005: 290)
Anthropologists’ commitment to upholding cultural diversity has therefore had a

major impact on policies relating to curriculum development, most particularly in
encouraging efforts to develop culturally relevant approaches.
There is a related need to help students understand the influence of culture
on what happens in schools, and there is obvious application of this knowledge
in navigating debates about how to ensure that educational processes
provide students with the analytic skills (particularly crucial in the era of
fake news) to make sound judgements about information and how it applies
to their own lives.
Policy and policing

Education is key in helping young people to resist efforts to draw them into
forms of extremism, and Anthropology has a vital role to play in providing
nuanced insights into how such processes emerge. As Scott Atran pointed out
in a blunt statement to a Senate sub-committee in the USA:
If you want to be successful in the long run where it counts – in stopping

the next and future generations of disaffected youth from finding their
life’s meaning in the thrill and adventure of joining their friends in taking
on the world’s mightiest power; if this committee is to be truly relevant in
solving the radicalization problem that it poses, then you have to under-
stand these pathways that take young people to and from political and
group violence. Then, knowing these pathways, you can do what needs to
be done … Quality field-based scientific research can help save lives.
(2010: 1)
There is often a relationship between social disadvantage, poor education, and

levels of criminal involvement. Gaining an in-depth understanding of the
experiences that people have and the social contexts they inhabit provides
important insights into the causes of crime. For example, Mark Totten and
Katherine Kelly used ‘life course analysis’ with young offenders who have been
convicted of murder or manslaughter:
We wanted to uncover the participant’s world from his or her own

viewpoint … The research explored the intentions, meanings and motives
young people ascribe to their actions within the context of having them
recount their life experiences … Involvement in the criminal justice system
and in high-risk activities was the result of a lifetime of events that, in turn,
contributed to the risk of committing homicide.
(2005: 77)
The importance of understanding the context is also highlighted by Scott

Kenney’s work with the families of homicide victims. He found that it was
vital to consider broader issues, such as how people interacted with the criminal
justice system, and their communities’ cultural responses to crime: ‘My research
project dealt with murder … While my initial goal was to examine gender dif-
ferences in active coping among homicide survivors, it quickly became apparent
that this was a group troubled by far more than the crime itself’ (2005: 116).
James Vigil worked with Chicano schoolchildren in America, and observed that
their poor educational performance was persistently explained in terms of racial or
cultural deficits, creating barriers for the children that included: ‘Culturally biased
performance tests, political opposition to bilingual education, and teachers and
administrators unfamiliar with (or even hostile towards) Chicano culture’ (2002:
263). He focused on how these conditions, and the marginalisation that comes
with them, contributed to the growth of a street-gang sub-culture and crime in
urban areas. By doing in-depth ethnography within the ‘sub-culture’ of gang
membership, his research pointed to ways in which problems could be addressed at
an educational level, through special programmes and through more effective
home-school linkages.
The ability to look below the surface and discern the underlying factors is
also vital in addressing the problem of domestic violence and abuse. Like other
aspects of health and wellbeing, this requires considerable sensitivity to cultural
beliefs and values, and a careful balance between respect for personal and
domestic privacy and the protection of people’s basic rights. A good example is
provided by Anannya Bhattacharjee’s research in New York (2006), which was
concerned with domestic violence in immigrant communities from South Asia.
Bhattacharjee observed that American immigration processes (in which legal
immigration status is often spouse-based) make women highly dependent upon
their husbands, and thus very vulnerable to isolation and abuse. Her work also
revealed that immigrant domestic workers, whose visas are often sponsored by
their employers, are similarly isolated and disadvantaged:
The employer may deny her sponsorship or hold the power to do so over
her. She is extremely vulnerable to all forms of abuse, often works around
the clock, and may be denied basic subsistence. She, too, can face com-
plete isolation as her employer can control her movements much like a
husband controls those of a battered wife.
(Bhattacharjee 2006: 343)
Bhattacharjee’s research shows how respect for the ‘privacy’ of domestic space
makes it difficult to tackle these problems, and she has used anthropological
analyses to rethink ideas about private and public spaces, and to suggest some
new directions in tackling domestic violence and abuse.
Home work
Social problems are also manifested in major increases in the numbers of
homeless people. Kim Hopper has conducted research and advocacy in this
area since the 1970s, articulating the realities of the additional social issues that
intersect with homelessness, which include poverty, disability, mental health
issues, substance abuse and racial discrimination (2003). Anthropologists often
work alongside or with the agencies trying to address this problem. For exam-
ple, Aline Sarradon-Eck and her colleagues undertook a lengthy period of
ethnographic fieldwork in France following the work of a mental health out-
reach team, a ‘hospital without walls’ that combined psychiatric and physical
care with social support for homeless people (2014: 252). Jennie Simpson
explored the informal partnerships that emerged between police and homeless
outreach workers in Washington, DC, and noted the need to address the
‘structural changes in social and economic policies and economic dislocations
that have resulted in reduced funding for public mental health services, loss of
affordable housing, and a reliance on criminal justice systems to manage
inequality’ (2015: 125).
Access to housing can also be determined by cultural perceptions. Kathryn
Forbes’s research showed how stereotypical images of Mexican farmworkers
created a barrier for them in California’s housing policy:
Despite the desperate need for affordable housing in the rural areas of
Fresno County, local policy makers either have failed to aid or have
actively discouraged attempts to increase the stock of affordable housing …
Public officials make policy decisions based on both a land use ideology
that rationalizes governmental failure to serve Mexicans working in the
agriculture industry and portraits of farmworkers and farmworker families
that reflect stereotypes.
(2007: 196)
Anthropologists’ skills are also useful for agencies involved in urban plan-
ning. There is a wide range of ethnography examining how different
societies think about, design and use domestic and public spaces. As people
become more mobile and cities expand, social tensions can rise. At the high
end of the housing market, Brett Williams’s work (2006) is concerned with
the clashes of culture and class that can arise when urban neighbourhoods
become ‘gentrified’, bringing together people from different backgrounds,
with very different ideas about who ‘belongs’ in the community, what
constitutes neighbourly behaviour, and how public space should be used.
Even in small, everyday conflicts, an understanding of cultural differences is
helpful in resolving disputes, which (as the number of ‘neighbours at war’
on reality TV illustrates) can escalate rapidly.
At the other end of the market, affordable housing is also a key issue for
many people. Erve Chambers was involved in a project evaluating a pro-
gramme designed by the United States Department of Housing and Urban
Development. The programme was meant to give financial assistance to
low-income families and allow them more choice in rental housing, as well
as inducing builders (with inspections) to provide better quality facilities.
Located in Boston, his research evaluated the effects of government policy
on families, looking at how it affected their choices and their costs of living
(in Ervin 2005: 106).
Evaluating the efficacy of government and NGO efforts to address social
issues is something to which anthropological skills lend themselves. Aisha Rios
describes how, via an online network of PhD and graduate students, she
explored non-academic career pathways.
The value of evaluation

Aisha Rios
I eventually found a home in evaluation, which has allowed me to apply my

anthropological training creatively to help clients understand the diversity of
human experiences and perspectives as they relate to their organisations
and programmes. This was not a career path I envisioned for myself. It
wasn’t until after graduate school that I gained a richer understanding of
how diverse the field was, and the ways evaluation and anthropology inter-
sected, creating meaningful opportunities for me to do the kind of work that
mattered to me.
During my doctoral training and briefly after graduation, I worked on a

consulting basis applying ethnographic methods in market research, during
a time when the demand for ethnographic and qualitative methods in market
research and user experience was growing. The firm was unique compared
to other firms because we utilised a creative array of observational and
journaling approaches to data collection, which aligned with my training in
ethnographic methods. I worked on virtual teams of multiple consultant
ethnographers collecting and analysing data across the country.
My first salaried, full-time position after graduate school was as an eva-
luation specialist position in a government, public health contracting firm. I
landed this position because I could show I possessed the specific skills and
experiences the firm needed. I enjoyed government evaluation contracting,
which involved direct engagement with HIV and STD prevention advocates
within community-based organisations, and state and local health depart-
ments across the United States. I loved interviewing and building rapport
with front-line workers in health and social services. Interviews exploring
people’s lived experiences and what really matters to them, making sense of
the data collected, and then using these insights to answer evaluation
questions is an exhilarating experience.
I was lucky enough to support the design and execution of national eva-
luations that inform public health strategy and direction, but after working in
government contracting for nearly four years, the work felt too top-down for
my personal inclinations, and I wanted to spend more time working directly
with communities. I now work for a small evaluation consulting firm where
we use participatory approaches. What I love about our work, is our ability to
directly inform the implementation of programs and services in way that is
tangible and feels more immediate than academic research.
If you love the idea of getting in the weeds using data to answer questions in
a way that is actionable for organisations, evaluation may be an ideal applied
anthropological pathway for you, and there is great diversity of careers within
evaluation. I advise interviewing as many people as you can who focus on dif-
ferent topic areas, use different methods, and work in different settings. Dialo-
gue with others about their own career pathways and experiences proved very
helpful as I navigated my own career pathway. Good luck!
Cultural insights are equally important in one of the most fundamental of respon-
sibilities that societies have: caring for children and ensuring their healthy develop-
ment. Anthropologists are involved in many kinds of research relating to children,
including the social and cultural issues surrounding adoption. Cross-cultural adop-
tions raise many complex issues and are highly controversial, as illustrated by the
public debates surrounding adoptions by ‘celebrities’. There are many other areas of
anthropological research into childhood and childcare, as Heather Montgomery
observes:
The many ethnographies that make up this subfield suggest a great diver-
sity in definitions of, and ideas about, childhood and the different roles and
expectations placed on children according to their cultural background.
They also highlight the heterogeneous nature of childhood and the impact
that gender, age, birth order, and ethnicity have on children’s experiences
and daily lives.
(2019: 1; see also Montgomery 2008)
Prescription and persuasion

The involvement of anthropologists in medical issues and in healthcare is
examined in Chapter 7, but the general health and welfare of the population is
a central responsibility for any government, and a number of anthropologists
are employed in assisting policy development and implementation in this area.
As the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic revealed with brutal clarity, healthcare can be
intensely political, most particularly when access to resources is uneven. No
doubt ethnographic studies of this period will emerge, but inequality of access
is not new: Cori Hayden’s work, for example, has long been concerned with
the ethical and political issues around access to medical resources. Her research
focused on the debates in Mexico when the government, frustrated by the
soaring costs of imported pharmaceutical products, enabled the legal creation
and use of generic ‘similar’ drugs with the argument that this was in the public
interest (2007).
In practical terms, there are two key ways of enacting government poli-
cies: legislatively, through laws and regulations; and through persuasion –
communicating and promoting ideas and information, encouraging some
kinds of behaviour and discouraging others.
One of the major prerequisites for public health is a healthy environment. As
well as researching environmental issues directly (Chapter 4), anthropologists
work with the regulatory agencies responsible for protecting public health, for
example, by ensuring that food providers practice good hygiene; that industries
do not release pollution into the communities where they are located; and that
individuals do not impinge on the health of their neighbours.
Government agencies regulate waste disposal and enforce building codes, while
simultaneously trying to persuade populations to adopt ‘green’ behaviours such as
recycling rubbish and using energy efficiently. Research focused on why people
do (or don’t do) certain things, enables government agencies to make judgements
about where behaviour might be amenable to persuasion or incentives, and where
regulatory or technical solutions may be the only way to achieve change.
Along with delivering direct healthcare, government agencies hope to guide
social practices in relation to health. How people think about and take care of
their own health is a direct reflection of their cultural beliefs and values, and an
understanding of these is helpful not just in designing appropriate health services,
but in actively encouraging populations to maintain or adopt healthy practices.
There are many potential areas of research: nutrition, exercise, work–life balance,
sexual behaviour, alcohol and drug use, mental health and so on. Governments’
abilities to regulate health-related behaviour are limited: they can define a legal
drinking age and pub opening hours, or criminalise drugs, but the governance of
health is more generally directed towards education and persuasion.
For this, governments have turned to ‘social marketing’ – methods for
encouraging positive social behaviours – which arose in part from anthro-
pological and psychological approaches to understanding human behaviour.
Social marketing campaigns are often health-related, focusing, for example, on
family planning and contraceptive use, or safe sex practices. In the UK, ideas
initiated by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) have translated into the
formation of the Behavioural Sciences Team (Afif 2017), better known as the
‘nudge unit’, a team of former civil servants whose goal is to enable governments
to persuade the population to make healthy choices, to drink less (Haydock
2014), and address diet and lifestyle issues (Hansen et al. 2016).
Governance and democracy

The Nudge Unit illustrates an important trend over the last several decades, in
which governments, responding to ideologically driven determination to
reduce the involvement of the State in people’s lives, have cut many social
services, leaving these to be picked up by private providers, or by charities
dependent upon philanthropic donations. There has been a blurring of
responsibilities between National Health Services and private companies, via
Public and Private Partnerships (PPPs).
An even stronger push towards privatisation has pertained in the provision
other services, particularly in the UK, the USA and Australia, with the full or
partial privatisation of public transport companies, organisations delivering
communications technologies, and suppliers of energy and water. Many ser-
vices are now partially or wholly delivered by large private corporations that
are, more often than not transnational in their form.
This is an important trend in terms of how it affects governance. As I have noted
elsewhere, dependence upon transnational corporations, and their ownership of
vital resources, such as water, raises major questions about the capacity of States to
govern:
If the ownership of water and other essential material resources, and the
infrastructural wherewithal to manage these, are not held democratically
by the State, who owns the State? How does it exercise power? Does it
even exist? Walker (2014: 390) reminds us that ‘the state, as coordinator of
collective action and as an intermediary between the public and private
spheres, has significantly changed in nature’. He describes this as a shift
from government to governance … Along with anxieties about potential social
and ecological impacts, the handing over of the control of water to trans-
national corporations, and more generally to ‘the market’, has contributed
to rising doubts about democracy itself – about the extent to which
governments (of any hue) are representative ‘of’ the people or able to
protect human or nonhuman interests.
(Strang 2016: 310; see also Wedel 2009)
Rogers Orock raises similar concerns about the potential to hold transnational
corporations accountable for their activities, observing ‘the disturbing co-existence
of socially irresponsible actions amidst a forceful tendency to circulate a feel-good
CSR discourse of responsibility’:
In the wake of transformations being ushered by globalization, figures

suggest that there is a rise in the power of transnational corporations
(TNCs), raising important questions about the exercise of such power and/
or how to hold them accountable for it. Concomitantly, corporate social
responsibility (CSR) discourse has emerged as a new discursive formation;
a new meta-narrative that is propagated by TNCs. It seeks to portray the
actions of TNCs as oriented by such values as ‘responsibility,’ ‘sustain-
ability,’ ‘development’ … not only do TNCs behave irresponsibly in
contexts outside the Global North where they can easily get away with
doing so, but … the CSR discourse of responsibility helps to occlude these
often damaging actions by TNCs.
(2013: 1)
Kim Fortun raises similar concerns about the connections between international
corporations and political elites. Tracing the ties between policy-makers and
vested interests has led her to question the motives behind programmes
apparently operating within a framework of public health and corporate
environmentalism (2010).
As nation states struggle to regulate the activities of transnational service
providers and protect their citizens’ rights, it falls to intergovernmental orga-
nisations such as the UN to try to govern via international regulation. Today,
via digital media, the UN is able to bring a huge range of societal perspectives
into its conversations and, as I found in working with them on water issues,
they are increasingly aware of the advantages of having people in the room
who are accustomed to thinking comparatively about diverse cultural beliefs
and practices.
All of the different aspects of human (and non-human) life fall under one
area of governance or another. All areas of human services, whether dealing
with social welfare, health, education, law and order, or the environment, can
make use of anthropology: indeed it would be reasonable to say that there is no
area of human service in which anthropological training would NOT be useful.
Thus there are multiple potential careers for anthropologists, in all areas, and at
all levels of governance, where they can make a contribution to the design of
new policies; to their implementation, and to evaluations of their efficacy in
providing for human needs.
6 Anthropology, Business and
Industry
Money matters
Economic activity, and processes of production and consumption, have always
been a key area of study for anthropologists (Hann and Hart 2011). Modern
societies rely heavily on a diverse range of businesses and industries, and the
anthropology of economic life has changed accordingly (McCabe and Briody
2018). Today researchers are involved in examining a host of different aspects of
‘how people make a living’: thus they work with resource industries; a range of
service and manufacturing industries; designers and architects; communications
and media industries; and market research and advertising companies. Rita Denny
and Patricia Sunderland describe a new sub-field of business anthropology, which,
they suggest, can offer businesses insights into customers, products, processes, and
their own organisational cultures (2016).
Anthropologists bring to business and industry a unique intellectual perspective
from which to consider events analytically. As John Seely Brown, the head of
Xerox’s research and development section observed: anthropology and anthro-
pologists ‘let you view behaviour through a new set of glasses’ (in S. Roberts 2006:
73). Having discovered the benefits of doing so, Xerox now regularly employs
anthropologists. And they are not alone: the number of anthropologists working as
employees for businesses, or assisting them as consultants, is growing rapidly.
Robert Morais and Elizabeth Briody have written about the wide range of busi-
ness careers available to students of anthropology:
Anthropologists are on staff and consult with Google, Intel, American Eagle,
Nissan, ADP, and IBM; anthropologists have conducted consumer, design,
and organizational research for Procter & Gamble, Campbell’s Soup, WD-40,
General Motors, Revlon, IDEO, and MARS, among others; many anthro-
pologists work in advertising agencies, design companies, and marketing
research firms … An anthropological perspective provides a focus, methodo-
logical toolkit, guiding principles, and theory for gathering and analyzing
‘what’s going on’ within firms and the marketplaces in which companies
compete.
(2018: n.p.)
118 Anthropology, Business and Industry
The path less taken

Elisabeth Powell
When I decided to major in anthropology, I did so convinced that I was

sacrificing post-college career opportunities in order to pursue my academic
passion. Before going to Princeton, I had never even heard of anthropology.
While I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do upon graduation, I figured I
would land somewhere in business.
Economics seemed like the most logical, relevant path for success in the
business world. After all, knowing about supply and demand and how to run
regressions seemed much more practical than studying things like totems
and liminality in far-off villages. Anthropology is interesting but irrelevant.
Everyone knows that.
However, I ended up falling in love with the anthropological approach to
understanding humans across cultures and geographies. Anthropology is
unique and liberating in that it is not tied to a particular subject matter:
rather, it is a theoretical, methodological and analytical approach that can be
applied to understand human behavior in any context.
Despite my fears, I decided to follow my heart and major in anthropology.
It was a phenomenal fit for me, from an academic perspective. However, I
recall my first career fair in vivid detail. I envied my economics major peers
and wondered if I’d automatically be put in a different bucket because of my
major. I’d even come up with a script to spin anthropology: ‘I constructed a
curriculum based on economics, sociology and anthropology to be able to
analyze and understand consumer behavior’. Better, I thought, than just
saying ‘anthropology.’
My perspective radically changed, however, when I discovered a consulting
firm specifically looking for anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists. I
couldn’t believe it! Could anthropology actually be valuable in business? Are
there even anthropologists in business? And, in what way does anthropology
help them in what they do?
For my thesis I researched the intersection of anthropology and business. I
interviewed twenty anthropologists in a variety of roles within businesses –
from consulting to in-house, consumer research and innovation to marketing
and brand strategy. Through my research, I discovered the invaluable con-
tribution of an anthropological lens in the business world.
This discovery shouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, is not business at
its core a conglomeration of humans serving other humans? If so, then who
better to be in the conversation than an anthropologist?
Contrary to my initial perspective, anthropology has been central to my
value in business. In fact, I use my anthropological education in business
each and every day. For five years, I have been applying my anthropological
lens to drive human-centered, global innovation and brand strategy at
Anthropology, Business and Industry 119
premier innovation, design and consumer research consultancies for clients

such as Hilton, Uber, Diageo, Apple, Estee Lauder, Saks Fifth Avenue,
Motorola, Nestle, Pepsi, Tyson Foods and Google.
Take, for example, my experience helping Uber get out of their brand
crisis. I used my research and analysis skills to lead consumer research in
10 global markets, and I leveraged my understanding of culture to navigate
Uber’s complex sociopolitical environment — which was critical to driving
change. So often valuable innovations fail to make it to market, not for lack
of a gap in the market or a market in the gap, but because of a company’s
internal politics and culture.
Anthropological research methodologies have helped me to unlock pow-
erful cultural, category, commercial and consumer insights. I ask different
questions and question basic assumptions. It is frequently in those taken for
granted ‘truths’ where meaningful disruption can happen.
In our globally connected economy, it is critical for companies to under-
stand consumers across cultures and geographies. Anthropologists know
that product, brand and communication strategies must be tailored based
on specific sociocultural contexts, and they are uniquely able to understand
those contexts.
Now, I no longer hide my educational background. While I admittedly still
need to translate my experience and value, particularly in the tech world, I
am proud of my identity as an anthropologist and confident about the value
it can bring to business.
It is my hope that others will not forgo anthropology in favor of more ‘prac-
tical’ and ‘relevant’ majors. Instead, they will pursue degrees in anthropology,
knowing that they will be learning a unique approach to making sense of the
world useful in any context. As it did for me, an education in anthropology will
enable them to pursue what they love and fight what they hate – wherever that
takes them. We desperately need anthropologists in business if we want a
more humane, respectful and empathetic world.
For a discipline that for much of its history has inclined towards research with
small and often vulnerable communities, studying industries and corporations, and
working with them as employees and consultants, raises some interesting challenges.
As Bill Beeman puts it: ‘Anthropology is the one social science that is most adept at
dealing with economic and cultural change’, but ‘large corporations are much richer
and more powerful than the anthropologists who wish to study them’ (2019: 25–6).
Engaging with large business organisations also requires anthropologists to
consider their wider networks. With globalisation, contemporary businesses and
industries are intimately connected to the vast and volatile international markets
that now dominate the use and distribution of resources (Fisher and Downey
2006). Many anthropologists are interested in how engaging with processes at a
planetary scale affects different communities, demanding new economic
practices and disseminating a range of cultural ideas and values between pre-
viously distinct societies and nation states. This is not a new phenomenon:
colonisation invariably entailed unequal economic and cultural exchanges
between hegemonic societies and the people whose homelands they appro-
priated. In a post-colonial world, where these exchanges have merged into
global markets, the outcomes of such exchanges have also been mixed: at a
local level, the flow of investment, profit and consumer goods across borders
can support local producers. But many inequalities persist, and in many cases
globalisation exploits peripheral peoples while concentrating wealth in the
hands of a small international elite (Bestor 2003). As we saw in Chapter 4, this
is particularly evident in resource-based industries, such as mining and oil
exploration and Anne Willow, whose research focuses on the extractive
industries of British Columbia, Canada, reveals the gap between tourist
expectations of ‘unspoiled landscapes and rugged splendour’ and the reality
that much of this landscape has been destroyed by intensive mining opera-
tions, with far reaching consequences for First Nations communities and more
recent settlers (2017: 21).
Work that reveals the deeper effects of a globalising economy underlines the
fact that anthropology is not just about applying qualitative methods: it requires
theory and analysis that enables practitioners to make social action more trans-
parent. It also implies a level of intellectual independence, derived from scientific
training, and upheld by the ethical codes that guide the discipline. In reflecting
on globalisation, anthropologists have tended to unsettle comfortable assumptions
popularly made about the benefits of economic growth, and the utility of the
market as a force for positive change. As in other applications of anthropology,
researchers therefore find themselves both ‘standing back’ to reflect critically on
issues and, with a more internal role, trying to conduct research in a way that
properly incorporates ethical principles.
Kathi Kitner who has worked as a senior researcher at Intel, writes about
some of the challenges faced by anthropologists who extend their work beyond
academia, and the potential difficulties of reconciling ethical practices with the
demands of the private sector.
I believe ethics – whether in academic, medical, legal, political, or even

engineering fields – is not a clear topic with neatly drawn rules. It does not
matter whether you are at the top of your career, a student, or working in a
for-profit business or a nonprofit nongovernmental organisation (NGO): the
dilemmas swirling around the concept of ‘doing the right thing’ are still dif-
ficult, usually contentious, and often intellectually and emotionally painful.
(2016: 310)
Anthropologists in business
Business and industrial companies are, ultimately, social communities. They
share a common purpose, often have common training (for example through
business schools, or vocational institutions), and develop their own internal
cultures. They are therefore very amenable to the kind of ‘organisational
research’ discussed earlier in this volume: research that specialises in gaining an
understanding of institutional cultures, how these work internally and how
they interact with larger social and economic networks (Corsin-Jiménez 2017).
In multicultural societies and globalising economies, businesses and industries
increasingly contain people from diverse cultural groups. They have to manage
this diversity. Many also have international networks of relationships that bring
further – and more diverse – cultural perspectives into the equation. The ‘cul-
tural translation’ skills of anthropology, and its ability to provide in-depth
understandings of social behaviour are therefore an important part of the work
that anthropologists do in this sphere.
Good management depends on a clear understanding of what is going on in
a company and anthropology can help to reveal this. A classic example is pro-
vided by Julian Orr’s work with Xerox. He did ethnographic research with a
group of the technicians who service Xerox’s machines, and he found that their
training never kept pace with the new technology that was being introduced.
To cope with this, they developed an important sub-cultural set of ‘war stories’
about past machine failures and heroic saves, which served to communicate
ideas about what might work to get them out of a jam. Orr showed Xerox
how this was functioning:
Once Xerox found out how technicians solved difficult machine problems,
it decided to facilitate and develop this grassroots approach by equipping
technicians with mobile radio phones that would enable them to call each
other in the field or to contact a roving ‘tiger team’ comprised of highly
skilled troubleshooters … Orr’s discovery of the economic power of
storytelling within an occupational community provides an unforgettable
illustration of the power of culture in an organization.
(Kedia and Van Willigen 2005: 247)
Engagement with technology is central to many kinds of businesses, and Gene-

vieve Bell describes her former role as a Vice President for User Experience at
Intel, in which she assisted engineers by ‘helping to interpret the complexities of
cultural and social practices and the ways in which those practices might shape
people’s relationships with technology, as well as people’s patterns of resistance,
rejection, adoption, and creative re-use’ (2011: 3–4).
There are many ‘sub-cultures’ in the workplace: groups of people united by
common knowledge and expertise, professional training, a particular language
and of course by the particular kind of work that they do. ‘Members of occu-
pational or professional groups often have characteristics that parallel those
found in small-scale societies, such as a unique system of meanings, practices,
and a language that distinguishes them from other work groups’ (Baba 2005:
230). Marietta Baba points to a range of anthropological studies of such groups:
Herbert Applebaum’s study of construction crews; Elizabeth Lawrence’s
ethnography on rodeo participants; and other anthropological research on
accountants, locomotive engineers, longshoremen, medical school students,
nightclub strippers, police, professional dance musicians, social workers, timber
loggers, underground miners, waiters (2005: 230).
For anthropologists, everyday business meetings are ‘key sites through which
social, political, temporal, spatial, and material circumstances are constituted and
transformed’ (Brown et al. 2017: 11). Jen Sandler and Renita Thedvall see meet-
ings as the source of particular types of knowledge, identities and relationships:
Whether in policy organizations or local communities, labor halls or religious

institutions, schools or corporations, among activists or social workers or
anarchists, ethnographers often find that meetings are where the action is. In
meetings power is produced and enacted, dynamics or identity and hierarchy
are negotiated, and organization is produced, determined, and challenged.
(2017: 1)
As in other spheres, anthropologists who work with businesses often have a role
in conflict resolution, and with the Unions who represent employees’ interests.
Paul Durrenberger’s wide-ranging ethnographic work on collective action and
unions explores how, with the global spread of neo-liberal ideologies, their
dynamics changed over time:
Labor unions originated to amplify the negligible power of individuals

who have nothing but their labor to sell. By joining together, such indi-
viduals can bring the force of their collective action to represent their
interests versus those of the owners of capital … From the point of view of
workers, unions are like insurance companies to protect them individually.
For their part, unions became professionalized bureaucracies whose leaders
are hard to distinguish from their counterparts in the corporate world.
(2009: 16)
Anthropologist working for a union

Penny Howard
I work as the national research officer for the union that represents seafarers
and dockworkers in Australia. It is one of Australia’s most famous unions, with
a long and successful history of organising and supporting workers’ struggles
for better conditions and safety. It has also been involved in broader political
struggles, such as for Aboriginal rights and against South African apartheid.
One hundred years ago, dockworkers and seafarers were some of the most
exploited workers in Australia. Now they are among the best-paid blue-collar
workers, and the maritime industry is one of the few industries in Australia
where almost all workers are union members and are covered by union
agreements. The union is strongly coordinated with other unions around the
world, especially other unions of dockworkers and seafarers.
My job is to help support union campaigns by providing union members
and elected officials with background research about the industry or com-
panies we are dealing with. We also run campaigns to improve the laws
that affect our members, and we have to analyse how laws and actions by
government agencies affect them.
Anthropology trains you to talk to people, listen, and gain a good under-
standing of what is really going on. My background in anthropology has
trained me never to take for granted the claims made by legislation or gov-
ernment about how they work. I have learned this lesson again and again as
a union researcher. It is critically important to talk to workers in the industry
to understand how the industry is changing, and why employers are acting
in particular ways.
I talk to workers, read company financial reports, newspaper articles and
government reports, and synthesise that material to offer a clear analysis of
a particular situation or challenge. Usually this comes down to under-
standing the class dynamics and politics in a situation. Why is an employer
or a government pushing a particular agenda? And how will it affect workers
and other people? This can then be used in developing campaign strategies,
campaign materials, media releases, and submissions to government.
For example, in 2014 we received a proposal from the Australian Maritime
Safety Authority about implementing new safety guidelines for seafarers
working in the offshore oil and gas industry. We discovered that these
‘safety’ guidelines were being pushed by international oil companies, and
had been developed in the UK without consultation with workers or unions.
A small committee of experienced seafarers read through the document and
found that what was proposed would actually undermine a lot of the stan-
dards and processes that Health and Safety Representatives and union
delegates had implemented in Australia. I compiled seafarers’ insights into a
submission opposing the new guidelines, and we asked other unions to
support us. In the end, the international guidelines were not introduced.
Instead, a process began to update the older Australian safety guidelines, in
consultation with our union and our seafarer members. A new and improved
Shipboard Safety Code of Practice came into force in early 2019 – although
unfortunately some employers are still opposing it.
More recently, I have helped to write the union’s policy on climate change.
We identified that the skills of members working in offshore oil and gas could
be transferred to building offshore wind turbines. Yet the conservative govern-
ment in Australia was blocking the development of Australia’s first offshore
wind project. We started a campaign to unblock it and organised contingents
of MUA members to participate in demonstrations such as the School Strike for
Climate in early 2019, with placards saying, ‘Stop blocking offshore wind –
Climate jobs now’. Union members are keen to use the skills developed
working in the offshore oil and gas industry to build new low emissions indus-
tries, and the union is committed to ensuring that these are good union jobs. A
transition to a low-carbon future cannot be allowed to increase inequality, or it
will undermine the popular and political support we need to make the neces-
sary changes. Our union is leading the discussion of how the Australian union
movement can tackle these challenges.
A big part of union campaigning is around workplace safety. As a result of a
number of dockworkers being killed at work, the union started a campaign to
bring in a Stevedoring Safety Code of Practice. I made a calculation for the
campaign comparing the fatality rates of dockworkers with other industries:
dockworkers were 14 times more likely to die than the average Australian
worker. This information gave workers confidence that what they were experi-
encing should and could be improved. The Code was finalised in 2014 and
rolled out across union workplaces. Since then, there have been no further
deaths of dockworkers in Australia.
Today, unfortunately, most parts of the union movement face significant
challenges. The union movement needs people to be able to think broadly
and creatively about how to understand the world, and how to change it. I
encourage every student to study anthropology.
In the last two decades, the protection of rights within the workplace has
focused more upon race and gender equality, and unsurprisingly this is a lively
area of research in the social sciences. In a recent report by the UK Equality
and Human Rights Commission, its author, Malcolm Brynin notes that:
The gender pay gap is a longstanding phenomenon and its causes are
complex. Social pressures and norms influence gender roles and often
shape the types of occupations and career paths which men and women
follow, and therefore their level of pay. Women are also more likely
than men to work part-time and to take time out from their careers for
family reasons.
(2017: 7)
Even within the university sector many inequalities remain. Tami Navarro
writes about the effects of neo-liberalism in academic settings, and con-
temporary relationships between capitalism, academic advancement, race and
gender:
Given that academics of color are disproportionately represented in the

ranks of unsecured, contingent labor, and that the numbers of women
working in academia off the tenure track have ballooned in recent years,
women of color bear multiple burdens of academia’s transformations.
(2017: 507)
Trudy Turner and her colleagues note some positive changes over the last
twenty years in relation to gender equality and academic status within STEM
(science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines, but the number
of women in senior academic positions remains relatively low. Issues affecting
women in STEM disciplines include expectations that they will undertake
‘voluntary’ or unacknowledged roles; feelings of social isolation; lack of influence;
and experiences of sexual harassment (2018).
Anthropologists have also being paying attention to the #MeToo movement,
and Melissa Demian considers how it has encouraged reflection about what we
mean by ‘informed consent’ and the extent to which it encompasses professional
and personal exploitation (2018: n.p.).
Multinational and multicultural communication

As noted above, as well as having internal cultures and sometimes sub-cultures,
businesses and industries also have a set of external relationships with other
groups at national and international levels. These require careful management,
and depend, more than anything else, on effective communication. At the most
basic level, this means being able to speak the language. English is the mother
tongue of only 5% of the world’s population, yet Gary Ferraro and Elizabeth
Briody note that many Westerners enter the international business arena with-
out studying languages at all. Companies based in the US rarely train their staff
in a second language, although English is rapidly becoming ‘just one of the
major languages of world trade’ (2017: 98). Furthermore, whilst English may
be a country’s or company’s official language, other languages or dialects may
well be used on a day-to-day basis.
International business organizations require effective communication at a

number of levels. The firm must communicate with its work-force, custo-
mers, suppliers, and host-government officials. Effective communication
among people from the same culture is often difficult. But when attempting
to communicate with people who do not speak English – and who have
different ideas, attitudes, assumptions, perceptions, and ways of doing
things – one’s chances for miscommunication increase enormously … If
international business people are to succeed, there is no substitute for an
intimate acquaintance with both the language and the culture of those with
whom one is conducting business.
(2017: 95–6)
When I was preparing to go and do my doctoral fieldwork with an Australian

Aboriginal community (back in the Jurassic era), I read a short text by John Von
Sturmer called ‘Talking with Aborigines’ (1981), which outlined some of the
cultural conventions that I would meet in the field: the need not to march up to
people or their camps directly, but to approach them elliptically; the need to use
kin terms rather than personal names; the convention that when people die their
names are not spoken for some time. There are also more subtle issues about
how different adoptive kin require different relationships: some involve ‘joking’
relationships, some are more formal; some require strict avoidance; some involve
social and economic responsibilities. The use of silence in Aboriginal communities
is complex and cannot be taken to mean agreement at all. Such preparation, and
lengthy fieldwork, is essential to good cross-cultural communication.
In order to work effectively, all anthropologists have to do this kind of thing
and, as a result, they are well equipped to assist others in coming at least part of
the way down the same road. Although ‘doing business’ may not need the
depth of cultural understanding and engagement that ethnographic fieldwork
requires, it is certainly helpful for people to have some idea about the cultural
norms that prevail in the communities with whom they are involved. There is
thus a very useful role for anthropologists in assisting them in this regard. As
Richard Reeves-Ellington says: ‘Business people who are more culturally aware
are also more successful’ (2003: 247). He designed and implemented a cross-
cultural training programme for an American company that was doing business
in Japan. About 50 employees participated in this and the long-term results
were impressive: managers who took the cultural training program were able to
cut project completion time nearly in half and increase the financial returns
from the projects threefold (2003).
In essence, Reeves-Ellington taught business people to use the basic methods
developed by anthropologists to describe and analyse cultural settings. He
enabled them to think about the way that things are classified in a particular
cultural space; to discern local principles for behaviour; and to consider the
values that drive these. He encouraged them to think about the ‘cultural logic’
that they were encountering – how do people engage with their environment?
What do they consider to be truth and reality? What is their view of human
nature? How do they approach relationships and define the purpose of activities?
How do they use their time?
He also gave his trainees a lot of information about the values and behavioural
rituals implicit in business interactions in Japan, for example, explaining the
formal rituals and ideas that surround business card exchange; the seating
arrangements of tables for meetings; the kinds of conference practices that are
expected, and the importance of reciprocity in ritual exchanges.
Anthropology and digital media

Today it is possible to learn a great deal about other cultural norms simply by
going online, and all businesses, industries (and anthropologists) engage with
communications media. The role of newspapers, radio and television has been
largely superseded by the internet. As we saw in the Introduction, anthro-
pological interest in communications has followed the technology, with an
increasing focus on digital media. This has obvious relevance in relation to how
businesses advertise their products and present their public persona via digital
technologies.
In 2002 Simon Roberts founded Ideas Bazaar, the UK’s first ethnographic
research company, which specialised in examining people’s responses to media.
They focused initially on print and broadcast media, conducting audience
research, and helping to develop programme ideas for the BBC (S. Roberts
2006). Later they ran studies examining the rise of networked technologies in
Britain, with projects on mobile phones, broadband internet, and technology in
the workplace (S. Roberts 2016).
In business anthropology, this kind of work naturally segues towards advertising,
which is intimately concerned with cultural beliefs and values, hoping to present
products in a way that accords with what is considered culturally desirable.
Advertising content and how people respond to it is therefore fertile ground for
anthropological analysis, as is the ‘advertising culture’ of the companies who pro-
duce this particular product. There are many ways to approach the analysis of
advertising: for example, in working with advertising agencies, Brian Moeran
described it as ‘storytelling’:
An advertising agency may be seen as a dedicated storytelling organization …

Participant observation in the agency has impressed upon me that making ads
is mainly a matter of talk. There is talk about accounts, rival agencies, and all
the people and institutions (corporate clients, publishing houses, television
networks, production shops, celebrities, and so on) … There is talk about ad
campaigns themselves – about how one marketing analysis successfully
repositioned a luxury item as an everyday commodity, or another creative
idea enabled a product to ‘speak’ to an elusive consumer group, and so on.
(2007: 160)
In the digital age, advertising has taken many new forms, for example with the
emergence of ‘influencers’: individuals hoping to monetise their personal lives
(Abidin 2015; Hopkins 2019) and become ‘microcelebrities’ in their own right
(Senft 2013), or packaging their children to be ‘kidfluencers’ (Volpe 2019). Using
platforms such as Instagram, influencers have created a new visual economy,
complete with a particular social media aesthetics (Leaver et al. 2019). Individual
use of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram often requires a complex
mix in which, to meet personal and professional aims, an online persona must be
tailored to engage with a number of audiences and expectations.
The advent of social media has given rise to a new type of self-pro-
motion, where individuals are increasingly expected to create a ‘digital
identity’ with which to represent various aspects of their persona to the
online world. From physicians to financial planners, educators to gig
economy participants, workers of all stripes are encouraged to promote
themselves with gusto … Crafting a professional profile, curating one’s
content, and engaging with colleagues and clients are framed as com-
pulsory activities.
(Scolere et al. 2018)
Marketing anthropology
As well as examining processes of advertising, anthropologists sometimes
participate in consumer research. Practitioners have a range of views about
involvement in this field. For Adam Drazin, anthropological skills have
considerable utility in a wider ‘research industry’, and vice versa:
In between my first anthropology degree and my Ph.D., I worked for

several years in this industry of market research and opinion polling.
During this experience, I was struck by how the idea of ‘research’ is at the
heart of what it means to be a ‘market researcher’, and is often more
important than the ‘market’ part of the appellation. Many market
researchers I know often identify with academic anthropologists in the
sense that both are interested in research first. There are dissenters of
course, but it is well known that the best market researchers are people
who are simply dying to get onto the next piece of research and find
something out.
(2006: 91–2)
He found that experience as a market researcher helped him considerably when

he trained as an anthropologist, and went to conduct ethnographic research in
Romania: ‘Hundreds of market research projects, chains of focus groups, and
training involving tramping the streets of Essex towns knocking on doors with
a clipboard had equipped me fairly well for participant observation and data
collection’ (Drazin 2006: 91–2).
However, Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny raise some doubts about the
use of ‘ethnography’ in consumer research:
The misuse and misappropriation of ethnography in consumer research has

been part and parcel of its use. A myriad of research techniques within
consumer research (from the few-minute in-store intercept interview, to
the one-hour ‘depth interview’, to the online focus group) have become
redefined as ‘ethnographic’ with barely any change in the underlying
assumptions regarding method or analysis.
(2016: 13–14)
Market research also creates some ethical dilemmas for anthropologists. It is

widely accepted, for instance, that in focus groups and surveys people very rarely
report their behaviour honestly, and that more accurate information may be
gleaned by simply observing what they actually do. However, the professional
ethical codes that guide anthropology strictly forbid practitioners to do research
covertly, and precludes acting as ‘shopping spies’: market researchers who cov-
ertly spy on customers in shopping malls, fast-food halls and so on, sometimes
striking up conversations with them while pretending to be fellow shoppers and
sometimes videoing their behaviour.
Despite some concerns about the appropriation and misuse of ethnographic
methods, it remains that consumer behaviour is an important area of activity,
defining, in effect, how societies use and manage their resources. In general,
market research is conducted openly, and represents a straightforward attempt
to find out what people think, or what they want, and to produce and adver-
tise goods accordingly. Anthropology can bring greater depth to such data
collection, as well as the ability to consider diverse cultural responses. In
increasingly multicultural societies, businesses seek to target different audiences
effectively, and can thus make good use of anthropological insights into diverse
cultural beliefs and values.
Writing about the increasing role of anthropologists in business, Gillian Tett
observes that there is new emphasis on qualitative research that contrasts with the
once-dominant privileging of scientific measurement and theories of rational
behaviour. Globalisation has made companies more aware than ever of differences
in cultural and social perspectives at all stages of business relationships:
It is often tempting to think that the 21st-century world is so closely

integrated and digitised that the issue of culture is becoming irrele-
vant … but behind the scenes, a growing number of companies appear
to be quietly realising that the reverse is true: as the world becomes
more globalised, there is actually more – not less – need to understand
cultural difference.
(2017: n.p.)
It follows that companies have become increasingly keen to hire anthropologists,

and today, Drake Baer says:
Microsoft is reportedly the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the

world and it now common for companies such as Google, Amazon and Intel
to employ in-house anthropologists. Their holistic approach and under-
standing of human societies and behaviours enable them to offer valuable
insights into areas such as marketing, communications, organisational culture
and consumer research.
(2014: n.p.)
There are related opportunities for anthropologists to work as consultants.

Graeme Wood describes the work of ReD Associates:
The corporate anthropology that ReD and a few others are pioneering is
the most intense form of market research yet devised … In many cases, the
consultants in question have trained at the graduate level in anthropology
but have forsaken academia – and some of its ethical strictures – for work
that frees them to do field research more or less full-time, with huge
budgets and agendas driven by corporate masters.
(2013: n.p.)
Marketing also benefits from anthropological understandings of how people
engage with their environments and with images and objects. The ‘anthropology
of the senses’ can also inform the commercial sphere. For instance, Virginia
Postrel’s (2003) research observes how people respond in aesthetic and sensory
terms to objects and images, and Dan Hill has charted the rise of experiential
products and services and the ways that they are marketed. His work focuses on
consumers’ sensory-emotive reactions to particular ‘brands’, and he suggests that
considering people’s sensory reactions to them provides a much more truthful
response than can be gleaned from either surveys or focus groups (2003).
Anthropologists are also interested in changing patterns of consumption: for
example, the implications of a substantial shift towards online shopping (Miller et
al. 2016) which has been further advanced by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Making use of the in-depth ‘insider’ perspective provided by anthropology is
therefore useful at each stage in business and industry – in designing commu-
nications about products, in observing people’s responses to these efforts, and in
assessing how products are actually used.
Informing marketing and management

Cynthia Sear
How are decisions made in organisations and institutions? How do executives

decide on a new strategic direction or a change in management? More and
more, research is the answer to these questions, and not just for the world of
business. Politicians and government departments are also huge buyers of
research, which they use for informing election campaigns and government
initiatives. Indeed, in the past decade, the global industry of commercial
research, often called ‘market research’, has grown considerably in value, from
approximately 32 billion USD in 2008 to 46 billion USD in 2017.
In my career, as an anthropologist and research consultant, I’ve focused on
how it can be used in decisions about marketing and management. How do
people think, feel and behave in relation to corporations, products and services,
and what does that mean for what the business should do next? Businesses
have generally used surveys, focus groups and interviews to answer such
questions, but in recent years there is a growing trend to use ethnography.
Unlike most anthropologists, I wasn’t introduced to the discipline through
school or university, but while working at a research consultancy called
Forethought. Our client, Canon Australia, wanted to understand the cultural
and social changes that were happening in the world of imaging. With people
taking and sharing more images than ever before, thanks to smart phones
and new forms of social media, we were asked to weigh in on what this
meant for Canon. At Forethought we had access to a team of psychologists
to help with planning and interpreting research, but no one was specifically
qualified on cultural and social matters. Recognising this gap, and with the
support of Forethought, I studied anthropology at the University of Oxford.
Unsure what to expect, I was relieved to find that I both loved the discipline
and that it had immediate application for a career in research consulting.
While I learnt innumerable things in the course and have not since viewed
the world in the same way, I also learnt that ethnography is an optimal
method of research. For me this came down to two points. First, people are
generally pretty terrible at describing their own behaviour. As Bronislaw
Malinowski (one of the founding fathers of the ethnographic method) repor-
ted from his time in the Trobriand Islands, what people say they do is often
not what they actually do. Because the ethnographic method includes
observing behaviour, anthropologists can arrive at insights that would be
missed simply by asking or conducting surveys.
The second benefit of ethnographic research is derived from the reality
that people cannot often tell you what they want, as what they want may not
exist yet. As Henry Ford reportedly said: ‘Had I asked people what they
wanted, they would have said “faster horses”’. Anthropologists have been
responsible for a number of new products, such as on-the-go yoghurt. This
healthy but portable product was invented after anthropologist Sarah
Squires observed the difficulty mothers experienced each morning in getting
their children out of bed and ready for school. With on-the-go yoghurt (also
known as ‘go-gurt’), mothers had a portable breakfast option for themselves
and their children, which could be grabbed from the fridge and enjoyed in
the car on the school route.
Observations made in the field can provide inspiration for new ways of
doing business. A particular study comes to mind. Hired by an agricultural
company who wanted to understand their target market better, a team of
researchers, including myself, set out to conduct ethnographic research
with Australian farmers. Spending days on tractors and eating pre-packed
sandwiches out in the blazing sun was fascinating in a multitude of ways
and has changed the way I think about the harsh but beautiful Australian
landscape. From a consulting perspective, one of the key take outs of the
project was the manner in which the farmers interacted with the research-
ers. The vast majority of them thoroughly enjoyed having someone take an
interest in their work. Farming, we learnt, is often a lonely business. As
Australian farms have gotten bigger over time, rural communities have
shrunk, and workers are often transient and unreliable. The implication was
that the agricultural company needed to have a personal presence in the
communities, and that their frontline staff should conduct visits to farms to
build that relationship.
Since my master’s degree I have started a PhD in anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Melbourne and I’ve begun to work as an anthropologist-for-hire for a
number of research and advertising agencies in Australia and the UK. I’m con-
stantly meeting new people and ‘hanging out’ with them to understand their
ways of looking at the world. In the past year I’ve hung out with property
investors in their homes and at house inspections, chatted about Brexit with
small community clubs in the UK, and I’ve spent countless hours observing
behaviours in shopping centres and supermarkets. My work is ever varied,
always interesting and I feel truly lucky to be paid to do something I enjoy.
Design anthropology
Inevitably, one of the things that anthropologists do in relation to new tech-
nologies is to consider how different groups of people engage with them.
Diverse responses to mobile phones demonstrate the value of taking cultural
differences into account. Petronella Vaarzon-Morel’s research with the
Warlpiri in Central Australia explored the impact that access to mobile phone
and internet technologies has had on the social relations of Aboriginal people:
a society traditionally led by its elders. She suggests that ‘the way people
engage with mobile phone technology illuminates and intensifies fault-lines
arising from contradictions between older established Warlpiri orders and
changing relations with the State and modernity’ (2014: 240).
Borut Telban and Daniela Vávrová conducted research into the social and
cultural effects of mobile technology, in Ambonwari village, Papua New Guinea.
‘New technologies continue to be objects of fascination and prestige’, they
observe (2014: 326), and as well as using mobile phones as torches, radios, and
cameras, people saw them as a way to ring the dead as well as the living:
Recent aspirations among the Ambonwari to use mobile and wireless phones
and build a Digicel tower … are framed by cosmologically well-established
desires to deepen the contacts with the usually invisible (external) world, their
deceased relatives in particular, and bring all the advantages available to the
latter into their living presence.
(2014: 224)
In Vanuatu, Daniela Kraemer, now Lead Ethnographer with a social research

and service design firm in Toronto, looked at how the relationship between
mobile phone technology and social change resulted in ‘a radically altered
kinship and gender landscape’ (2017: 39).
John Sherry began his career conducting research with Navajo activists, which
involved looking at how they were using new technologies to interact with out-
siders. He went on to work for Intel Corporation, which makes microprocessers.
Most people think that sounds a little strange – an anthropologist working for a
microprocessor manufacturer – but it’s not as strange as you might think … I
feel very lucky to have a job like this. Sometimes anthropologists wind up in
jobs they never even dreamed of. That wasn’t true in my case – I’d been
hoping that a technology company would be interested in getting a detailed
understanding of how people actually use their products … At Intel, in the
Intel Architecture Labs, I work with a small group of social scientists … Our
collective goal is to identify new uses for computing power by understanding
the needs of real people. We call it ‘design ethnography’. It’s a great job, and
the good news is, there seems to be a growing market for applied cultural
anthropologists in this field.
(in Gwynne 2003: 214–15)
Following John Sherry’s contribution, the company set up a ‘Peoples and

Practices Group’: a special team of ten anthropologists and psychologists, to
research how people use computers and come up with better products:
In the past, marketing teams might have been given the task of making a
product cross-culturally palatable. Increasingly, however, culture is taken
into account earlier, at the design stage: for example, the embedded com-
pass in mobile phones to allow Muslims to locate the direction of Mecca.
(Anthropology Today 2004: 29)
Other companies followed suit: IBM set up a human sciences group, employ-
ing linguists and anthropologists to provide insights into their clients’ businesses,
and it became increasingly common for anthropologists to assist in product
design, with this work sometimes leading to the creation of new products. For
example, Adam Drazin has worked with Hewlett-Packard Labs, the Technical
University of Eindhoven and Intel Ireland, exploring the relationship between
material culture, digital artefacts and design anthropology.
Many of the digital technologies which we take for granted have been designed
with the critical input of anthropological work and thinking: the personal
computer, e-mail, windows-type interfaces and smartphones are all examples of
things which since the 1970s anthropologists have helped to shape.
(2012: 245)
He points out that commercial clients are not seeking anthropology per se –
they are seeking answers to questions and solutions to problems: ‘In most cases,
a commercial client does not buy anthropology. They buy research in order to
address problems’ (Drazin 2006: 94). In design anthropology, the key problem
is how to make things for people. Thus Heath Combs has considered the work
of ethnographers paid by furniture companies to study people at home, and
consider how they actually use their furniture and their living spaces, more
generally. ‘In the furniture industry, their findings will drive anything from
retail store and product design to brand management … Ethnography focuses
on closely studying a relatively small number of people to get a detailed
understanding of consumer needs’ (2006: 1).
In her work with Intel, Genevieve Bell worked with social scientists, designers,
engineers and computer scientists, to find out what people – end users – need and
want from new products and technologies. She became involved in a global
research project, using the contents of peoples’ cars to gain insights into potentially
useful developments for mobile and computer technologies:
We were there to empty out Frank’s car and catalog its contents, tracing
the flows of technology in and out of the vehicle and trying, if we could,
to get a sense of how this car is inhabited … For all the cars on the world’s
roads, surprisingly little social science research is dedicated to making sense
of them, or to exploring the tensions between cars as designed and cars as
inhabited and embodied.
(2011: 3)
Ton Otto and Rachel Smith describe how design anthropology has matured
into a ‘separate (sub)discipline’, with design and anthropology brought together
through the shared use of ethnography, and increasingly a common interest in
finding practical solutions to social problems (2013). As this suggests, design
anthropology is a proactive use of ethnographic theory and method:
The emerging field of design anthropology signals a shift from anthro-

pological description towards a more active, multidisciplinary and collabora-
tive approach to design that encompasses both technical and social aspects of
problem solving … Practitioners of design anthropology follow dynamic
situations and social relations and are concerned with how people perceive,
create, and transform their environments through their everyday activities.
(Gunn et al. 2013: xiii)
Bill Briggs points out that this more holistic view can extend to whole
workplace environments:
There is a growing recognition of the close relationship between work

environment and work culture, and the importance of user experience. A
US furniture company, Steelcase, recently had its team of in-house
researchers carry out a long-term anthropological experiment into office
design. The researchers used cameras to observe the daily routines of their
own senior staff to develop innovative working environments that
improve creativity and wellbeing as well as productivity.
(2017: n.p.)
As in policy areas, anthropology also offers skills suitable in evaluating the out-
comes of design, or doing what is called UX (user experience) testing or analysis
(Ladner 2014). Juliette St Andrew now works as a researcher for UX Connections:
If you’re studying anthropology or social sciences and it comes as a very

pleasant surprise that you could someday work for Google or IBM, you’re
not alone; I myself was quite shocked to find that not only could my
degree be applied to a career I had never even heard of, but also that my
academic and methodological training as an anthropologist aligned quite
beautifully with the professional requirements and methods cultivated by
UX designers and researchers.
So if you’re an anthropology major or recent graduate, and like myself,
are unsure about your future prospects, consider researching User Experi-
ence and other applied/digital anthropological careers … And if your business
is looking to better understand your users and what they need or want in a
product or service consider anthropologists – We’ve spent much of our aca-
demic career preparing for a job in UX without even knowing it.
(2015: n.p.)
Jonathan Ventura combines anthropology with industrial design and focuses on the
social role of industrial designers, who must ‘harness industrial, technological,
municipal and political forces for the good of the community’ (2013: 38). He seeks
to bridge the gap between design students and anthropologists, who he considers to
be essential members of a design team. Design anthropologists, he suggests, should
be ‘ambassadors’ to their profession, and the academic discipline of anthropology
should provide an ethically driven ‘moral compass’ for design teams (2013: 39).
Inevitably, anthropologists also cast a reflexive eye on the process of design
itself. Working with the Kelabit people in the northern highlands of Borneo,
Ian Ewart compared the design and construction of two bridges. The first, a
suspension bridge, relied on careful planning and specialist parts; the second
bamboo bridge was much simpler, built using traditional methods and materi-
als. Arguing that the existence of designs and plans for the first bridge did not
necessarily confer greater knowledge or experience, compared with the existing
knowledge required to build the unplanned bridge, he suggests that the rela-
tionship between preconception and production needs to be further explored:
As an engineer-turned-anthropologist, it seems to me to be something of a

folly to attempt to isolate the process of design from that of production …
Engineering is a specific form of activity, which I suggest can be defined as
the communal production of large-scale or complex objects. This generic
definition removes engineering from its popular perception as being
somehow uniquely Western and industrialized.
(2013: 85)
Ultimately, anthropology itself can also be seen as a product: a service that trained
researchers provide. It is certainly framed in this way in business and industry,
reflecting the economic focus that pertains in this sphere. There is thus a wide range
of ways that anthropologists can approach commercial activities: as analysts of globa-
lisation, and as critics of its social and environmental effects; as cultural translators; and
as experts who can offer commercially useful insights into human behaviour. The
opportunities for anthropologists to find employment in business and industry are
constantly expanding, as are the potential areas in which they can act as consultants.
7 Anthropology and Health
Health in a cultural context

While health is foundational in every society, there are major cultural variations
in how people think and act in relation to it, and all aspects of health – from
the cradle to the grave – have an important social dimension. Each decade
brings important emergent issues, such as currently rising concerns about caring
for an ageing population; dementia; changes in approaches to mental health
issues; homelessness; lifestyle and obesity; air pollution; health insurance; PTSD;
and major disease outbreaks (Ebola, SARS and, of course, Covid-19).
Health is, in consequence, one of the major areas in which anthropologists
find employment, and medical anthropology has become a major sub-field
‘actively engaged in helping to address pressing health problems around the globe
through research, intervention, and policy-related initiatives’ (Singer and Baer
2011: n.p.). True to form, rather than examining health issues in isolation,
medical anthropologists place them within their specific biosocial and cultural
contexts, to consider the effects of things like structurally embedded violence, the
stresses introduced by climate change; and the impact of poverty or social mar-
ginalisation (Brown and Closser 2016). Such work may require collaboration
with healthcare professionals, government agencies, NGOs, pharmaceutical
companies and other stakeholders in the healthcare industry (Alami 2016).
As in other areas, anthropology turns a critical gaze onto the institutional
structures that define access to healthcare, and the kind of healthcare that is
delivered. Thus Lisa Henry’s research explores the idea of collaborative health-
care in the United States from a perspective of critical medical anthropology,
which ‘has extensively critiqued biomedicine’s hegemonic structure that places
doctors in control of knowledge and power and casts patients as depersonalized
recipients of treatment (not care)’ (2015: 42). A more collaborative approach, she
argues, informs the type of care available to patients as well as how it is accessed
and delivered. Tanja Ahlin and her colleagues investigated health insurance in
India – whose national budgetary allocation for healthcare is one of the smallest
in the world – and considered why ethnographic methods are so crucial to this
type of research. ‘We argue that ethnographic case studies could add much to
existing health service and policy research, and provide a better understanding of
Anthropology and Health 137
Figure 7.1 Cecilia Vindrola-Padros carrying out fieldwork. Photograph courtesy of

Lucas Cannistraci.
the life cycle and impact of insurance programs on both insurance holders and
healthcare providers’ (2016: 102). Sandra Lane and her team focused on medi-
cally vulnerable people and the issues of low income and health insurance in the
USA (2017). And Piyush Pushkar worked alongside NHS activists in the UK, to
record how they brought together very different groups to fight against funding
cuts and the privatisation of healthcare (2019). Some anthropologists work within
the NHS.
Anthropology in the UK healthcare system

Cecilia Vindrola-Padros
An anthropologist? Will you be able to find a job? Can you really make a
living out of this? These are questions I heard frequently when I started
studying anthropology in 2001. Fast-forward to 2018, and you can see me
requesting help with an injury in the busy emergency department of a
London hospital. The junior doctor looking at my notes asks me about my
occupation. ‘I’m a medical anthropologist’, I reply. ‘Anthropologist?’, he
asks, ‘we are getting one of those’. ‘That’s me!’ I reply, ‘We are evaluating
your hospital group model’. ‘I know, and I am really interested in reading the
findings’, he said.
The fact that he knew the work we were doing and the role of the
anthropologist leading the qualitative work meant that the countless hours I
had spent building relationships and observing meetings, events and the
delivery of care across various areas of the hospital had allowed me to
become ‘embedded’ in the three hospitals where we were working at the
time. Staff, from senior members to clinicians on the frontline, such as junior
doctors in the emergency department, knew what we were doing and, more
importantly, were interested in learning about what we would find.
I have spent the past seven years helping to develop embedded research
teams in London hospitals with colleagues from disciplines such as operational
research, nursing, epidemiology and health economics. Embedded research-
ers are those who work with dual affiliation: to an academic institution, like a
university, and a healthcare organisation, such as a hospital. They are con-
sidered members of the healthcare organisation and co-produce research with
staff to address the problems and particular circumstances hospitals face
today. They immerse themselves in the daily working mechanisms of hospitals
to build relationships with staff and understand the organisational culture.
Anthropologists are the core of these teams, trained to carry out immersion
fieldwork. These skills are important when trying to collaborate with hospital
staff, as becoming a part of their daily work lives facilitates the teams’ produc-
tion of research. Drawing from anthropology’s critique of the power relations
that emerge during the research process and its emphasis on reflexivity,
embedded researchers recognise that all forms of knowledge are relevant and
important. By bringing together different forms of expertise (clinical, manage-
rial, academic), we can create better research that will lead to better evidence
to improve care. We also assume that by involving a wider group of staff in the
research (not just the research team), then staff will feel a greater sense of
ownership over the findings and will be more likely to use them to make chan-
ges in practice.
Immersive methods also allow anthropologists to understand the complex-
ities of institutional contexts. We uncover how problems faced by the hospital,
and interventions designed to solve them, are shaped by local needs, pres-
sures and interests. We unpick these particularities without losing sight of the
wider social, political and economic processes that shape the health and care
networks in which hospitals operate. In other words, we use ethnography’s
multi-scalar view to understand the individual experiences of clinicians and
managers in relation to their hospital and the national healthcare system.
Over the past few years, we have contributed to research on ward
accreditation systems, interventions for high-risk surgical patients, the
development of a new pain management team, crowding in an emergency
department, the use of nursing staff for one-to-one care, and evaluations of
a hospital group model and a hospital at home programme. Each study was
different, but in most cases the value of anthropological perspectives was
recognised. This appears to be a common trend in the NHS as more
anthropologists are asked to either join the service or develop health ser-
vices research in collaboration with universities.
This trend is visible in other organisations in the healthcare sector. One

example is the role I play at the Health Services Research Centre (HSRC).
The HSRC created a Social Scientist post in 2017 with the aim of incor-
porating perspectives and methodologies from the social sciences in the
design and implementation of research on perioperative care. In this role,
I lead a multi-sited ethnography focused on exploring the use of data for
perioperative quality improvement in six hospitals across the UK. An
important component of my job is the training and supervision of anaes-
thetists who are interested in using qualitative approaches in their
research. This work requires multiple translations of anthropological
thought and practice, but, in general, leads to the recognition of the value
of anthropology and the use of our discipline beyond the walls of
academia.
The questions I encountered during early stages of my career have dis-
sipated, as I am often overwhelmed with requests to join new teams and
projects. Additional work needs to be done to disseminate the value of
anthropology and strengthen the contributions we make to the study and
improvement of healthcare.
Anthropologists also work on health issues outside professional healthcare

institutions. Sisse Groen, for example, describes how she came to work on
occupational health and safety.
Figure 7.2 Sailing from the Port of Antwerp, Belgium, 2011. Photograph: Sisse Groen.
Anthropologists prevent work injuries

Sisse Groen
When I was a girl growing up in Denmark, I would occasionally skip
school to visit cultural history museums. I would walk through the exhi-
bitions and imagine what it would be like to be a little girl in, say, the
plague-infected Europe in the twelfth century. As I grew older, I found
that I also wanted to change the social world and make it fairer. That is
how I found myself engaged in safety research in the maritime industries,
tasked with investigating issues that would help prevent seafarers’ work
injuries.
International shipping is one of the world’s most globalised industries. A
shipping crew will consist of seafarers of different nationalities, living and
working together, but on very different terms. On a Danish ship for example,
the Captain might be Danish and employed directly by the shipping com-
pany on a permanent contract. He will be at sea for up to three months and
then home three months with full pay. His ratings, though, are likely to be
from a Southeast Asian country, such as the Philippines. They will be
employed by an agency only for the duration of the contract, usually nine
months. When they go home, they are without income and job until their
next contract. They are ‘able bodied’ seafarers who perform manual tasks
such as chipping rust or handling ropes, in which work injuries are more
likely to occur.
Yet in injury statistics, Southeast Asian seafarers had fewer reported work
injuries than their European colleagues. How could this be when they had the
riskiest tasks and the workplace was the same? Were they better at looking
after themselves? Or did they hide their injuries instead of reporting them?
An anthropologist colleague and I set out to find some answers, con-
ducting fieldwork onboard Danish ships. For one of my voyages I sailed
on an oil tanker, with a crew of twenty-four Indian men. But I soon dis-
covered that the seafarers were anything but monocultural. They came
from very different parts of India, some were Hindu, others Muslim or
Christian, and their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds were
equally diverse. The Bosun for example, was a Hindu former fisherman
from Kerala. It took me days of following him around to gain his con-
fidence enough for him to talk to me in his limited English. The Chief
Engineer was a well-educated Sikh from New Delhi. His English was
superb and he was keen to discuss my research methods with me. He
questioned the kind of knowledge I would gain from chipping rust with
the ratings, and suggested that a questionnaire survey and some struc-
tured interviews would give better validity to our study. This had me
pondering my methods all day. In the evening I accompanied the Bosun
on his watch duty and during the conversation asked his opinion about
Figure 7.3 Sailing from the Port of Antwerp, Belgium, 2011. Photograph: Sisse
Groen.
the best way to find answers to my questions. He said that he liked the
way I did the same work as everyone on board and talked to everyone,
because that way I would see things from everyone’s perspective and
learn more. I don’t think an anthropologist can get a better compliment
than that. And I learned that our practices are formed by our position
more than our nationality.
We also did fieldwork in Manila to learn more about the conditions of
Filipino seafarers. We visited the maritime academies, the employment
agencies, the medical clinics and not least Rizal Park where seafarers come
to look for work and the agencies advertise positions. And we learned how
hard it is to get a contract on board an international ship and how hard it is
to get reliable information about injury claims.
Our report found that Southeast Asian seafarers have fewer reported
work accidents than their European colleagues for interrelated reasons:
some of these are that Southeast Asian seafarers are younger and fitter,
because of the hard selection process. Another reason is that under-
reporting is common, because job safety overrides work safety. We also
concluded that in order to learn about work injuries that occur at sea it is
necessary to create a reporting system gives sufficient security to all
members of the crew.
For anthropologists not so keen to go to sea, working in land-based com-

munities can be equally rewarding. Ryan Logan, for example, tells us about his
research with community health workers.
Community health workers

Ryan Logan
Anthropology’s potential for fostering positive social impacts, has always
been a source of motivation for me, and I was recently involved in a colla-
borative endeavor that explored the lived experiences of community health
workers (CHWs).
Figure 7.4 Indiana Government Centre, where the author observed public
meetings related to CHW policy development. Photograph: Ryan
Logan.
CHWs are nonclinical in their approach, focusing on health prevention,

chronic disease management, cultural brokering, medical interpretation, and
advocacy. CHWs are usually members of the – often marginalised – com-
munities they serve, and are poised to make significant positive health
impacts on them. They work to empower their clients and help them over-
come social determinants of health (issues related to lack of transportation,
lack of fresh foods, safety, and general lack of access to health care).
For example, Maricela serves as a bilingual CHW who accompanies
monolingual Spanish speakers to doctor’s appointments and instructs them
on nutrition, disease prevention, chronic disease management, and English
language instruction. Many CHWs possess similar skills but are often
underutilised by the wider medical workforce.
To produce findings that could make positive, impacts for these workers, I
employed a collaborative approach to elevate the CHWs’ participation, to
privilege their voice, and to provide insights into their experiences. I involved
them in the research design, process, implementation, and initial data ana-
lysis. Several key outcomes emerged from this collaboration. While I have
written a policy brief and peer-reviewed articles, the CHWs produced visual
data (using the method of photovoice) to utilise in their outreach, marketing,
and policy development.
This is what drew me to anthropology: the ability to wield this discipline
not only to advance theoretical debates in academia but also to create
positive impacts for research participants. While these are just some of the
issues that this discipline can illuminate, an anthropological approach can
address any issue in society.
Food for thought

Anthropological interests in health span both space and time: they rely on the
cross-cultural comparisons that are central to the discipline, but they also draw on
the long view provided by evolutionary anthropology, and of course primatol-
ogy, which considers not only the development of homo sapiens from earlier
species, but also keeps anthropology in touch with our closest non-human rela-
tives. This permits useful cross-species comparisons, for example, in considering
gendered behaviours. Thus, to give a health-related example, primatology studies
undertaken by Frans de Waal and his colleagues, to observe power dynamics and
conflict among chimpanzees, were extended in a recent two-year study explor-
ing interactions between surgical teams in US teaching hospitals (Jones et al.
2018). Results from data collected over 200 operations suggest that gender pro-
vides a significant source of conflict in operating theatres: ‘the highest percentage
of cooperation was observed when the attending surgeon was female in a male-
prevalent room or male in a female-prevalent room. This effect seemed more
pronounced for male surgeons’ (Jones et al 2018: 7579).
Primatology also supports evolutionary thinking about human genetic devel-
opment; brain development; and analyses of the effects of long-term changes and
adaptations on human health and wellbeing. A lively area of research focuses on
diet and in this regard an evolutionary view of human development intersects with
the anthropology of food, which has long been a major area of research. Ethno-
graphers have focused on the social and cultural diversities with which human
societies approach this central aspect of life, looking at the history of food; how
food is produced, cooked and shared; what foods mean in different societies; how
food is used in rituals; how food contributes to the construction of social identity
and status; the use of food for medicinal purposes; and of course the various health
issues relating to food security, nutrition and diet.
Current concerns about diet, lifestyle and obesity have highlighted the mis-
match between the diet and lifestyle of prehistoric humans (adapted genetically
over many thousands of years), and modern diets and lifestyles, which are the
result of quite recent and rapid changes. Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner suggest
that understanding ancestral lifestyles makes it easy to see why modern humans
suffer from chronic illnesses:
The major chronic illnesses which afflict human beings living in affluent
industrialized Western nations are promoted by a mismatch between our
genetic constitution and a variety of lifestyle factors … diet, exercise patterns,
and exposure to abusive substances … The genetic constitution of humanity,
which controls our physiology, biochemistry and metabolism, has not been
altered in any fundamental way since Homo sapiens sapiens first became wide-
spread. In contrast, cultural evolution during the relatively brief period since
the appearance of agriculture has been breathtakingly rapid, so that genes
selected over the preceding geologic eras must now function in a foreign and,
in many ways, hostile Atomic Age.
(2003: 52)
As well as engaging with ideas about a ‘paleolithic diet’, Eaton points out that
this actually varied quite a bit from place to place (Eaton et al. 2009). This has
been affirmed by other evolutionary anthropologists (Chang and Nowell 2016;
Le 2016; Stanton 2013), some of whom have approached this forensically,
examining the teeth of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, and
noting the flexibility of the latter in making use of various food sources (Fiorenza
et al. 2020). Evolutionary and biological anthropology also considers other key
developmental shifts, such as changes in natural resource use; population growth;
changing family structures, and new forms of cooperative (or competitive)
behaviour (Gibson and Lawson 2014). It also encompasses the sub-field of
bioarcheology, which is the practice of examining human remains.
Human remains are a sensitive issue in any context. For example, Duncan
Sayer reflects on a number of archaeological projects that he has undertaken in
Britain and the ethical dilemmas faced by archaeologists when involved in the
exhumation of human remains. The dead cannot be considered in the same
way as other cultural objects, he says: ‘They are past people, individuals who
experienced the world in a way we can attempt to perceive’ and thus con-
nected to present people through ‘a sense of empathy that we do not have for
inanimate objects and material culture’ (2010: 1).
Archaeologists regularly confront these emotive issues when building work is
undertaken. In 2013, for example, two mass graves were discovered during devel-
opments at Durham University’s Palace Green site, situated within a UNESCO
World Heritage Site. After two years of analysing the skeletal remains, archae-
ologists concluded that the graves held Scottish soldiers captured by the English
after the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650. A permanent headstone now marks
their resting place, with the inscription: ‘Here lie the remains of those Scottish sol-
diers from the Battle of Dunbar who died in Durham 1650–51, were excavated
from Palace Green Library in 2013, and were reburied here on 18 May 2018’. My
colleague, Chris Gerrard, described the experience of working on such a large,
interdisciplinary project:
I have been involved in many different archaeological projects over the

years, some of which may have more academic impact than this one, but I
have never experienced such engagement and impact … the Dunbar story
has modern relevance and resonance, perhaps particularly around themes
such as identity, immigration, warfare, memory and loss.
(in Gillett 2018)
As well as unearthing challenging historical events, bioarchaeology also seeks to

unravel humankind’s longer history.
Studying remains
Charlotte Roberts
Bioarchaeology is a part of biological anthropology. It involves the study of

human remains from archaeological sites – think Richard III or Ötzi the
‘iceman’! It is not the same as forensic anthropology (also a part of biologi-
cal anthropology but focused on human remains from a crime scene), but
the analytical methods used are the same in many respects.
I entered this field by chance. I left school to train to be a nurse, then
decided to go to university to prove to myself I could pass a degree course
(and then go back to nursing). I chose to do archaeology for no particular
reason other than it might be interesting. As an undergraduate I had never
thought about studying archaeological human remains, but by my third year
my thesis was just that. By chance I got to do a master’s course in recon-
structing past environments and ended up in bioarchaeology. My nursing
background has been a perfect ‘fit’ with archaeology and my research on
the origin, evolution and history of disease.
Studying people’s remains (skeletons and preserved bodies) is the closest

we can get to our ancestors. It enables us to give a voice to those who came
before us, helps us to understand how our population has changed over thou-
sands of years, what they experienced in their lives, including their health pro-
blems, and can even give us clues as to how humans might evolve in the
future. It is a popular area of study and usually attracts people with archae-
ological, anthropological and historical interests. Bioarchaeologists pay close
attention to ethics. The remains studied are those of once living people and are
respected as such. Dedicated laboratories are used, and study is performed
with dignity and considered a privilege and not a right.
Human remains are excavated by archaeologists as a legal requirement when
land is being developed, for example to put up new buildings. Of course, when
people died in the past their communities, like ours, buried them in the manner
consistent with their belief systems. Therefore we might be studying remains
from Neolithic chambered tombs, Roman cemeteries, plague pits from the four-
teenth century, or even burial grounds associated with medieval hospital or
monasteries. Excavation of human remains involves careful attention to detail
and knowing the detailed anatomy of the skeleton, of both the young and the
old. If you do not know which bones you would expect to see in a complete
skeleton then you do not know what to expect when excavation starts. Different
burial conditions (e.g. soil acidity) also affect how well a body or a skeleton is
preserved and how it is ultimately studied. However, bioarchaeology involves
more than knowledge of anatomy. Advances in techniques over the last twenty-
five years means that having a background not only in biology, but also chem-
istry, can help in accessing and using chemical methods of analysis to study diet
and the migration of people in the past. Ancient DNA analysis also enables us to
study the genetic makeup of past humans, including the diseases they had.
When we study skeletons we first lay them out in correct anatomical
position, placing the right bones in the right places. Poorly preserved and
fragmented bones can make that challenging! The next step is estimating
what biological sex the person was and how old they were when they died.
By knowing what male and female bones look like and how they age over a
person’s lifetime, we can estimate these parameters in archaeological ske-
letons. We then want to know a bit about how the teeth and bones of indi-
vidual skeletons of individuals varied within the population studied, and
when compared to other populations of the same and different time periods
and places. This is called ‘normal variation’ and is perhaps most visible in
varying heights over time (stature), as this is affected by people’s diets and
diseases in their ‘growing years’. We can certainly guarantee that every-
body’s skeleton is different, both past and present.
One of the most interesting parts of bioarchaeology is exploring the
evidence of disease (palaeopathology). Using knowledge about how dis-
ease affects the skeleton gained from medicine and dentistry, we look for
abnormal bone formation and destruction and chart its distribution in the
Figure 7.5 Examining skeletal remains (1). Photograph: Hugo Glendinning.
bones and teeth. Knowing the sex and age of a skeleton is important in
reaching a diagnosis because specific diseases affect people at different
ages, or impact on one gender more than another. It is possible, for
example, to see evidence for air pollution in the sinuses and on the ribs,
indicating that people were as likely to experience poor air quality as we
are today.
Figure 7.6 Examining skeletal remains (2). Photograph: Hugo Glendinning.
Although many diseases, such as the plague or malaria, do not affect the
skeleton, ancient DNA analysis can now detect these in bones and teeth.
This has been an exciting development. We can even look at the strains of
bacteria that caused diseases like tuberculosis to see if those infecting
strains have changed over time according to people’s living conditions. This
is enabled through comparing the archaeological data with that from modern
genetic work on the tuberculosis bacteria.
Medical anthropology and evolutionary medicine are also relevant.
Remember, we are studying disease in human remains worldwide from a
geographical and evolutionary perspective. Another advance is that we can
analyse bones and teeth to determine people’s diets and whether they
migrated during their lives. By comparing chemical signatures in soils and
water from both their place of birth and their place of burial, we can see how
mobile people they were.
We try to place whatever information we extract from the skeletons or
bodies in context, and use we know about those people’s lives from the
archaeological record (e.g. how they were buried, and aspects of their diet,
work, and living conditions). For example, we know that people with leprosy
were not invariably stigmatised: skeletons with leprosy of their bones have
been found in cemeteries used by the rest of the community within which
they lived. Thus bioarchaeology can overturn well-established assumptions
about the past by re-evaluating all the evidence at our disposal.
Why am I a bioarchaeologist? Because I like piecing together the past
using information I have collected from studying skeletons, and I like to get
close to our ancestors. While studying pottery is also an important part of

archaeology – pottery is found at nearly every archaeological site – for me
it does not have that same close connection to the past as studying the
people who made it! I think that palaeopathology is perhaps the most
important part of bioarchaeology. Good health and wellbeing is something
we strive for today, and charting health in the past through studying human
remains enables us to look at how good or poor health has fluctuated
through vast stretches of time (and why). It is clear that human health got
worse when we started to be farmers and lived in permanent housing
(rather than being on the move like hunter-gatherers). Skeletons of hunter-
gatherers tend to not show diseases associated with settled communities
and higher population density, exposure to animals, and a less varied diet.
This sort of work helps us to understand who we are today how we got
here, and how we might change our lifestyles, diet and activity levels to
achieve better health!
Recent debates about lifestyles have often highlighted concerns about meat
eating, not merely in terms of human evolutionary adaptation, and the health
effects of high levels of protein combined with a sedentary lifestyle, but also in
relation to the ecological impacts of sustaining intensive cattle farming on a large
scale (Mann 2007). Since Levi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked was published in
1964, anthropology has developed a rich strand of research considering what
different foods mean to people in diverse cultural and temporal contexts (Klein
and Watson 2016; Tierney and Ohnuki-Tierney 2012).
Being most often hunted by men, meat often appears as a high-status food, and
this was certainly the case in northern Australia, where I worked with indigenous
communities and cattle farmers (Strang 1997). In both groups, whether comprised
of wallaby hunted as bush food, or beef from the weekly ‘killer’ slaughtered by the
stock team, meat featured as the most prestigious food, with quite formal rules about
sharing and distribution. In the Aboriginal community these were largely based on
age, status and kin relationships and their attendant obligations. For the pastoralists,
as well as practical limitations in accessing other foods in a remote area, there was a
strong tie between ideas about meat and masculinity. The cattle station on which I
worked for a year featured, at the entrance to the homestead, a sign saying ‘Don’t be
a mung bean. Eat more meat!’ Stockwork certainly lived the dream, with meals
consisting of beef in some form (leftover hash for breakfast, corned beef sandwiches
for lunch, grilled meat for dinner) three times a day, every day. This was accom-
panied by carbohydrates (bread or potatoes), and vegetables or fruit rarely appeared
at all. I will say, however, that with 15 hours a day spent on horseback, or doing
some kind of intense physical work in tropical temperatures, I have never been so fit
in my entire life. But I have not eaten much beef since then …
As this implies, research on lifestyles is central to the anthropology of health, and
at the more advantaged end of the social scale there is also a growing anthropological
literature on health foods. Rosalind Coward’s work points to growing concerns
about the inclusion of undesirable substances in industrialised food production:
The pursuit of a healthy diet is the principal site where we can exercise
conscious control over our health … No wonder there has been such
panic as the facts about adulteration of food at source have become widely
known … In the mythology of alternative health, food and health have
become inextricably linked as if it would be impossible to be healthy
without serious attention to our diet … Food and its relation to health has
totally replaced sex as the major source of public anxiety about the body.
(2001: 50–1)
This work resonates with my own research on drinking water, examining why
people are willing to pay vastly more for bottled spring water rather than drink the tap
water that they fear may have been chemically polluted in the course of its treatment,
and during its journey through an industrial farming landscape (Strang 2004).
In social contexts where such concerns are a luxury, there is an increasingly
pressing need to understand the social realities, such as food poverty, that lead to
particular choices (Caplan 2016), and to reveal the drivers of obesity (Warin 2018;
Wilson 2010). Anthropologists often find themselves working in regions where
food security is major issue: for example, David Pelletier’s (2000, 2005) research, in
Latin America, Vietnam and Bangladesh, is concerned with how malnutrition
affects levels of child mortality, with a view to improving policies in this area.
Nurgül Fitzgerald, David Himmelgreen and their colleagues (Fitzgerald et al.
2006) became involved in developing educational programmes to promote better
dietary habits through nutrition in impoverished American communities.
Cultural beliefs and practices around food are critical in defining what people
eat. David Himmelgreen and Deborah Crooks note a study examining the high
consumption of Coca-Cola in the Yucatan, which revealed a belief that it is
healthy, and the importance of local perceptions of it as a Western (and therefore
high-status) item. As they say: ‘Anthropological studies on the marketing of fast-
food chains like McDonalds are especially relevant today in light of the global
obesity epidemic’ (2005: 155). In more general terms they observe that:
Applied nutritional anthropology has the potential to make significant con-

tributions in addressing the nutritional problems of the twenty-first century.
These problems include the global obesity epidemic, the intersection of diet
and physical activity in the development of obesity related diseases (e.g. type 2
diabetes), the continuing problems with undernutrition and micronutrient
deficiencies, the ongoing problem of food insecurity in a food-rich world …
[And] the contribution of globalization on food consumption patterns.
(2005: 178–9)
Anthropologists can therefore provide insights into many aspects of food use and
into wider behavioural issues, such as the way that people think about physical
exercise, and the extent to which this is encouraged (or not) in their economic and
social practices. As mentioned previously, in relation to social marketing, anthro-
pologists are well situated to work in areas such as health education.
Some culturally embedded ideas encourage people to adopt habits that are
harmful, and the only way to combat such problems is to understand the underlying
factors. Thus Florence Kellner’s research (2005) seeks an in-depth understanding of
how the processes of self-construction and self-presentation that are part of ‘coming
of age’ in most Western societies actually encourage many young women to take up
smoking. At the same time, many societies, with a fuller understanding of the health
impacts of smoking, have moved to reject it and to enact legislation to prevent
smoke being imposed on others in public places. Anthropologists have engaged
with this topic via, for example, Andrew Russell’s research on women and smok-
ing in the North East of England, and on collaborative research in public health
(2015, 2018); Brian Kelly’s work on how public policy effects the denormalisa-
tion of smoking (Kelly et al. 2018); and Annechino and Antin’s research into
the anti-tobacco movement and representations of vaping (2016).
There is clearly scope for anthropologists to make the underlying factors that
lead to harmful behaviours visible in relation to alcohol and drugs. Richard
Wilsnack and his colleagues have highlighted the central role of alcohol in
symbolising and regulating gender roles. Historically, male alcohol consump-
tion has considerably outpaced that of women, but their research, conducted in
Norway, shows that in recent decades, particularly among millennials, female
alcohol consumption has risen to similar levels:
Adult alcohol drinking patterns have changed markedly over a 20-year

period. Abstaining has become rarer while consumption and rates of recent
drinking and problematic drinking have increased … There has been a
gender convergence in most drinking behaviours, including lifetime history
of problem drinking, over the past 2–3 decades.
(Bratberg et al. 2016)
Elizabeth Halpern and Ligia Leite’s research focuses more specifically on alcohol-
ism within the Brazilian Navy, and considered how this is encouraged by ‘a
learned naval tradition, disseminated by beliefs and myths in favor of the presence
of alcohol during the work journey’ (2014: 1).
Simone Dennis and Andrew Dawson provide some insights into how their
current research intersects with public discussions about alcohol-fuelled vio-
lence in Australia.
Responsible drinking
Simone Dennis and Andrew Dawson
Imagine you’re watching a documentary about the damage and harm that
drinking alcohol might cause. It’s compelling viewing – there’s loads of violence,
neighbourhoods are disturbed as people stagger out of pubs and clubs – not to
mention the vomit that’s liberally strewn (or spewn?) all over the street.
The documentary features public health policy makers who speak about
the health consequences of drinking alcohol for individuals and commu-
nities, and the best ways to curtail bad behaviour and reduce the amount of
vomit in the street. They say all sorts of sensible stuff, including suggesting
that we have lock out laws. That’s a geographically targeted crime control
that has been in effect in places like Sydney’s entertainment precinct since
2014. It was introduced there after a ‘one-punch’ attack killed a teenager
called Daniel Christie on New Year’s Eve. It prevents people entering hotels,
registered clubs, nightclubs and karaoke bars after 1.30am, prevents venues
from serving alcohol after 3am, and is designed to curtail alcohol-fuelled
violence. The public health experts also suggest that we need floor prices
for alcohol, to make it less readily available to people, especially the young
men highlighted in the one-punch attack. And, they advise in the doc-
umentary, we need to set specific limits on alcohol intake, so people will
know how much is enough, how much is too much and what constitutes
tipping over into irresponsible drinking.
That all sounds very sensible, you think, as you reach for more crisps and
possibly another beer. Now imagine that instead of public health experts
being featured in this documentary, talking about all the ways they would
like to regulate consumption of alcohol, the documentary features prominent
figures from the alcohol industry. When that thought crosses your mind, you
laugh out loud and spill a little bit of your beer. It’s a ludicrous notion! You
can imagine how the whole documentary scene described above would be
re-crafted. Instead of causing irritation to the neighbourhood, drinking at
night in the street impels everyone to have an impromptu dance party. There’s
no one-punch attacks or deaths – alcohol is a social lubricant that inspires
conviviality and friendship. Further, robust good health is assured by a few
hearty brews, if not physically then socially and emotionally. Drinking is good
for letting off steam. The whole thing would be biased in the opposite direction
from the public health view. Right?
Well, in fact, it is not so easy to arrive at that conclusion if you start
thinking anthropologically. Let’s do that now, to see if we get a bit of a dif-
ferent result. We are going to assume that you are aware of the anthro-
pological insistence on revealing the ‘uncommon knowledge’ underlying the
apparently obvious circumstances of everyday life. This depends on the
process of critically questioning assumptions. It is easy to assume that our
imaginary documentary would shape up one way if led by public health
experts, and quite another if it featured alcohol industry reps. But this
assumes that the industry would want its consumers to have totally unre-
gulated relationships with alcohol, no matter what the cost. That’s why
people watching our imaginary documentary would be outraged.
But if we suspend that assumption for a minute, we might consider that

the industry also worries about problematic relations with alcohol but, like
public health agencies, it has particular entailments and agendas that shape
its involvement with drinking. Where the public health agenda might be
focused on health and its preservation, the alcohol industry seeks to elim-
inate the unsavoury and risky elements of drinking because irresponsible
and dangerous alcohol consumption damages the industry, and gives rise to
policy positions that change prices, curtail supply, or that publicly point to
the relationship between alcohol and violence. Of course, only one of these
agendas is regarded as laudable, but they are perhaps not the polar oppo-
sites they might at first appear to be.
That’s one kind of assumption we might question. Another might be around
the idea that the volume of alcohol consumption is at the heart of alcohol-
fuelled violence. In our imaginary documentary, public health experts recom-
mend a position be taken on how much alcohol is too much. In Australia, the
‘responsible drinker’ is currently defined as someone who drinks no more
than two standard drinks (i.e. a drink containing 10 grams of pure alcohol) on
any given day – a limit that is thought to reduce the risk of harm from alcohol-
related disease or injury over a lifetime – and who drinks no more than four
standard drinks on a single occasion, an amount that is thought to reduce the
risk of alcohol-related injury arising from that occasion. But does volume of
consumption relate strictly to violence and other negative consequences of
drinking?
In some societies (such as the UK, much of Scandinavia, the US and
Australia), alcohol is strongly associated with violence. But this pro-
pensity to violence doesn’t appear in Mediterranean and some South
American cultural contexts, in which drinking is more likely to be asso-
ciated with harmonious social interactions. This kind of variation isn’t
related to different levels of consumption: it clearly arises from very dif-
ferent expectations about the effects of alcohol and social norms
regarding drinking comportment. This means that there is quite a lot of
variation among different social groups, even within the aforementioned
national cultures, in terms of the attitudes and behaviours that people
bring to drinking and drinking socialities.
We also know very little about how drinkers themselves define ‘responsi-
bility’. It mightn’t be in strict accordance with volume. Have you ever thought,
‘I’ve only had three beers. I’m still OK to drive’. This is plainly occurring in
Australia, where drink driving is on the rise. Anthropologists are good at finding
out how drinkers themselves might think about what counts as responsibility
because they’re in a position to ask people. That’s not necessary if we accept
that responsibility is all about volume, and very problematic if responsibility
isn’t really related to how much alcohol is consumed.
Our imaginary public experts also wanted to make up a lot of rules to
govern drinking. Do formal rules help? In all cultures, drinking is a rule-
governed activity that has self-imposed norms and limitations concerning who
may drink how much of what, when, how, in what contexts, with what effects.
While these vary in form and style across cultures, there are some universals,
including the proscription of solitary drinking, the prescription of sociability,
the application of social controls regarding consumption and behaviour after
consumption, and formal and informal restrictions on female and underage
drinking. Self-imposed protocols have vastly more influence on both levels of
consumption and drinking behaviour than ‘external’ or legal controls imposed
by legislators and policy-makers. These informal etiquettes tend, even where
they appear to encourage higher consumption, to reduce the potential for the
harmful consequences of drinking, including the dialling down of violent
behaviour. This tells us something important right away: that increasing formal
rules and their force has little impact on dialling-down problematic drinking, or
in creating the social conditions for responsible drinking.
How about the regulation of drinking spaces and those lock out laws
we mentioned? Perhaps not: the ethnographic record suggests that those
societies that have special, marked off environments for drinking, which
operate like separate social worlds with their own customs, values, rules,
norms, traditions, and so on, tend to have much more problematic
drinking outcomes than those with more ‘open’ drinking environments.
Similarly, in countries (such as the US and UK) where alcohol is used to
mark the transition from work to play – where drinking is associated with
recreation and irresponsibility, and regarded as antithetical to working –
tend to have higher levels of alcohol-related problems. Countries in which
drinking is an integral part of the normal working day, and alcohol may
be used to mark the transition to work (for example, France and Spain)
tend to have lower levels of alcohol-related problems.
So, perhaps our documentary – which of course isn’t really imaginary
at all, in that it represents what actually happens in the regulation of
alcohol – isn’t that sensible after all. It might be much more effective,
though perhaps counter-intuitive, to include an industry partner in solu-
tions aiming to reduce negative experiences with alcohol. Attending to
cultural norms and the temporalities and spatialities of alcohol consump-
tion might be better than setting a floor price and focusing on volume.
Our new research into responsible drinking does just that.
Anthropological approaches to alcohol are mirrored in research into other

forms of addiction and their social impacts, and there is a wide literature
examining alcohol and drug use (Page and Singer 2010; Singer 2012).
While public concerns about the antisocial behaviours linked with alcohol
and drug use remain, attitudes towards addiction have become more
nuanced. Richard Chenhall’s work in this area has included developing
culturally appropriate evaluations of indigenous residential alcohol and drug
treatment centres (2007, 2008), and examining changing trends in substance
misuse in remote indigenous communities, with a specific focus on youths
(Senior and Chenhall 2008).
Many problems with addiction are related to mental health issues and, while
these are often regarded as an individual matter, how they are dealt with at a social
level is critical. There are wide cultural variations in how mental health problems
are understood and encompassed, and anthropological insights into these variations
are useful in informing both the management and treatment of problems. Emily
Martin’s work examines attitudes to mental conditions like manic depression and
ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). She observes that, because ideas
about ‘what makes an individual’ are becoming more open to constant change and
fluidity, these conditions ‘have been undergoing a dramatic revision in American
middle-class culture, from being simply dreaded liabilities, to be especially valuable
assets that can potentially enhance one’s life’ (2006: 84).
Cultural attitudes to mental health also have to be considered in relation
to physical issues: not just genetic, diet and lifestyle factors, but also wider
social, cultural and ecological influences. Roger Sullivan and his research
collaborators have called this ‘bio-cultural analysis’. Their research in Palau
was directed towards trying to discover why there was, most particularly
among the men in the population, one of the highest incidences of schi-
zophrenia in the world (Sullivan et al. 2007). Anthropologists have also
considered how mental illness can be aligned with ‘chronic identities’ (Von
Peter 2013); examined how self-harm among adolescents intersects with
issues of agency (Csordas and Jenkins 2018); and how conventional medical
approaches to depression tend to locate the problem within the individual,
thus applying stigmatising disease-oriented assumptions and intensifying
rather than alleviating the problem (Bromley et al. 2016).
Comparative health
Although healthcare in the 21st century is heavily dominated by Western sciences,
there are many other cultural models about what constitutes good health and how
this can be achieved and maintained. Anthropology is therefore useful in translat-
ing and communicating different ideas about health between cultural groups, in a
variety of contexts. For example, some anthropologists work with migrants whose
health traditions may be quite different from those they encounter in their new
homes. More than 1 million migrants arrive in the USA each year, many coming
from India, Mexico, China and Cuba (López et al. 2018). Working with such
groups highlights the importance of participatory research, and the need to con-
sider how different people conceptualise health issues (Gooberman-Hill 2014).
Linda Whiteford draws attention to the integration of traditional and
biomedical approaches to health, and notes the utility of social marketing in
tackling global issues such as family planning and breast-feeding. She put
her ideas into action by leading the establishment of a centre at the Uni-
versity of South Florida, which enables social anthropologists and marketers
to work together to bring about social change (2015). But whether working
with people to embrace positive changes in practice, or simply tackling
medical challenges, it is vital to have a real understanding of the social and
cultural context.
In this sense, anthropology can greatly assist epidemiologists in thinking
about how diseases spread, and how to contain them. James Fairhead considers
how a need for cultural insight came to the fore very sharply with the out-
breaks of Ebola in West Africa, when he worked with the Ebola Response
Anthropology Platform. His research showed why some of the early response
initiatives met with resistance, exposing faultlines in political and economic
structures that had previously been glossed over, and highlighting tensions
between international biomedical views on what was perceived as a potential
global threat, and local community norms regarding the treatment of disease
and burial practices.
The disease and the humanitarian response unsettled social accommoda-

tions that had become established between existing burial practices and
hospital medicine, local political structures and external political subjection,
mining interests and communities, and those suspected of ‘sorcery’ and
those suspicious of them.
(2016: 7)
Working as a health coordinator for Médecins sans Frontières, anthropologist

Maria Manca went on three missions to Guinea during the 2014–16 Ebola
epidemic. Observing deep suspicions about biomedical responses, she similarly
emphasises the need for health promotion messages to be both practical and
‘culturally appropriate’, taking into consideration the ways in which local
communities understand disease, death and burial practices. ‘Health promotion
is dependent upon sharing information with local populations and adapting
health-care services to make them more acceptable, and is an essential part of
any Ebola intervention’ (2017: 9).
The Ebola outbreaks also highlighted the need to consider wider cultural
practices, such as traditions of hunting and gathering, and the importance of
game meat consumption (Ngade et al. 2017; Venables and Pellecchia 2017).
Barry Hewlett, the first anthropologist to be invited by WHO to assist in
the fight against Ebola, in his work with other medical anthropologists in
the Congo, underlined the importance of understanding cultural models and
their social and political implications (Hewlett 2016; Hewlett and Hewlett
2008; Hewlett et al. 2005). They found that in the early stages of the epi-
demic medical aid was sent, but there was little communication or coordi-
nation with the local community, and people became so suspicious of
outsiders that when they returned with the second outbreak, there was
armed resistance to their activities. The research showed how the problem
lay in the aid agencies’ lack of understanding of local history, how diseases
were perceived and also how they were managed. Partly as a result of this
work, the World Health Organization (WHO) revised its guidelines for
responding to Ebola outbreaks.
Ginger Johnson writes about her experience of working in West Africa with
the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)
during the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak. Her account raises issues that will resonate
with many people following the recent Covid-19 pandemic.
Understanding disease transmission

Ginger Johnson
In December 2013, a two-year-old boy in West Africa engaged in a normal
activity for many toddlers around the world – he played outside around a
tree near his home. However, this particular tree happened to house a
colony of bats infected with Ebola, one of the most deadly infectious dis-
eases humans have ever encountered. Shortly after the toddler’s encounter
with the bat colony, he died. His mother died approximately a week later,
followed by his three-year-old sister and grandmother. This was the begin-
ning of the largest outbreak of Ebola – or Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) as it is
now known – in history. But it would take another three months, and almost
thirty more deaths, before EVD was confirmed as the source of the toddler’s
illness. Over two years later, by March 2016 when the outbreak was officially
declared over by the World Health Organization, more than 11,000 persons
had been infected by it and died in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
This is a disease known to medical professionals since 1976. So why was
the outbreak of EVD in West Africa so much worse than any previously recor-
ded? Was this strain of the virus somehow different, somehow more deadly,
from previous strains? The short answer is, no. Although unprecedented in
scale, the course of infection with EVD in West Africa was consistent with his-
torical outbreaks in that an animal (in this case a bat) was the first source of
transmission, with the subsequent spread of the virus almost exclusively
through human-to-human contact. Enter the need for anthropologists.
Infectious diseases such as EVD are spread through persons coming into
contact with the body and bodily fluids of someone who is experiencing
symptoms, or someone who has recently died from their illness. Because
infectious diseases are most often spread through routine human interac-
tions, they are as much social as biological in nature. In the case of EVD in
West Africa, this meant that common human behaviors – a mother caring for
her ill toddler, a friendly handshake or hug between friends, a goodbye kiss
on the forehead given to a beloved grandmother who has passed away –
suddenly had the potential to transmit a deadly virus.
The scope of the outbreak in West Africa can be attributed to several factors,
one of which were burial practices. Someone who has recently died from a
disease such as EVD is highly infectious. Combine this with a large group of
mourners who may come into contact with the deceased during the funeral,
and there will be multiple opportunities for EVD to be transmitted to others.
Investigating the transmission of EVD during funeral proceedings was a

topic towards which many anthropologists working during the outbreak
dedicated their time and attention. Our work demonstrated the importance
of not only understanding burial practices as contributing to the transmis-
sion of EVD, but also the risks to those who were caring for their ill relatives,
friends and community members. This work also communicated to outbreak
responders the social significance of funeral proceedings for ensuring a
person’s passage to the afterlife. Understanding these issues were key in
understanding why families were resistant to ‘safe’ medical burial practices.
It may seem strange that persons actively experiencing an outbreak of a
deadly infectious disease would resist medically safer burials designed to
halt transmission. But think about some of the things that all humans have in
common. We love and are loved by others. We have individuals in our
families and our communities for whom we often have a high degree of
respect – our parents, our grandparents, our religious leaders. We may well
have persons in our families and our communities, such as children, who we
care for and mentor. How might we respond if any of these persons become
very sick and need care, or if they do not survive?
Who do you trust to treat your loved ones respectfully? What ceremonies
should be performed to allow you, your family and your friends to say
goodbye? Or to make sure that your loved one is treated in a manner
according to your religious customs? However you picture this, it is probably
very different from a ‘safe’ burial in the context of an infectious disease
outbreak. This was one of the reasons why, in West Africa, distrust devel-
oped between persons affected by EVD and the personnel tasked with
stopping its transmission. Control of the epidemic in was severely under-
mined by this distrust. It was often the role of anthropologists to help
humanitarian agencies to understand local customs and establish mechan-
isms for respectful engagement with EVD-affected communities. This helped
to reconcile how affected communities needed their loved ones to be han-
dled, and what outbreak responders required in order to ensure a ‘safe’
burial for persons who died from EVD. These collective efforts by anthro-
pologists and outbreak responders led to what is now known as Safe and
Dignified Burials.
At the time of writing, Safe and Dignified Burial procedures are being used
in yet another outbreak of EVD in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of
Congo. Although EVD control methods and messages may need to be
adapted to new contexts, such as in North Kivu, the aims of anthropologists
working during a public health emergency remain the same: to understand
local contexts and human behaviors in order to engage respectfully with
communities experiencing a crisis. Given the many global crises we are
experiencing today, whether through climate change, civil war or the outbreak
of an infectious disease, the world needs a new generation of anthropologists
who are equipped to work in fast-paced emergency environments.
Figure 7.7 While community residents look on in the background, a member of

the Safe and Dignified Burial team in Sierra Leone is sprayed with
chlorine prior to removing his protective suit. Burial team members
had recently picked up the corpse of a deceased community member.
Photograph: Ginger A. Johnson.
Work on Ebola draws on earlier research into AIDS and HIV transmission
which – although no longer a focus of attention in global media – remains a
pressing issue in some parts of the world. In this too understanding local cultural
ideas and behaviours has been critical. Adam Ashforth’s work looks at how the
spread of this disease in Africa is entangled with ideas about witchcraft, which has
been seen, traditionally, as a central factor in illness. ‘Cases of premature death or
untimely illness in Africa are almost always attributed to the action of invisible
forces, frequently those described as “witchcraft”. Thus the HIV/AIDS epidemic
is also “an epidemic of witchcraft”’ (2004: 147). Because of the distrust this
engenders, the disease therefore poses a threat not only to human health, but also
to the stability of democratic governance in the region:
The implications of a witchcraft epidemic are quite different from those of a

‘public health’ crisis … when suspicions of witchcraft are at play in a com-
munity, problems of illness and death transform matters of public health from
questions of appropriate policies into questions concerning the fundamental
character and legitimacy of public power in general – questions relating to the
security, safety and integrity of the community.
(Ashforth 2004: 142)
Ted Green spent several decades working in sub-Saharan Africa and is familiar
with indigenous contagion theories. He notes that people are well aware of
the causes of disease, and how contagion spreads, and have specific protocols
for quarantine. Programmes that cohere with local methods are far more
likely to work. WHO took this advice on board, and is now directing its
efforts towards working with and incorporating indigenous medical practices
into aid programmes (Green and Herling Ruark 2011; Janzen and Green
2016; Leclerc et al. 2016).
As will be evident, anthropologists have long been involved in efforts to
tackle epidemics. Long before the Covid-19 outbreak, anthropologists such as
Limor Samimian-Darash raised questions about societies’ capacities to tackle
biothreats and uncertainty (2013), and Lenore Manderson and Susan Levine
have considered how the social realities of poverty and structural vulnerability
invariably intersect with people’s capacities to cope in such circumstances.
‘Culture’ was always included in popular discourse and media accounts of

Ebola … COVID-19 appears to be outside of culture. Yet the institution of
quarantine practices, lockdowns, and border controls, and the insistence on
adherence to hygiene practices (handwashing) highlight how human practices
and behaviors are implicated, and foreshadow a global humanitarian crisis as
community transmission takes hold in global south communities. Here,
manifold risks are tied to the poverty of infrastructures and resources … It is
tempting to ask what the world would feel like had governments responded
to other global health disasters – gender-based violence, climate change, war,
poverty, HIV/AIDS, or hunger – with such vigor.
(2020: 367–8)
From the cradle to the grave

Anthropologists are involved in studying health at every stage of human life, even
before it begins. A fast-growing area of research is concerned with human repro-
duction, in particular where this is technologically or socially assisted, for example
by in vitro fertilisation, sperm donation, surrogacy (Poveda et al. 2018) or adoption
(Schachter 2017). Such practices raise a number of complex social issues, as do
reproductive controls, such as contraception and abortion, or the opposite issues of
infertility and childlessness (Allison 2010; Mire 2016). In such areas, sensitivity to
diverse cultural beliefs and values is very helpful – one might say vital.
Catherine Chiapetta-Swanson conducts research with nurses in clinics specia-
lising in genetic termination (an abortion carried out when genetic abnormalities
are found in a foetus). As she points out: ‘GT nursing is intense. It is one-to-one
care across a range of extremely sensitive procedures, which are emotionally and
morally charged for both patient and nurse’ (2005: 166). Her research helped
hospitals to improve their management of the process and support the people
involved with more effective coping strategies. Human reproduction raises other
complex issues too, particularly when it is assisted, thus Charis Thompson’s work
in fertility clinics in California examines some of the tricky questions raised about
kinship and ‘chains of descent’ when egg or sperm donation or surrogacy creates
‘third party reproducers’ (C. Thompson 2006: 271).
Commercial surrogacy has become the focus of considerable critical scrutiny
by journalists and feminist scholars. Holly Singh, who has conducted research
into infertility in India, suggests that by privileging issues of labour outsourcing
and global inequality, researchers fail to address the relationship between
‘transnational commercial surrogacy’ and more localised issues of inequality and
limited access to infertility treatments in India: ‘Most research on gestational
surrogacy in India avoids or marginalizes the intersections of class and religious
background in which women tend to become surrogates and fails to address the
options available to Indians who face infertility’ (2014: 826).
In the USA, Zsuzsa Berend’s research into surrogacy considers how people
using one of the country’s largest surrogacy support websites negotiate ideas of
‘relatedness and relationships’ that extend beyond traditional notions of kinship:
In gestational surrogacy, genetic relatedness between the child and the

intended parents strengthens claim to parenthood but lack thereof does not
call parenthood into question … Surrogates and intended parents contend
that surrogate babies belong to the parents who want them.
(2016: 24)
The area of assisted conception, particularly the ‘anonymous’ donation of

sperm, eggs and embryos (gametes), is surrounded by legal and ethical ques-
tions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on anonymous semen donation in
the UK and other European countries, Jennifer Speirs addresses the conflicting
views surrounding legal rights for people conceived with donated gametes to
know the identity of their genetic parents. ‘Despite the increasing number of
countries whose laws now permit access to such information, many in the
infertility treatment business remain opposed to or anxious about this change of
legislation’ (2011: 73). Conducting research in Denmark, Sebastian Mohr,
meanwhile, focuses on what it means for men to be sperm donors, describing
their donor experiences in the wider context of their moral, social and gen-
dered identities, and how their decisions to donate are constrained by con-
temporary socio-political and biomedical frameworks (2018).
A converse problem is presented by selective reproduction technologies.
Studies of the way that infanticide, abandonment and selective neglect were
deployed in the 20th century, along with forced abortion and sterilisation, have
given way to a focus on new clinical techniques permitting the selective ferti-
lisation of gametes, implantation of embryos, or the abortion of foetuses that,
rather than attempting to tackle infertility, are used to prevent or allow the
birth of certain kinds of children. Anthropological research in this area is
comparative, discussing how, in different societies, selective reproduction
engages with issues of long-standing theoretical concern, such as politics, kin-
ship, gender, religion, globalisation and inequality (Gammeltoft and Wahlberg
2014).
Similarly, comparative research considers social attitudes to abortion. Recent
studies include work on the erosion of legislative rights to abortion in the USA
(Andaya and Mishtal 2016); on ‘reproductive rebellions’ in Britain and the
Republic of Ireland (Kasstan and Crook 2018); and on feminist activism to
seize control over abortion rights in Mexico (Singer 2018).
Cultural variations are equally evident in approaches to child-rearing.
Research examining different ideas and practices in relation to parenting are
usefully comparative (Lancy 2017), revealing underlying assumptions about
emotions and power relations (Hoffman 2013) and cultural identity (Gana-
pathy‐Coleman 2013). Anthropologists are often involved in child health
policy. Julie Spray’s work, for example, brings governance issues together with
youth and community work in New Zealand (2018), and Lee Smith Battle
examines the ‘long arc of childhood trauma’ in a multi-generational study of
teen mothers in the USA (2018).
There are emergent issues too. Veronica Barassi, who specialises in the
anthropology of media, has turned her attention to the issues of digital
monitoring during pregnancy and the online surveillance of children (2017).
The last few decades have seen rumbling and sometimes intense debates about
vaccination and its real and perceived risks, and understanding the polarised
perspectives has been critical (Brunson and Sobo 2017; Elverdam 2011;
Jiménez et al. 2018; Sobo 2016). The vaccination issue has also brought
autism to the fore, with anthropologists not only considering the fears relating to
vaccination (Kaufman 2010) but also the wider issues of how societies imagine and
encompass different social behaviours (Belek 2018; Ochs and Solomon 2010).
In many societies the baby boom that followed the Second World War has
led to a contemporary focus on ageing, with anthropologists considering the
demographic and social effects of an ageing population (Bofill-Poch 2018; S.
Harper 2015, 2016) and the challenges of coping with ageing and dying
(Feldman 2017). Anthropologists are closely involved in work examining how
old age is imagined and experienced in different groups; how people think
about ageing; what kinds of activities they undertake in old age; and how dif-
ferent generations interact. They also investigate the social implications of
longevity.
It is invariably useful to understand cultural beliefs and values in relation to
the diseases that often accompany (and sometimes precede) ageing. Ideas about
cancer, disability and dementia are critical in defining how these are treated or
managed at a social level, and an awareness of ‘under-the-surface’ beliefs can
often help in developing new ways to cope with health problems in these areas.
For example, demographic realities have meant a major rise in the numbers of
people experiencing or caring for others with Alzheimer’s disease (Dawson and
Goodwin‐Hawkins 2018; Herron and Rosenberg 2017; Tessier 2017). As in
other areas of health, dealing with dementia elicits diverse cultural responses,
and comparison is useful in encouraging positive change (Henderson 2016;
Henderson and Henderson 2005).
For example, there is considerable ethnographic research on institutions for
the short- and long-term care of the elderly, such as nursing homes and hos-
pitals. Robert Harman comments that ‘nursing home treatment is frequently
unsatisfactory and sometimes inhumane’. He notes that anthropologists have
acted as advocates for the inhabitants of such institutions, worked to influence
policy, and contributed to the education of carers in institutions and at home
(2005: 312). Seeking to improve the care and treatment of residents, Jason
Ulsperger and David Knottnerus explore the root causes and types of abuse in
nursing homes in the USA, which are facilitated by what they describe as
‘bureaucratic ritualized practices’ (2016: ix).
Because of the discipline’s cross-cultural utility, anthropologists are often
employed to assist in the healthcare of elderly refugees and immigrants. Robert
Harman notes research in several related areas: Elzbieta Gozdziak working on
problems specific to older refugees and programmes designed to support them;
Neil Henderson’s development of ethnic-specific Alzheimer’s support groups
for Hispanics and African Americans; and Kay Branch’s work as an Elder Rural
Services Planner for a Native Tribal Health Consortium in Alaska (Harman
2005). Annelieke Driessen has also highlighted the need to challenge repre-
sentations of dementia that place too great an emphasis on ‘a single pathway
towards loss and decline’ which may result in alternative pathways remaining
unexplored. Where care professionals create the right conditions, she suggests,
residents are able to ‘surrender’ to feelings of pleasure in their daily activities
(2018: 23).
The Covid-19 pandemic has served to highlight the need for societies to
make better provision for the care of the elderly. Highlighting the importance
of the behavioural sciences in crisis situations, medical anthropologists such as
Mona Koshkouei, Lucy Abel and Caitlin Pilbeam have provided advice on
how to control the spread of the pandemic in care homes (2020).
Anthropological research into care overlaps with the sensitive area of medical
disclosure, and the challenges of relaying information about terminal diseases.
For example, working in southern India, Cecilia Van Hollen’s research tackles
the difficult ethical issues surrounding medical disclosure in relation to the
decision of whether and how to tell patients about a cancer diagnosis. She
notes that an individual’s right to know about their own health, and the
options available to them, may be countered by cultural arguments that
potentially devastating knowledge should be withheld to protect an individual’s
psychological wellbeing. This is not only a concern for medical practitioners:
she describes her own ethical dilemma when, during the course of an inter-
view, a woman who was in the middle of cancer treatment asked whether this
is what her records actually said:
If she still had some lingering doubt about what disease she in fact had,
would it be ethically wrong for me, a foreign anthropologist, to be the one
telling her the diagnosis? But wouldn’t it also be wrong for me to lie and
tell her that I didn’t know when the diagnosis was plain as day and when
she clearly had been working under the assumption that she had cancer?
(2018: 60)
There is also (forgive the pun) a lively area of research in anthropology con-
cerned with death itself, a whole area of Death Studies in fact, which considers
different cultural beliefs about spiritual being and mortality, and the ritual
practices surrounding the end of life. Here, as in all domains of human exis-
tence, there is huge cultural variation in ways of mourning and/or celebrating
the departed, which draws on the discipline’s foundational literature concerned
with religion, rites of passage, and how social and spiritual ideas are enacted and
affirmed in ritual (Firth 1960; Fortes 1966; Van Gennep 1966).
Contemporary anthropologists such as Douglas Davies have focused atten-
tion on the social and ecological issues surrounding cremation in Britain (2015),
and, following a shift towards secularism and alternative views on spirituality,
the emergence of funerary innovations such as ‘natural’ woodland burials
(Davies and Rumble 2012). There is also anthropological work on suicide: for
example, Thomas Widger conducted research into the causes of suicide in Sri
Lanka, collecting data on how people understood and performed suicidal
behaviours, and the kinds of problems that led them to doing so (2018).
Antonius Robben’s (2018) collection of works on death asks questions about
how the state wrests away control over the dead from bereaved relatives. Why
do many mourners refuse to cut their emotional ties to the dead and nurture
lasting bonds? Is death a final condition or do human remains have agency?
This last question leads us to a couple of related sub-fields of anthropology
which sit within the evolutionary and physical anthropology discussed at the
beginning of this chapter.
Forensic anthropology
As a specialised area of biological anthropology and archaeology that is often
focused on recent crimes, forensic anthropology features regularly in novels,
films and television programmes such as Silent Witness or CSI. The role of the
forensic anthropologist is usually to identify bones and determine the cause of
death: s/he will begin by determining whether the bones are human, and will
then look for indications of age, gender and ancestral origin. Dental records are
useful, as are old bone fractures and signs of diseases, hair samples, blood type
and, of course, DNA, the capture of which has transformed the forensic sci-
ences (Black and Ferguson 2011; Nafte 2016).
It is through these material traces, and the individual or collective identities that
they recollect, that the dead may ‘speak’ to the living. Although rarely as dramatic
as presented in television crime series, they do speak about past violence, genocide,
battles and mass deaths, which is why ‘a forensic investigation requires a team of
specialists from many different scientific fields of study as well as legal and law
enforcement specialists’ (Pickering and Bachman 2009: xi). Thus many forensic or
physical anthropologists work both within and beyond universities:
According to a recent survey of the AAFS Physical Anthropology section

members … (44.5%) are employed at an academic institution and do for-
ensic casework on a consulting basis … Within academia, forensic
anthropologists are typically employed as physical anthropologists, anato-
mists, osteologists, and/or skeletal biologists. Other common employment
agencies are medical examiner and coroner’s offices (19.1%), federal agen-
cies (12.7%), private consulting firms … (5.5%), museums (2.7%), and
non-profit organizations (2.7%).
(Tersigni-Tarrant and Shirley 2013: 28)
In addition to obtaining a PhD, forensic anthropologists in the USA must also

undertake three years of casework in order to be certified by the American
Board of Forensic Anthropologists (Bethard 2017). There is a wide range of
potential uses of these skills: for example, Nathan Stam and his team conduct
research into the relationship between deaths through heroin drug overdose,
and variations in both purity and mass of ‘street-level’ heroin (2018). Stefanie
Plenzig and her colleagues have used forensic autopsies to investigate the pos-
sible causes of death for stowaways in airplane wheel wells (2018). Others have
focused on examining weapons that may have been used at a crime scene (Law
et al. 2018). Where there are multiple fatalities, Hans de Boer tells us, DNA
profiling is crucial:
Identification of the victims of these events is considered an important

mark of respect not only for the deceased but also for surviving family and
friends. In addition, identification may be required legally, for instance to
aid criminal proceedings, facilitate settlement of estate and/or inheritance,
or the right of the remaining partner to re-marry. Consequently, specific
processes have been developed to facilitate positive identification of the
deceased.
(de Boer et al. 2018: n.p.)
A relatively recent role for forensic anthropologists has been in the recovery
and identification of victims at sites of large-scale disaster. Scott Warnasch
writes about excavations that took in the years after the destruction of the
World Trade Center on 11 September 2001:
Forensic archaeologists and physical anthropologists are the most qualified

professionals to perform many of the crucial tasks required to conduct a
successful mass disaster recovery operation. These highly trained profes-
sionals can provide expertise far beyond the scope of law enforcement and
emergency response teams, which primarily focus on saving lives.
(2016: 592)
Paul Sledzik, who was directly involved in the aftermath of the event, notes
that ‘anthropologists emerged to serve as directors of victim identification
teams, quality control managers, morgue managers, and coordinators of long-
term identification efforts’ (2016: 381).
In recent years, forensic anthropologists have also been involved in identify-
ing the victims of genocide, for example in Rwanda. Some forensic tasks
investigate long-term crimes: for example, Emma Johnston and Mishel Ste-
phenson use DNA profiling to identify degraded skeletal remains in Guatemala:
There are believed to be over 200,000 people killed or forcibly dis-

appeared during the 36-year internal armed conflict in Guatemala, which
ended in 1996. The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala
(FAFG) is a nongovernmental institution whose primary mission is the
identification of victims from the internal armed conflict. The foundation
aims to return victims for proper burials and provide closure for families
and communities exposed to violence and human rights violations.
(2016: 898)
Ernesto Schwartz-Marin’s and Arely Cruz-Santiago’s ethnographic research into

Colombian and Mexican forensic systems similarly highlights decades of violence in
aiding searches for ‘the men, women, and children from Mexico and other countries
who have disappeared and are possibly dead, waiting to be found in mortuaries and
clandestine mass graves that are yet to be identified’. Relatives of the ‘disappeared’
work closely with forensic scientists, providing their DNA and assisting in the loca-
tion of mass graves ‘in a citizen-led forensic project’ (2016: 483, 504).
As this implies, there is an important political dimension to forensic anthro-
pology, in terms of whether, when or how investigations take place. For
example, Cristina Cattaneo believes that all human remains should be treated
with ‘equal dignity’ regardless of status or origin. She has been working in
Sicily with a volunteer team of forensic scientists and anthropologists, attempt-
ing to create genetic profiles for hundreds of unidentified migrants and refugees
who perished attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. ‘“It’s crazy”, she says.
“In any other disaster the entire forensic world is geared to go to the place –
except when it comes to migrants. They are treated as B-series individuals, and
that needs to change”’ (in Nadeau 2017: n.p.; see also Cattaneo 2018).
A forensic career
Natalie Langley
I work in forensic anthropology and clinical anatomy, and I do research,
casework, and service in this field. I also teach gross anatomy, embryology,
and histology at a medical school, and conduct clinical anatomy and medi-
cal education research. I became interested in anthropology when I took an
Introduction to Physical Anthropology course as an undergraduate student.
When I discovered how much the skeleton reveals about an individual …

age, sex, stature, health, habitual activities, and more … I was hooked! After
completing a postdoctoral research fellowship in forensic anthropology, I
acquired my first faculty appointment in a medical school anatomy depart-
ment, and a consulting position as a forensic anthropologist, which I think of
as applying the science of biological anthropology to solving crimes.
Many students and professionals are not aware of the historical relationship
between biological anthropology and anatomy. The earliest biological anthro-
pologists were often anatomists, and this continues to be an important com-
ponent of our training. The relationship between the hard and soft tissues of
the body is fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of physiology and
skeletal biology, just as knowledge of the skeletal form of ancestral hominids
and extant primates is integral to a holistic interpretation of modern human
variation. In my forensic work I harness this knowledge to solve mysteries
from skeletal clues, and bring closure to the families of unidentified persons. I
also use my expertise in gross, microscopic, and developmental anatomy in
forensic research and in educating the next generation of medical profes-
sionals. I interweave my training in biological and cultural anthropology,
medical anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary biology into anatomy edu-
cation to provide students with an understanding of the whole person.
A career in forensic anthropology and clinical anatomy may seem dis-
jointed, but knowing where muscles attach to the bones and how they move
the skeleton assists my interpretation of skeletal features in forensic case-
work. Likewise, understanding disease processes in living individuals
informs how I interpret the evidence they leave behind on the skeleton.
Working closely with physicians and surgeons also helps me develop com-
munication, teamwork, and leadership skills that are invaluable when I lead a
forensic recovery effort, or communicate findings with the media, families
and in a courtroom.
In a typical year I lead medical school anatomy and histology courses in
the Fall. I organise course delivery, deliver lectures, facilitate small group
learning, supervise teaching assistants, provide feedback to students, help
students complete dissections, and create reviews, quizzes, anatomy lab
practicals, and examinations. In the Spring I conduct research and mentor
student projects in forensic anthropology, clinical anatomy, and medical
education. Another Spring activity I enjoy is completing special dissections
on unembalmed cadavers for advanced anatomy and procedural skills
training courses for surgeons and residents. I prepare presentations for
conferences, and write journal articles and books. I attend annual forensic
and anatomy conferences, in addition to a general medical education con-
ference. Throughout the year I consult on forensic cases, conduct peer
reviews of colleagues’ case reports, and provide expert testimony in court.
Needless to say, I am never bored and enjoy the diverse array of profes-
sional activities and responsibilities my career affords, all made possible by
my decision to study biological anthropology. My diverse training and work

experience have taught me that the best work is done by multidisciplinary
teams who bring varying areas of expertise, experience, and approaches to
the table.
Figure 7.8 Natalie Langley (right) providing training at the University of Ten-
nessee Forensic Anthropology Center with James Roberts (left).
Trainees are learning to document and map a surface recovery of
skeletal elements.
8 Anthropology and Identity
Defining identity
Human beings spend a lot of time and energy ‘creating’ themselves and others, and
formulating ideas about social identity: who ‘we’ are, and who ‘they’ are. They
compose and represent identity in a host of ways: through language, historical narra-
tives, performance, art, material culture, ritual and other media. Every human society,
small or large, has a vision of its own characteristics, and defines these in comparison
to others. There are many sub-divisions of identity according to things like gender,
age, class, education, political ideology, religious beliefs and so on. Larger societies
contain sub-cultural groups: indigenous communities; ethnic groups; immigrant
populations; rural and urban inhabitants. And there are specialised groupings, defined
by profession, or by shared interests; for example, in recreational activities, or the arts.
Some years ago, Benedict Anderson coined the now well-known phrase ‘imagined
communities’ (1991) to describe how people locate themselves within various
groups, and compose individual and social identities over time.
Identity also has some important material dimensions: most immediately it is
linked with individual and familial biophysical characteristics, but it is also
formed in relation to physical environments: the urban and rural landscapes
people inhabit and how they engage with these; the material things that they
produce, or which they regard as desirable; the media through which they
represent themselves and others. Thus Peter Finke suggests that ethnic identity
‘hinges on a bundle of markers used to distinguish each other in presumed
cultural terms, always embedded in power games that try to secure political
support and loyalty’ (Finke and Sökefeld 2018: n.p.).
Anthropologists therefore see identity and how it is represented as an
important dimension of human life. They recognise that it plays a key role in
relationships between groups at a local, national and international level; in
conflicts over land and resources; and in the maintenance of cultural diversity.
Understanding how people deal with issues of identity and representation is
therefore practical as well as absorbing, and many anthropologists are closely
engaged in understanding the processes through which identity is constructed
and expressed. This chapter considers some of the work that researchers do in
this area.
Gender and sexuality
One of the most fundamental aspects of human identity is that of gender, but
cross-cultural comparison reveals wide variations in ideas about how this is
composed. Many societies still place considerable weight on the biophysical
characteristics that define ‘sex’ rather than ‘gender’, such as genital anatomy, as
in most Western societies, or density of flesh and bone, as in Nepal. But it is
now many years since feminist anthropologists such as Sherry Ortner and
Harriet Whitehead (1981), Judith Butler (1990) and Henrietta Moore (1994)
challenged assumptions about biological determinism, and gave ideas about
gender a good shake-up, foregrounding the cultural construction of sex and
gender, and the extent to which beliefs about what constitutes femininity or
masculinity rely on social norms about behaviour and inclination (Whitehead
1981). Ethnographic comparison has revealed diverse views about how many
genders there are: five, for the Bugi in Indonesia (Graham-Davies 2007) or, in
many Native American communities three or four, which hinge on ideas
about individuals having ‘two-spirits’, that combine feminine and masculine
characteristics (Lang 2016).
Recent decades have brought major challenges to the notion of fixed
gender categories, and greater openness to concepts of fluid gender identities
that do not fit binary gender categories (Valentine 2007; Vernon 2016).
LGBTQ activists have demanded rights to self-identify, and to have social
equality – for example, in having same-sex partnerships and marriage. As
LGBTQ communities have resisted efforts by right-wing governments to
reverse social and political progress in this area, anthropologists have sup-
ported them with critical thinking and ethnographic research considering
how ideas about gender are established – and often imposed with varying
degrees of repression – in different societies (AAA 2018).
The anthropology of gender tends to focus on how concepts of masculinity or
femininity are upheld in different cultural contexts, and how they often provide
differential access to status, power, property and education (Mascia-Lees and
Black 2017). Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, for example, have
undertaken research into masculinities, but as they point out:
Though we seek to question taken-for-granted social categories, we can

only do so in terms of our own experience. Imprisoned as we are in the
strictures of our language, it is difficult to escape using the terms ‘men’,
‘male’ or ‘masculinity’, and ‘women’, ‘female’ or ‘femininity’, without
implying a binary notion of gender.
(2016: 11)
However, diverse ethnographic studies are not only ideal for making visible the
ways in which gender is constructed, they also offer alternative, and sometimes
less sharply binary, ways of thinking and talking about it.
Anthropology and Identity 171
Race and nationalism
The progress made in understanding that the materialities of gender are subsumed
by powerful social constructions has also benefited anthropological critiques of
racial categories. Although debates continue about how to reconcile the material
and social aspects of human identity, most anthropologists would say that the idea
of race is an invention – a cultural device for describing ‘the other’, which has little
genetic foundation. It is now over 20 years since the American Anthropological
Association (AAA) made a formal ‘living’ Statement on Race which is unambig-
uous in presenting race as a primarily political and ideological ‘social mechan-
ism … a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences
and group behavior’ (2020). The AAA also instigated The Race Project, which
aimed to promote a broad understanding of race and human variation. This
produced a public education programme and a travelling museum exhibition,
and its findings, written up by Alan Goodman, Yolanda Moses and Joseph
Jones, conveyed three key messages: that race is a recent human invention; that
it is about culture, not biology, and that race and racism are embedded in
institutions and everyday life (Goodman et al. 2012).
But it is precisely because of its political utility that the concept of race
remains central to debates, and while the study of genetics has served to chal-
lenge racial assumptions, it has also continued to reify a biological view that
there are ways to categorise people according to their genetic inheritance. Thus
Michael Yudell, in co-authoring a paper in Science, noted how racial categories
are open to misuse, for example in relation to medical diagnoses, and called for
a halt to the use of race as a category in genetics studies:
We thought that after the Human Genome Project, with [its leaders]
saying it’s time to move beyond race as a biological marker, we would
have done that … Yet here we are, and there is evidence things have
actually gotten worse in the genomic age.
(in Begley 2016; see also Yudell et al. 2016)
As Lee Baker observes, there is also some messy entanglement between con-
cepts of race and culture. He compares how, in the late 19th century, there
were very different approaches to salvaging ‘disappearing’ Native American
culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages, while
few such efforts were made to preserve the cultural ideas and practices of
African Americans. His account reveals how anthropology has both responded
to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how
ideas emerging from the discipline have since been appropriated (and mis-
appropriated) to wildly disparate ends (2010).
As ever ethnography provides the depth that is needed, and much of what
anthropologists do in relation to race is to consider how ideas about it are
created and upheld. Thus Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban’s work examines ‘how
racism happens’ in America, looking at the biological and cultural ideas, and the
social and spatial arrangements that allow racist assumptions to persist in many
communities (2005). Peter Wade has considered how race, ethnicity and nation
enter into recent genomic research about the ancestry of Latin American popula-
tions, how such research is received and interpreted in the public domain; and
how this contributes to ‘anti-racism’ in the region (Wade et al. 2019).
As well as finding their way into concepts of culture and ethnicity, beliefs
about race often intersect with ideas about nationalism. In Benedict Anderson’s
terms, ‘the nation’ too is an ‘imagined community’ (1991). It enjoys the defi-
nitional certainty of being founded on ‘native soil’: a territory contained by
borders, with a formal State, mechanisms of government, and a history of
belonging (or not belonging). But, like other constructions of identity, it also
encompasses ideas about racial and ethnic identity, shared cultural beliefs and
values, and shared ‘blood’ (or genes). Jason Antrosio asks, ‘Is nationalism bad?’:
‘In an ideal version of nationalism, everyone who is a citizen is equally involved
in the nation. All national citizens can be proud and exude nationalism’, he
says, observing that the same can be said of other nations. But, he adds, ‘This
ideal version of nationalism has rarely, if ever, been realized’ (2017: n.p.). And
with the rise of populism and the far right in Europe and the USA, far from
ideal ideas about nationalism and belonging have surfaced in debates about
immigration, Brexit, and trade relations (Gilmartin et al. 2018).
Community identities
Modern nation states contain a multiplicity of cultural and sub-cultural commu-
nities, each of which strives to compose and represent a collective identity. This
is most obviously the case for indigenous communities overtaken by colonial
hegemony. In Australia, for example, having had negative identities as ‘savages’
of ‘children of nature’ imposed upon them by colonial settlers, Aboriginal people
have struggled to assert their own ideas about cultural identity, and to balance a
desire to revive or maintain their own cultural traditions and relations with place
with the demands of participating in a modern nation state (Cowlishaw 2012). In
New Zealand, the Maori community has been successful in establishing a pre-
mise of bi-culturalism, and asserting the value of indigenous lifeways, but, as in
the USA, Canada and Australia, this clarity is challenged by the levelling effect of
current discourses about multiculturalism (Eriksen 2015b).
There are other cultural and sub-cultural groups that share a common identity.
As noted in Chapter 4, counter-movements seeking ecological and social justice
also form distinct networks and communities, linked by shared beliefs and values,
and a common purpose (Kopnina and Shoreman-Ouimet 2017; Milton 2014).
Religions have often formed the basis of communities, and many ethno-
graphers have turned their attention to the study of religious groups. Joel
Robbins’s work considers the anthropology of Christianity (Robbins and
Haynes 2014), Tanya Luhrmann worked with neo-Pagan communities in
London, and notes the long history of ‘alternative’ social and religious
movements:
I took myself off to London to conduct fieldwork among a subculture of
people – several thousand at least – who thought of themselves as, or as
inspired by, the witches, wizards, druids, kabbalists and shamans of mostly
European lore. They met in different kinds of group: ‘covens’, ‘lodges’,
‘brotherhoods’ – which all ultimately descended from a nineteenth-century
group – the Golden Dawn – created by three dissident Freemasons in the
heyday of spiritualism and psychical research.
(2002: 121)
Drawing on fieldwork in Ohio, Charles Hurst and David McConnell explored

social change and conflict within the world’s largest and most diverse Amish
community. Their findings challenge over-generalised assumptions of the
Amish as pastoral communities that reject ‘modern’ technology in favour of a
simple, religious lifestyle, or a sub-culture that separates itself from non-Amish
neighbours:
Sitting quietly next to an Amish friend on our way to the Heritage

Historical Library in Aylmer, Canada, we were startled when the sound
of his cell phone broke the silence in the car … In another instance, an
Amish teacher, hearing of our interest in a particular lesson plan, opened a
cupboard and proceeded to run off a color copy of it on his battery-
powered copy machine … And when students arrived for a school
campout, we noticed that they sported the latest Nike and Adidas travel
bags, footwear and camping gear (but only in dark colors) … Mixtures
like this these are not anomalies; they are interwoven throughout the
fabric of Amish culture.
(2010: x)
Further work with the Amish community by David McConnell and Marilyn
Loveless challenged representations that equate Amish pastoralism and religious
tradition with environmental stewardship.
Over the past two decades, many of the popular myths about the Amish –
that they are slowly dying out, that they are a homogenous group of
technophobes, that they are ‘stuck in the past’ – have been convincingly
dispelled. Yet the image of the Amish as living in harmony with nature is
alive and well.
(2018: vii)
As well as forming physically located communities around local mosques or

churches, or within Parishes, many contemporary religious communities are
linked within much larger virtual networks. Simon Coleman’s research on
religious language and ritual has led him to consider worship via the internet,
which enables connections between global religious networks (Coleman and
Hackett 2015).
As the Covid-19 virus brought to the fore, internet linkages, and virtual
networks or communities, are now a central part of many people’s lives. This is
well expressed, for example, by the Japanese sub-cultural group, Otaku.
According to Mizuko Ito:
Otaku culture defies simple definition. Emerging first in Japan in the

1980s as a marginalized and stigmatized geek subculture, it has gradu-
ally expanded its sphere of influence to become a major international
force, propelled by arguably the most wired fandom on the planet …
Otaku have often been regarded as ‘sociopathic shut-ins out of touch
with reality’, but more recently, the term ‘suggests a distinctive style of
geek chic: a postmodern sensibility expressed through arcane knowl-
edge of pop and culture and striking technological fluency’.
(2012: xi; see also Galbraith 2019)
Language and identity

How do people ‘show and tell’ who they are? As implied in the previous
section on education, language itself is a key ‘plank’ of identity, containing
specifically cultural categories, concepts and values, and this is why retaining
traditional languages is often seen as central to the ability of minority
groups to ‘hold their own’ in larger multicultural societies. Just as reviving
the Welsh language has been an important development in defining
Welshness, indigenous communities all around the world struggle to keep
their own languages alive. Linguistic anthropologists have long played a vital
role in this endeavour, often recording entire language ‘orthographies’ so
that they are available to younger generations even if local language usage
lapses for a while.
In 2011 Barbara Sorensen and Jennifer Weston noted that: ‘In the United
States, 70 of the remaining 139 Native American languages will disappear in
the next five years unless immediate action is taken to teach these languages to
younger tribal citizens’ (2011: n.p.). They work with Cultural Survival to
address this issue: ‘For many Indigenous people, learning a language that was
rightfully theirs opens their eyes to their culture in ways they have never
experienced before’ (Sorensen and Weston 2011: n.p.).
The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, edited by Leanne
Hinton and Kenneth Hale (2013), was written in response to the 1993
UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages. Framed within the wider
context of environmental change, globalisation and the damaging effect
such phenomena have on linguistic and cultural identity, it includes chapters
on Native American languages, Maori, Hawaiian and Welsh. Each case
describes the projects being developed in and by indigenous communities in
an attempt to keep their languages alive.
A journey with linguistic anthropology

Jill Kushner Bishop
As a child I was always fascinated by language and culture, and I loved
hearing my grandparents pepper their English conversations with Yiddish
words and expressions. I rarely ever heard them speak exclusively in Yid-
dish, but the language was a part of them and a part of my family. As an
undergraduate I took some anthropology courses, but decided to focus
instead on my love of language and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in
Spanish. After a few months of teaching high school Spanish, I realised I
had so much more I wanted to learn. I accidentally stumbled upon linguis-
tic anthropology and immediately knew that I needed to do the PhD I had
been hesitant to pursue.
Inspired by my grandparents’ Yiddish, I decided to look at another Jewish
language, Judeo-Spanish – a dying dialect of Spanish spoken by descendants
of the Jews exiled from Spain in 1492. I did my fieldwork in Jerusalem, where I
focused on efforts to keep the language from disappearing. I had every inten-
tion of finishing my dissertation and getting a job in academia, but at an AAA
(American Anthropological Association) annual meeting, I found out about a
company that was looking to hire anthropologists and other social scientists to
work in a corporate setting. I spent two years helping companies understand
what people think, do and use. We went to people’s homes to interview them,
observe them in their environments, talk to them about how they organised
their stuff, and watch them shop online (all with their permission, of course!).
We also met people outside their homes, for example in the baking aisle at the
grocery store, to help a cake mix company understand people’s perceptions of
homemade versus store-bought. The world of user research fascinated me
then and continues to fascinate me now.
A few years later, I was hired by Chipotle Mexican Grill as a Language and
Culture Consultant to oversee programs in 130 restaurants in four states. A
majority of the employees were native Spanish speakers, and many of them
had limited English skills, so I worked with the restaurant managers to bring
job-specific English training to the stores. We also helped the managers
understand the cultures of their employees, and helped the employees
understand both US culture and Chipotle’s corporate culture.
In 2005, with a laptop, a cell phone, a stack of business cards and the
yellow pages (how times have changed!), I launched a consultancy business.
Initially the focus was similar to what I was doing with Chipotle: job-specific
language and cultural training. However, clients started requesting transla-
tion services, so we added that on. Then we started getting contacted by
universities that had audio and video recordings of research to be tran-
scribed and translated. Before I knew it, the company had morphed into a
translation agency that worked in over 75 languages. We eventually phased
out the training services to focus on translation, and although we work
across a variety of industries, the work I enjoy the most is corporate and aca-
demic research. From transcribing interviews with Syrian refugees for aca-
demics, to translating survey responses to help Airbnb’s internal research team
understand host and guest experiences – and everything in between – I love
building on my roots in linguistic anthropology and ensuring that everything we
do is anchored in a strong understanding of language and culture.
Inevitably, native languages play an important role in debates about political

independence. Jacqueline Urla conducted research on the Basque language
revival in northern Europe, chronicling the Basque people’s efforts to preserve
Euskara, reputedly the oldest living language in Europe (2006). More recently
she has focused on Catalonia, describing it as ‘a living laboratory’, undertaking
‘one of the most successful and longstanding language movements in Europe’.
She emphasises the value of qualitative research techniques in illuminating the
relationships between language, politics and social change (Urla 2013: 177).
While the socio-political struggle between Catalan and the more dominant
Castilian is often simplified in terms of incompatible languages and associated
identities, Kathryn Woolard and Susan Frekko found that for people living in
Catalonia – both native speakers and individuals from diverse backgrounds –
Catalan as a socially dynamic language in which linguistic choice is closely
intertwined with political process (2013). Pablo Giori underlines the importance
of language and traditional practices in what he describes as ‘cultural nationalism’,
a form of ‘bottom-up’ nation building (2015).
The potential for cultural nationalism to disrupt existing state configurations
came to the fore in debates about Scottish independence from the UK.
Although the Gaelic language in Scotland does not carry the political weight it
has achieved in Ireland, or which has been demonstrated by the revival of
Welsh in Wales, it forms part of the wider debate.
Ullrich Kockel has suggested that, in spite of a 55:45 vote against self-
determination in 2014, the long-term outcome of the Scottish campaign for
independence is far from clear. One of the issues that remains contentious is a
demographic imbalance in UK politics that lends weight to English interests
and policies and ‘makes the Union forever lopsided’ (2015: 2). Alexander Smith
points directly towards issues of identity in the referendum, highlighting tensions
between experiences and perceptions of ‘Scottish’ and ‘British’ identities, and
suggests ‘that affirmations of Britain during the independence referendum helped
empower an insidious, but largely taken for granted, discourse of imperial
nationalism’ (2017: 54).
It is plain that there are important ties between efforts to assert linguistic and
political independence, and the striving for equality that these express. This is
also the case in other kinds of linguistic activism, as illustrated by Audrey
Cooper’s account describing efforts to promote sign language for the deaf
community in Vietnam.
Linguistic anthropology, education and social change

Audrey C. Cooper
Imagine that you have traveled to Southeast Asia, to bustling Hồ Chí Minh
City in southern Việt Nam to observe a weekly meeting of community lea-
ders, to learn about their efforts to promote government recognition of their
language and language access in education, employment, and civic leader-
ship. You see about a hundred people seated on wooden chairs and a small
stage containing a white-board. Two people are on the stage addressing the
membership. The man watches his co-presenter intently as she moves her
hands in patterned sequences that are coordinated with facial expressions.
She is using Hồ Chí Minh Sign Language (HCMSL), and the purpose of the
meeting is to organise a social campaign to raise awareness about HCMSL.
The entire meeting is conducted with members alternating between
seated positions and the stage, so that everyone has clear visual access to
each other’s comments – and their aim is nothing less than educational
equality, requiring them to develop a plan for encouraging acceptance of
their language which only a few ‘hearing’ people understand.
This is the way my anthropology research began in Việt Nam in 2007.
Eventually, after studying HCMSL and Vietnamese and working with Deaf
community leaders, my research contributed to the design and implementa-
tion of an early childhood education project, training Deaf professionals to
provide family-based language/communication mentoring and training hearing
bilinguals to work as interpreters with language mentors in family homes and
educational settings. Sponsored by the World Bank, the Intergenerational
Deaf Education Outreach Project – Việt Nam ran for 5 years (2011–2016),
trained more than 100 personnel, worked with over 150 families, and facili-
tated conversations about the importance of Vietnamese Sign Languages to
Deaf children’s development and family cohesion.
Working with Deaf Americans as a nationally certified ASL-English interpreter, I
also learned about their struggles for basic social rights, such as access to infor-
mation and employment – and that these struggles are typical of Deaf commu-
nities around the world. My training as a linguistic anthropologist placed Deaf
community struggles in the context of social stigma – everyday assumptions
about groups that are incorrect and have a negative impact on their lives – and
also in a wider political and economic context. Conducting research that prior-
itises community collaboration and self-representation enabled me to see stigma
from a variety of perspectives, including those of people in positions of power
who make decisions intended to help Deaf people but which often end up caus-
ing them harm. For example, information and policies generated by government
officials, education specialists, political scientists, international development
workers, and the media often limit Deaf peoples’ potential because they limit the
use of signed languages in the first years of life, in school, and the workplace.
Fortunately, anthropology has produced vivid examples of small-scale
societies where Deaf and hearing people prefer to use signed languages for
everyday communication, including Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language in
Israel; Kata Kolok in Indonesia; Ban Khor Sign Language in Thailand; Chatino
Sign Language in San Juan Quiahije and Cieneguilla in Oaxaca, Mexico. More
work in this area is urgently needed as larger languages increasingly displace
smaller ones. Every language holds keys to unique forms of knowledge.
This is a powerful moment in history to be an anthropologist, as an
increasingly globalised world seeks better tools for understanding and
championing human diversity. Anthropological work with Deaf communities
has mushroomed over the past twenty years, finding new ways to explore
cultural, linguistic, political, and geographic phenomena.
History and memory

Closely aligned with the preservation of language diversity is the importance of
oral histories as a form of identity construction and self-representation. There is
a classic phrase that ‘history is written by the winners’. Thus the histories of
colonised communities have often been omitted from official records. The
phrase also underlines the reality that official ‘history’ is often ‘his-story’, ren-
dering women’s participation in events invisible. Uli Linke observes that today
ways of recording history have been radically enhanced:
The rapid emergence of global memory archives presents a novel challenge

for anthropological research. Media industries, commodity capitalism, and
digital technologies have altered the practices and possibilities of collective
remembering. Competing representations of the past are forged, deposited,
and exchanged in virtual space.
(2015: 181)
While this has indeed led to a flood of ‘competing representations’, the potential
to use film and audio recordings has broadened the range of possibilities con-
siderably. In this sense contemporary technology has intersected productively
with anthropological traditions of recording the oral histories that in non-writing
cultures particularly (but also in others) are a vital part of everyday life, transmit-
ting knowledge from one generation to the next, and enabling people to
describe themselves to themselves and to others.
Paul Connerton, whose classic monograph focused on ‘how societies
remember’, described even village gossip as a means by which ‘a village infor-
mally constructs a continuous communal history of itself’ (1989: 17). The
recording of oral histories as part of ethnographic research is an important
contribution to communities’ efforts to hold onto and represent an intimate
view of the past. This can be particularly important when lives are disrupted: in
the case of Chile, for example, the history of the Popular Unity party and its
progressive initiatives between 1970 and 1973 was lost during the ‘state-
implemented terrorism’ of the subsequent Pinochet dictatorship. Oral histories
offered a way to reconstruct some of the history that was lost or suppressed.
(Gaudichaud 2009: 58).
Memory, and thus identity, is also held in the material environment. As
noted earlier in this volume, this is particularly central for place-based com-
munities, such as indigenous Australians, whose intimate relationships with
their homelands includes the presence of ancestors in a sentient landscape. For
them sacred sites provide mnemonics for an entire body of traditional knowl-
edge, including ancestral creation stories, details on how to make use of and
sustain resources, and communal histories, including the trauma of the colonial
invasion. But all societies materialise their histories in engaging with the phy-
sical environment, thus the settlers who displaced the indigenous Australia
communities valorise the early homesteads, the remnant mine workings, and
the gravestones of early ‘pioneers’ in the same landscape (Stewart and Strathern
2003; Strang 2003).
There is a rich anthropological literature on how societies inscribe themselves
onto what archaeologist Barbara Bender described, in her seminal work on this
topic, as a ‘palimpsest’ of cultural landscapes (1993). In a broad sense, this encom-
passes all of the material activities – farming, building infrastructures etc. – through
which societies act upon their surroundings. Recently anthropological attention
has turned to how communities seek to make urban identities and make places for
themselves within cities (Cinnar and Bender 2007; O’Neill and Fogarty‐Valen-
zuela 2013). This area of research explores how immigrant communities form in
particular areas (Andrikopoulos 2017; Kleinman 2014), sometimes ‘place-
making’ around particular sites, such as civil rights memorials (Carter 2014).
It also addresses efforts to ‘green’ the city (Isenhour 2011), to create greener
communities via urban gardening (Harper and Afonso 2016), and the mixed
social effects of ‘environmental gentrification’ (Checker 2011).
Understanding how communal identities are materialised in a built environ-
ment is particularly clear in anthropological research on monuments (Tilley 2010).
The capacity for important edifices to express community belonging was also
brought home to me in a particularly enjoyable interdisciplinary project that I led a
few years ago on the topic of lighthouses (Strang et al. 2018). Originally built to
ensure the safety of shipping, and to mark the boundaries of national territories,
then made redundant by new navigational and communications technologies,
lighthouses have become much loved touchstones for coastal communities, to the
extent that they are replicated in miniature form to encapsulate local identities and
provide tourists with a souvenir (memory) of place:
Lighthouses have undergone a renaissance, providing a focus for local

community identity and cultural heritage. As such, their replication as
souvenirs becomes comprehensible. Attention to identity also allows us to
explore the ways in which, both materially and symbolically, the ‘body’ of
the lighthouse is a homologue that enables the expression not just of a
community’s persona, but also its territorial agency and ownership.
(Strang 2018: 4)
The capacity of the lighthouse to represent the body of the community also
serves to remind us that identity is embodied through phenomenological
engagement with places: by absorbing their visual characteristics, smells and
sounds. For example, the lighthouse project produced accounts of the memories
induced by the sound of foghorns. Thus Joshua Portway and Lise Autogena
described how, when it was decided to decommission the foghorns along the
British coast, a musical composition was conceived to bring 50 ships and a brass
band onshore together to sound a final Foghorn Requiem.
A foghorn is almost unique in that it is usually heard at a distance of several

miles, and the tone is formed by the local environment as much as by the
original horn. The sound is a unique encoding of time and distance, of
atmospheric conditions and of the millions of echoes and reverberations of the
physical landscape through which it travels. Foghorn Requiem was imagined
as a celebration of this lost sound and its emotional significance to a particular
landscape, memory and sense of belonging, but it was also intended as a
symbolic performance of the maritime culture in the North East of England
that could only be performed by the maritime community itself.
(2018: 154–6)
We therefore come full circle on the topic of identity, in observing that people
materially absorb their environments, via sensory experiences of hearing and
seeing and touching, and more literally through breathing the air and ingesting
the foods and drinks of the places they inhabit. Few things are more indicative
of community identity than a recipe for a special local dish. Aboriginal elders in
Australia tell me that local bush food is important because it is part of the
homeland that ‘grows them up’. In Europe we tend to say, ‘we are what we eat’.
There are thus multiple ways, from the local to the global, for anthropologists to
consider how identity is materially and socially created.
9 Anthropology and the Arts
Art and agency

All human societies produce art in some form, representing who they are not only
through language, oral history and written media, but also through multiple forms
of art ranging from the personalised production of body art (Ewart and O’Hanlon
2010) to statements of national identity (Eriksen 2010). All contain cultural ideas –
and often multiple cultural groups – who seek to express their particular beliefs and
values, and to maintain their cultural heritage. The anthropology of art thus offers
us a rich source of information about how people understand their lifeworlds, and
what they hope to achieve in these.
There is some linkage with the discipline of art history, which tends to focus
on the art of larger societies, tracing particular artistic ‘movements’ over time,
and with Cultural Studies, which focuses on contemporary media, usually in
industrialised societies (Lewis 2008). Anthropologists who specialise in the
analysis of art are also interested in these areas, but are more often focused on
the art produced by cultural groups, and concerned to locate their analyses in
an explanatory ethnographic context (Layton 2009; Morphy and Perkins 2006).
Within the sub-fields of anthropology itself, there is intellectual common
ground with cognitive and linguistic anthropology (Kronenfeld et al 2011), and
with research exploring the anthropology of the mind (Clark 2010; Dein 2019;
DeMarrais et al. 2004; Luhrmann 2011). A well-known debate about whether
there is a cross-cultural concept of aesthetics has widened into questions about
how and why things come to be seen as art (Morphy 1993, 2008). While
cultures may share a process for deciding whether objects or performances are
aesthetically ‘right’ there is much diversity in what they valorise and critique.
For example, examining carving and dance traditions in sub-Saharan Africa,
Robert Thompson points out that ‘Yoruba art critics are experts of strong mind
and articulate voices who measure in words the quality of works of art …
Yoruba artistic criticism may occur at a dance feast where the excellence of
sculpture and motion becomes a matter of intense concern’ (2006: 242).
As touched upon in the previous chapter, people’s engagements with their
material environments are both sensory and imaginative, so there are important
overlaps between the anthropology of art and the discipline’s thinking about
the senses (Howes 2005; Howes and Classen 2014; Pink 2010). Art and perfor-
mance elicit affective responses. Thus the anthropology of emotion is also part of
this picture (Beatty 2013): an affective response is one that both touches the
emotions and influences the mind. Thus the late Alfred Gell observed that art has
agency: via its capacities to ‘enchant’ and produce an affective response it acts
upon the viewer (or listener), comprising, in effect, a prosthetic extension of the
individual or collective artists’ intentions (1998).
As this implies, in addition to providing individual and collective ways to
express cultural and social identity, art has a number of agentive functions. It
provides a key method through which knowledge is transmitted between
generations; it communicates cosmological and religious beliefs; it serves,
within social and political arena, to express and promote specific beliefs and
values; and it constitutes, in many communities, an important and empowering
economic activity.
Aboriginal art in Australia illustrates all of these capacities. The traditional
role of bark, sand and now acrylic paintings, and the sculptures and body
art produced by indigenous communities, is to transmit the entirety of
Aboriginal Law (cultural knowledge) intergenerationally. It therefore pro-
vides an excellent avenue through which to understand the complexities of
indigenous lifeways. In a post-colonial context Aboriginal art has also
acquired a vital political dimension. The first petition on land rights was
presented to the Australian Government on a bark painting, and indigenous
art speaks for Aboriginal people in multiple local, national and international
arena. As Yolngu elders told Howard Morphy, it is ‘not just pretty pictures’
(2011). As indigenous art has become internationally renowned and mar-
keted transnationally it has also become both a way of upholding cultural
traditions within a contemporary social context, and an important source of
income and economic self-sufficiency:
The production, circulation, and consumption of Aboriginal acrylic paint-

ings constitutes an important dimension of self-production of Aboriginal
people and of the processes of ‘representing culture’ … This is a hybrid
process of cultural production, bringing together the Aboriginal painters,
art critics, and ethnographers, in addition to curators, collectors and dealers:
in short, an ‘artworld’.
(Myers 2006: 495)
In Australia, as elsewhere, art has a central role in representing history as well

as identity, often serving to challenge dominant historical narratives, and to
present alternate and minority accounts of events. In the face of right-wing
accusations of contributing to ‘black armband history’ contemporary Abori-
ginal artists, such as the Black Arm Band music theatre company, present
indigenous perspectives on the colonial era and celebrate the social activism
that enabled Australia’s civil and land rights movements.
Anthropology and the Arts 183
A comparative European example is provided by Arnd Schneider’s work,
which considers how art reveals contested views of cultural heritage. In a
project called ‘Traces’ focusing on objects such as death masks, Holocaust
memorials, and skull collections, he and his colleagues gathered diverse perspec-
tives on historical events, and their contemporary place in formulations of Eur-
opean and national identities (2020). The anthropology of art therefore provides
way of understanding what the producers of diverse representational forms are
trying to communicate to various audiences within particular cultural, political and
historical contexts.
Anthropology and museums

In many societies people’s major access to the art and material culture produced by
different cultural groups around the world is via museum collections. Ethnographic
museums bring objects and images into a space in which these can be explained and
understood. The role of cultural translator is obviously critical in this process:
‘Ethnographic museums and applied anthropologists have played a fundamental
role in the representation and interpretation of indigenous peoples, both in the
colonial and post-colonial periods’ (Stanton 1999: 282). Anthropology therefore
contains an entire sub-field of museum studies, focusing on the collection, curation,
conservation, analysis and exhibition of objects, photographs and films.
The discipline provides various routes to working in museums. Students can
undertake a general master’s and/or doctoral training in cultural anthropology
under the aegis of a major museum (as I did in the Pitt Rivers Museum in
Oxford), or they might do a specific training programme in Museum Studies:
for example, the Smithsonian Institution’s Summer Institute in Museum
Anthropology (SIMA) programme offers practical and theoretical experience to
future museum anthropologists: ‘Students learn about the significance of
museum collections, methods for examining and analysing museum specimens,
strategies for interpreting artifacts and their associated documentation, and how
to integrate data from museum collections within broader projects’ (Nichols
and Lowman 2018: 5).
Cara Krmpotich notes that as well as taking a practical approach to collections
management, such courses need to ensure that students have training in all areas
of museum work:
My background is in museum anthropology and material culture studies. I now

teach within a Museum Studies professional master’s program at the University
of Toronto that takes seriously the interrelatedness of practice and theory and
aims to create students who are ‘fluent’ across multiple museum roles.
(2015: 112)
Roles in museum anthropology have widened in recent decades from a pri-

mary focus on collections to require more external engagement with public
audiences and funding agencies. Thus Susan Mancino writes about the tensions
emerging from changes in the traditional public service role of museums ‘from
preservation, collection, and exhibition, to interpretation, education, and civic
engagement’, and she notes an increasing requirement to provide supporters
and funding bodies with measurable proof of visitor satisfaction (2016: 141).
Museums provide ways to consider the cultural heritage of any group, both
‘at home’ and further afield. For example, Robert Rotenberg and Alaka Wali
note the need for collections that reflect contemporary urban life:
The collecting of urban material culture should be considered by a broad

array of natural history and anthropology museums for the simple reason
that urban populations now represent the majority of people on earth. If
museums are to speak to current and future cultural patterns, we will need
to include documentation of urban dwellers’ lifeways.
(2014: 1)
Gabriel Alcalde writes about the National Museum of the Saharawi People,
established in 1998, remodelled in 2013, and located in the middle of a refugee
camp in Eastern Algeria. He analysed comments in the museum’s visitor books
‘to understand how the museum contributed to cultural heritage, participated
in the process of social cohesion, and supported the political struggle of a
people demanding their right to self-determination after decades of exclusion as
residents in a refugee camp’ (2017: 191).
Figure 9.1 Installation: Geographies of the Imagination, 2008. Photograph: Lydia

Nakashima Degarrod.
For cultural groups dislocated from their homelands, the preservation of their
cultural heritage presents particular challenges, but also becomes more vitally
important. Lydia Nakashima Degarrod describes some innovative methods of
documenting such experiences, making use of training in both anthropology and
the arts to create a collaborative art installation with nine Chilean political refugees.
Geographies of the imagination

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod
The central idea about creating an installation about the internal images of
exile came out of a meeting with a group of Chilean exiles who had
expressed a desire to tell their stories, consisting of five men and four
women who have experienced two forms of exile in the last thirty years. The
first occurred when they were expelled from Chile by the dictatorship of
Augusto Pinochet (1973–89). Secondly, a voluntary form of exile occurred
after their first return visit, during which they made the decision to remain in
the United States. They felt disillusioned with their homeland because of the
drastic social and economic changes that Chile had gone through under the
dictatorship. They also realised that living in Chile would create another form
of exile in their children who have been raised abroad.
I designed Geographies of the Imagination to fulfil their desires for a public
archive of their memories of long-term exile. They wanted to respond to the
misinformation propagated by the Pinochet dictatorship, which presented
the exiles as living a life of luxury, and the silence maintained by the post-
dictatorship governments about the exiles’ true situation. They felt that their
participation in this project would help them to recall the past, which they
buried in order to survive their lives as exiles, and provide a way of sharing
their stories of forced migration with their children.
Over a period of eighteen months, we created twenty-three monoprint ban-
ners representing their memories of forced migration, and nine videos in which
reflected on identity, belonging and the homeland. Ethnographic research was
essential for the creation of each of these forms of artwork as it informed my
understanding of the participants as well as the project itself. First, I conducted
library research on the psychological and sociological aspects of forced migra-
tion, and the history of the Chilean exile. Second, I conducted unstructured in-
depth interviews with each of the refugees to elicit and record their memories.
Third, I engaged in participant observation at social events in which the exiles
regularly congregate to in order to learn more about their social life. Finally, I
used my own experiences and memories of having been raised in Chile.
The process art making created a unique way of observing and partici-
pating in the creation of ethnographic knowledge that I wouldn’t have
learned in a traditional interview setting. For example, in the creation of
monoprint banners, facilitated by the plasticity of image creation, the exiles
had the rare opportunity of contemplating images about moments of the
past, to ponder and share their thoughts with me. And in the process of
being video-taped, they experienced nostalgic feelings as they interacted
with the places that have over the years triggered those feelings.
The installation consisted of nine monitors playing the videos dedicated to
each exile and twenty-three monoprint banners hanging from the ceiling. In
a separate section of the gallery, the audience was invited to reflect on their
experiences of migration by tracing their own journeys on blank maps.
Instead of the solitary reading of a text, viewers learned about long-term
exile in a social, immersive and sensory context. For the exiles, the exhibits
were an opportunity of learning more about each other experiences.
Ethnographic museums have a longstanding role as a way of engaging with

indigenous cultures around the world. Inevitably their collections represent a
range of complex historical relationships, with material provided by travellers,
colonists, and ethnographic researchers over a number of centuries. Post-colo-
nial critiques about historical modes of acquisition, and about who controls the
contemporary representation of cultural groups have given a lot of impetus to
reforms in which indigenous people have become increasingly involved in
museum curation itself, and as community partners in the management,
research design and presentation of exhibitions.
This has produced a two-way street, in which the development of research,
exhibition and education programmes link museums more closely with the
communities that were (and often continue to be) the source of the artefacts on
display. Many indigenous or ethnic communities have also established their
own museums, which can benefit from the exchanges of knowledge and
expertise supported by relationships with larger museum networks. Thus, as
Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto observe, museums are now involved in a col-
laborative and dynamic process of cultural production (2005). Writing about
the florescence of tribal museums and cultural centres in North America,
Patricia Erikson describes this as ‘places of negotiation between “autoethno-
graphic” (or self) portraits and representations framed by anthropological or
natural history paradigms’.
Increasing tribal involvement in taking on the power inherent in museum

representation has increased not only the visibility of tribal heritage
worldwide but also the possibilities that the tribal nations can take on the
responsibility of protecting their individual cultural heritage, thereby
increasing their power within the heritage management field.
(cited in Field et al. 2016: 86)
Lillia McEnaney, Maxine McBrinn and Antonio Chavarria interviewed a

number of anthropologists who work in and with museums:
Some of the respondents are Native, others are not; some trained for
museum employment, others received their training outside museum stu-
dies programs. All of the respondents find great personal reward in the
work that they are doing but also cite challenges that come from working
in small organizations and with sometimes variable support for their
institutions.
(2017: 99)
Kaila Cogdill has worked as an assistant curator at the Tulalip Tribes’ Hibulb
Cultural Center and Natural History Preserve in Washington State since 2014.
She notes that as well as tackling the continuing challenge of obtaining funding
for the museum, it is crucial to maintain the relevance of exhibits and pro-
grammes to attract visitors from within and beyond the tribal community:
When I attended the University of New Mexico in anthropology, there

was no museum studies department. I knew I wanted to be involved in
cultural centers and museums, so I interned at museums in New Mexico.
That would be my advice to people who are looking for work once they
graduate—intern and volunteer at places where you eventually would like
to end up and don’t just rely on the course work.
(in McEnaney et al. 2017: 101)
Rosemary Devinney manages a small tribal museum in southeastern Idaho: ‘I

am a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. I have knowledge of cultural
practices because I speak the Shoshone language … My research interest is
tribal language, culture, and history. I have an associate degree in marketing
and management’ (in McEnaney et al. 2017: 108–9). She believes a crucial part
of identity, cultural ownership and representation is that tribes are able to write
history from their own perspective and decide whether or not particular prac-
tices and beliefs should be made public. Although concerned that museums
may become obsolete in an age of modern technology, Devinney also
emphasises how important it is for young people to develop up to date and
relevant skills: ‘If they want to work in a museum, they should learn how to
use modern technology to create interactive exhibits. If they want to work in a
tribal museum, they need to study that tribe’s language, culture, and history’ (in
McEnaney McEnaney et al. 2017: 109–10).
Digital technologies have certainly expanded the ways in which museums
can communicate with communities, enabling them, as Rachel Smith says,
to ‘involve audiences in the co-production of expressions and experiences
of cultural heritage’ (2013: 117). They have also become invaluable in
widening public access to museum collections through online catalogues
and exhibitions, and Haidy Geismar observes that ‘digital technologies are
increasingly integrated into diverse practices of collection and collections
management, information management, curating, exhibiting and educating’
(2012: 266).
An increasingly collaborative relationship between museums and indigenous
communities has both required and enabled all parties to navigate some of the
issues arising from historical practices. One of the most sensitive ethical issues in
contemporary anthropology is dealing with the social and political legacy of the
collection and removal of indigenous human remains (Kakaliouras 2012). This
process has been assisted by legislation such as the Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA 1990). Stephen Nash and Chip
Colwell-Chanthaphonh describe this as ‘the single most important piece of
legislation in the United States affecting federally funded museums and their
relationship to federally recognized tribes’ (2010: 99).
NAGPRA is a federal law that establishes a process for federal agencies and
museums to return Native American cultural items: human remains,
funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony: to lineal
descendants, and affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.
The legislation also contains provisions for the intentional and inad-
vertent discovery of cultural items on federal lands, culturally unidentifi-
able and unclaimed cultural items, and penalties for noncompliance and
trafficking.
(2010: 99)
They acknowledge the law’s complexity and the very different ways in
which it is perceived by museum anthropologists: as a nuisance; as a threat to
research; as an opportunity; and as a route to ‘historical reparations and
restorative justice’ (2010: 99).
Chip Colwell underlines the importance of collaborating with religious and
political leaders of indigenous communities to arrange the return and reburial of
human remains (2017). This kind of sympathetic engagement has been con-
structive. As Tersigni-Tarrant and Shirley observe: ‘Physical anthropologists have
made great strides in correcting the misdoings of early practitioners and, in doing
so, have created an environment in which research and education is conducted
with the utmost respect and reverence’ (2013: 29). Thus Sonya Atalay describes
working with tribal elders to ‘bring together’ and prepare for reburial the frag-
ments of their ancestors’ remains that had been collected by a museum, sepa-
rated, stored in boxes, and later ‘excavated’ by undergraduate students (2018:
544). Similar endeavours have taken place around the world, for example in the
UK, Canada and Australia, where museums have worked collaboratively with
indigenous and other communities to resolve issues of repatriation and reburial
(Pullman 2018). They have also moved towards co-managing collections, and
co-designing exhibitions, ‘increasingly engaging in partnerships with groups other
than their local audiences, not least with regard to repatriating collections to the
peoples or countries from whence they came’ (Gabriel 2008: 12). Howard
Morphy’s influential work has placed the emphasis on understanding how objects
are valued by different groups of people, and the complex value-creation pro-
cesses in which museums are involved. His work challenges post-colonial
theories that place ethnographic collections in the past, presenting relationships
with communities as central to the future of museums (2019).
Of all the objects in museums, human remains most obviously contain inti-
mations of personhood and identity, but for many groups key – especially
sacred – objects encapsulating their cultural heritage are equally meaningful,
which is why NAGPRA also refers to ‘funerary objects, sacred objects, and
objects of cultural patrimony’ (1990: n.p.). Museums and libraries are also the
repositories of research-based knowledge that constitutes intangible cultural
heritage. Part of the dialogue between museums and indigenous communities,
therefore, is concerned with returning information to contemporary commu-
nities, and finding ways to share objects while also ensuring their conservation
(Svensson 2015).
There are complex issues about provenance, ownership, who should have
access to information and objects, and who should shoulder the responsibility
(and costs) of conserving artefacts that (often being made of organic materials)
can be fragile. The complexities are illustrated by a project described by George
Nicholas and his colleagues, an international research initiative designed to
address such matters: Intellectual Property in Cultural Heritage (IPinCH):
To accomplish this, a team of more than 50 archaeologists, lawyers,

anthropologists, museum specialists, ethicists and other specialists from
seven countries has been assembled, along with 25 partner organizations,
to explore the diverse values that underlie repatriation attitudes, decisions
and actions, and work to facilitate fair and ethical exchanges of knowledge
relating to cultural heritage. The seven-year project is funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada … Through these
studies and others planned, IPinCH is assisting descendant communities in
developing solutions to intellectual property issues that cannot be solved
through legal means alone. The result will be far more satisfying because
the studies are co-developed and co-managed by community members,
and they are the primary beneficiaries.
(2010: 11)
Anthropology recognises fully that cultural heritage is both tangible and intan-
gible, being not only embodied in objects, images and texts, but also in song,
dance, stories, performance and rituals. Less obviously, but just as importantly,
it is held in bodies of cultural knowledge, for example in the deep ecological
knowledge of place-based communities and their traditional methods of enga-
ging with and making a living from their homelands. This is illustrated by a
project that echoes similarly long-running debates about indigenous ecological
knowledge and fire management in Australia. Sean Dunham, an anthropologist
who works as a Heritage Program Manager for the USDA Forest Service,
describes how his training enables him to bring cultural heritage and forest
management issues together in the Chippewa National Forest in Minnesota.
Fire in the woods

Sean Dunham
What does an anthropologist do in a National Forest? The Forest Service motto
is ‘Caring for the land and serving people’ and our work strives to balance
multiple roles and interests including resource protection (including heritage
resources), resource extraction (mostly timber harvests), and providing a wide
variety of recreational opportunities for the public (camping, hiking, fishing,
etc.). In the Chippewa National Forest we also have an obligation to the Leech
Lake Band of Ojibwe based on treaties and our overlapping land base with their
reservation. My primary responsibilities are to ensure that Forest Service
activities such as timber harvests or campground development do not impact
or disturb heritage resources and to work with other land and resource man-
agers towards more integrated ecosystem management.
Heritage resources encompass a range of things including archaeological
and historic sites; historic buildings; cultural landscapes; and places that
have cultural meaning or significance relating to events or practices of the
people who live, or who have lived, here. For example, wild rice (manomin) is
an important resource to the Leech Lake Band that has subsistence and
spiritual significance in addition to being an element of Ojibwe identity. An
aspect of Ojibwe cosmology relates how they embarked on a journey from
the Atlantic Coast, across the Great Lakes, to what is now Minnesota in
search of a land where it was prophesised they would find food that grew on
water. That life and culture sustaining food source is manomin.
The Chippewa National Forest is named for the Leech Lake Band of
Ojibwe. Since Europeans came to the area the Anishinabe have been refer-
red to both as Chippewa and Ojibwe. About 90% of the Leech Lake Reser-
vation is within the National Forest and about 45% of the National Forest is
within the Reservation. The National Forest was established through an act
of the US Congress in 1908 intended, in part, to protect the Ojibwe living
here and provide benefits to them. As a result, the Leech Lake Band retains
the right to hunt, fish, and gather, among other things, on Chippewa National
Forest lands.
Working with the Leech Lake Band and university partners, we are
developing a project to examine the history of fire on the Chippewa National
Forest. While this is a local project, it also has resonance at a national level.
Catastrophic wildfires in the western US and Canada have become more
common over the past decade. Two critical factors associated with this
increase are climate change and landscape management. The Forest Ser-
vice’s aggressive fire prevention strategy over the past century has led to a
build-up of hazardous fuels which has contributed to the intensity of the
wildfires. As a result, the Forest Service has prioritised fuel reduction across
the entire National Forest system.
Figure 9.2 Sean examining a fire-scarred wood sample. Photograph: Robert

Ferdinandt.
Although the large wildfires of the western US are less common in northern
Minnesota, climate change and fuel load are increasing the risk in this area.
One way to reduce fuels is to carry out low-intensity prescribed fires to
consume fuels along the forest floor while minimising damage to the trees in
the overstory.
Concurrently, the Leech Lake Band has requested the Chippewa National
Forest to use fire more actively in our vegetation management strategies.
Ojibwe ecological knowledge relates that regular, low-intensity fire in the
forest understory creates and maintains habitat for many plant and animal
species that the Band uses for a variety of purposes including food (deer,
blueberries, etc.), medicine (sumac, wild bergamot, etc.), and other cultural
uses (white sage, birch, etc.).
Further, research has shown a historic use of fire as part of strategies
geared towards the enhancement and/or maintenance of habitats for plants
and wildlife similar to what has now been proposed by the Leech Lake
Band. A pilot study has been initiated on Star Island, which includes old
growth pine that predate the formation of the National Forest (1908),
including trees that are 300 years old with evidence of multiple fire incidents
(fire scars), as well as historical and archaeological evidence of human
occupation over the past 5000 years. The island is located within the Leech
Lake Reservation and remains culturally significant to the Band.
The Star Island Fire History project entails a partnership between the
Leech Lake Band, the Chippewa National Forest, the Leech Lake Tribal
College, and the University of Minnesota. The project will inform the broader
regional fire history framework as well as providing National Forest land
managers with a better understanding of the historical processes that have
shaped the landscape on the island. It may also provide insights for deter-
mining modern approaches to fire and forest management on the National
Forest that will facilitate hazardous fuels management while also ensuring a
more culturally appropriate model for implementing the Band’s desire to use
fire in the creation and maintenance of habitats on National Forest lands.
The project will benefit the Leech Lake Band and the students who partici-
pate on the project as well as the Chippewa National Forest fuels, silviculture,
and heritage programs. As an anthropologist I am well positioned to play mul-
tiple roles in a project involving western resource managers, Native American
elders, university scientists, and cultural history. This is why I love my job!
Heritage
International recognition that both tangible and intangible cultural heritage is
foundational to all groups – large and small – has led to an expanding field of
research and employment for anthropologists. Since the 1972 UNESCO
Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural
Heritage, UNESCO has played a vital role in designating heritage sites of
importance, backed up by legislation permitting the International Criminal
Court (ICC) to prosecute people who destroy these. Charlotte Joy observes that
the first ICC prosecution for the destruction of a World Heritage Site took place
in 2016, charging an extremist known to target cultural artefacts associated with
‘a uniquely African intellectual tradition’, but she also highlights some criticism of
UNESCO’s priorities, which appear to focus on archaeological sites in times of
conflict (2018: 15, 17).
Although UNESCO’s protection extends to heritage inherent in forests, land
and waterscapes, Mauro Agnoletti and Antonio Santoro point out that there is
still work to be done to integrate ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ issues. Heritage pro-
tection is often hampered by the predominance of a dualistic view of culture
and nature:
An approach to forest landscapes often employing the same tools used for
nature conservation has led to a definition of management tools mostly
based on ecological characteristics. The origin of forests and woodlands is
rarely interpreted as the result of human activities and protected and
managed accordingly … The fact that cultural values currently play a
limited role in SFM indicates the scant consideration given to the role of
culture and history.
(2015: 438)
There is clearly useful work for anthropologists in assisting UNESCO and other
international and national organisations, both in revealing cultural engagements
with environments, and in elucidating the complexities of local heritage issues.
Helaine Silverman notes the challenges of enacting international legislation:
Although saving and protecting many sites from destruction or deteriora-

tion, and admirably striving to achieve worldwide recognition of every
country’s or people’s contribution to the history of humankind, its imple-
mentation has at times engendered complicated and even conflictual local-
national-international dynamics of heritage administration and cultural
politics … Ethnography is a key tool of effective site management, for it
must engage local communities. Particularly as a national government
agency begins to move forward with the nomination of a site to the World
Heritage List, it is important for there to be a dialogue with local com-
munities so that they understand what may happen if the site becomes
World Heritage. They need to understand what development opportu-
nities are offered by tourism but also that the creation of a World Heritage
Site may impose limits on them, such as impeding other economic devel-
opment or even imposing some restrictions on altering the appearance of
homes or engaging in certain activities.
(2017: 122–3)
As we have seen, anthropologists have a key role in facilitating communication

between all parties in plans for development, including those hoping to expand
or manage tourist activities, which often focus on local communities’ capacities
to express their cultural heritage in ways that are socially, ecologically and
economically beneficial.
Tourism
Tourism has become an important area of research for anthropologists. Erve
Chambers has explored the complex issues that travel and tourism generate
about economic and social relations, environmental impacts, representation
and performance (Chambers 2020). Tourism has, in many ways, replaced the
colonial frontier as the place where different cultures meet and perform their
identities to each other. With globalisation it has become a major industry,
and one in which major political and economic inequalities become highly
visible. Tourism can be a double-edged sword, in both maintaining and
valorising traditional cultural practices, and providing economic self-suffi-
ciency, while also potentially commercialising and possibly distorting or
debasing cultural lifeways. As noted in Chapter 3, ‘ecotourism’ does not
necessarily deliver either ecological or social benefits. Much depends upon
the power relationships between local communities, government agencies,
and the tourist industry, and it is in mediating between these, and promoting
communities’ interests that anthropologists have a vital role. Less powerful
groups can face difficult choices about engaging in tourist industries in order
to make a living, or resisting pressure to ‘perform themselves’ for the gratifi-
cation of wealthier groups. Thus Xianghong Feng asks ‘who benefits?’ when
areas are opened up to tourism:
The Chinese government is making tourism an important rural develop-

ment strategy … The government sells development and management
rights to large for-profit corporations … Pleasant climate, stunning views,
‘colorful’ ethnic minority cultures, and the Ming Dynasty ‘Southern China
Great Wall’ are the primary tourist attractions in Fenghuang County.
Some researchers argue that this public–private partnership successfully
produces profits for developers and creates economic growth.
(2008: 207)
However, unless subject to a repressive regime, host communities are not pas-
sive recipients of the effects of tourism: they often find multiple ways to
negotiate relationships in ways that also fulfil their own needs. This is nicely
illustrated by Assa Doron’s research in the city of Varanasi:
Studies of tourism in the ‘Third World’ often focus on the far-reaching

economic, cultural and environmental consequences of tourism on local
populations. Scholars have argued that guest/host interactions reflect a
relation of domination … Such polarities tend to privilege the ‘guests’ as
the purveyors of change, while the creative and innovative practices of the
host group are rendered invisible … I examine the boatmen of Varanasi
and their role as culture brokers, negotiating the sacred city for visitors.
(2005: 32)
Tim Wallace has conducted research into international tourism, heritage and
conservation for many years, and is a co-founder of People-First Tourism. He
notes that the anthropology of tourism is a rapidly growing sub-discipline.
Anthropologists now work as ‘consultants, teachers, internship advisors, project
researchers, analysts, community development workers, and brokers between
NGOs or private enterprises and the community’ (2009: 11; see also Gmelch
and Wallace 2012).
Tourists are increasingly found in locations that were once the preserve of
anthropologists:
Today, formerly anthropologist-only, exotic, and peripheral four-S (sea,

sun, sand, and sex) tourism locales in countries like Indonesia and Costa
Rica – the poster child for ecotourism – have become so penetrated by
tourism that anthropologists have to study the role of tourism because it is
so ubiquitous.
(Wallace 2009: 5)
Kathleen Adams considers the ethical dilemmas of doing research in tourism,

where anthropologists might be asked to promote tourist spots or support ‘a
legitimized version of heritage-related events, artifacts, or performances’; and
Susan Stonich underlines the importance of ensuring community participation
in decisions relating to tourism and tourists, the difficulties arising from the
relationship between ecotourism and conservation, and the gap between ‘the
public rhetoric of international environmental organizations and their true
intent’ (in Wallace 2009: 12, 14).
Such work is important both ‘in the field’ and ‘at home’. For example, Mary
Lalone and a group of her students from Radford University, West Virginia,
were asked to help a small Appalachian community in the promotion and
representation of local tourism and ‘traditional mountain culture’. This resulted in
the development of an ‘anthro-planning approach’ which has since been repe-
ated in other communities concerned about local heritage tourism. ‘Anthro-
planning’ focuses on community participation, and the use of anthropological
field methods during the project design phase, so that the outcomes are fully
informed by ethnographic understandings of local lifeways (Lalone 2009: 16–17).
The outcomes, more often than not, involve some form of representational
activities, whether in the shape of a local museum exhibition, in the production
of artworks and artefacts (including souvenir art (Phillips 2006)), or performance
aimed at both internal and external audiences.
The performing arts
The study of art and performance sits alongside a longstanding anthropological
interest in rituals and ceremonies. All human societies have rituals: these are
often religious or semi-religious in nature, and intensely laden with cultural
meanings. As Victor Turner said, the performance of a ritual celebrates the
‘values, common interests and moral order’ of a group, and so binds it together
(1982: 10). Music, dance and theatre are equally central to the collective
composition of cultural life. Social drama entails an ‘interplay of event, specta-
cle, audience, and culture’ (Turner 1986: n.p.), in which identity and social
relationships are expressed and negotiated.
In anthropology, the study of the performative arts intersects with interests in
the body, phenomenological experience, proxemics (how people arrange
themselves spatially), the ways in which movement and gesture are culturally
inculcated, how stories are told. Richard Schechner’s influential work on per-
formance rests on the assumption that it ‘coexists with the human condition’
and ‘can take place anywhere, under a wide variety of circumstances, and in the
service of an incredibly diverse panoply of objectives’ (2003: ix–x). This gives
anthropologists with an interest in the performative arts a lot of scope: they
might, as Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius did, consider how theatrical perfor-
mances enables political protests about governance and development (2015); or
as Jonathan Marion has done, consider the cultural dynamics of competitive
ballroom dancing (2008).
In many societies dance forms part of formal ritual occasions, as well as
segueing into purely social or performative events, and into areas such as
health and wellbeing (Lochrie et al. 2018). Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and
Jonathan Skinner explore some of the many ways in which dance forms
have migrated around the world, as leisure or tourist commodities, as a part
of cultural heritage, as social or health activity. They suggest that ‘there is a
close relationship between dance and social change. Our contention is that
dance does not simply ‘reflect’ what happens in society or serve a particular
‘function’, but that it is often as central to social life as music and other
universal forms of expression’ (2014: 2). Felicia Hughes-Freeland’s work on
dance traditions in Java underlines the ways in which performative arts
articulate with social changes, charting how ceremonial dance traditions
have transformed into a form of national artistic expression, commercialised
for a growing tourist industry (2008).
Music similarly spans ritual and informal occasions, aesthetic pleasure, health
and wellbeing, and there is a large anthropological sub-field of Ethnomusicol-
ogy devoted to studying music in communities all around the world. This field
is very diverse: in Australia, for instance, it ranges from Fiona Magowan’s
research, which examines the songs used in indigenous rituals of mourning
(2007) to Elizabeth Betz’s work, which considers how is Polynesian youth in
Sydney and Melbourne engage in Australian multiculturalism via a ‘communal
hip hop scene’ (2014).
As in other sub-fields of anthropology, ethnomusicologists are keen to con-
sider what musical practices reveal about the social contexts from which they
emerge. For example, Kyra Gaunt describes the way in which African Amer-
ican popular music styles shape and are in turn shaped by the earliest games that
young black girls play: clapping, skipping, singing. These games contain musi-
cal, social and political lessons:
This is a story about the performance and politics of race, gender, and the body
in African American vernacular and popular music. It is also a contribution to
rethinking the ways we have represented blackness and gender in musicolo-
gical studies, offering an empowering way to approach it in the future.
(2007: 2)
The visual arts
Many kinds of representational activity involve the use of film and photo-
graphy and, as with other art forms through which identity is communicated,
much depends on who controls the process, and whether it involves a freely
chosen self-representation, or one decided by someone else. Thus David
Turton describes the ‘uneasy’ relationships suggested by tourist photographs of
the Mursi people, who wear large lip-plates that tourists find fascinating and of
course highly photogenic (2004).
Elizabeth Edwards’s influential work considers the photographic legacy of
colonial relations, and how this represents a particular historical narrative and
‘the anxieties that cluster around such narratives in a postcolonial and multi-
cultural society’ (Edwards and Mead 2013). She has also encouraged visual
anthropologists to consider the complex ‘cultural work’ done by photographs
as material objects ‘in which photographs become active in assemblages of
objects’ (Edwards 2012; see also Edwards and Hart 2004).
The kinds of issues that surround photography are equally relevant in
relation to film.
Who is in charge of the representational process remains important: anthro-
pologists have been critical of stereotypical images of indigenous people in
commercial films such as Walkabout (Roeg 1971), Crocodile Dundee (Faiman
1986), or The Gods Must be Crazy (Uys 1980), and television series such as Tribe
(BBC 2005–7).
Ethnographic film is a very different matter, providing a major tool for
communicating knowledge about cultures, but control of the process is vastly
more egalitarian than in the commercial film industry. Today, in accord with
wider moves towards the co-production of knowledge, ethnographic film-
making generally entails collaboration between anthropologists and host com-
munities. Thus Peter Snowdon, addressing the question as to who should be
responsible for deciding how events should be portrayed – the person behind
or in front of the camera – underlines the role of the filmmaker as an ‘ama-
nuensis’ (2016: 263). Sydney Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest seeks to overcome
stereotypical images of Native Americans (2014). Uvanga, which describes an
Inuit women’s collective was co-directed by a French-Canadian filmmaker
Marie-Helene Cousineau and an Inuk collaborator, Madeline Piujuq Ivalu
(Ivalu and Cousineau 2013). Michelle Dizon, as part of her research into dis-
placement and community identity in the Philippines, used filmmaking tech-
niques to gather histories of the indigenous Lumad communities seeking
sanctuary from violence, and combined their testimony with input from ‘con-
temporary media artists from the Philippines and its diaspora’ (2018: 66).
Sarah Pink observes that the theories and methods of visual anthropology
now play an increasing role in social intervention projects, providing ways to
access and represent knowledge that might not otherwise be easily available
(2009). For example, Christina Lammer’s ‘bodywork’ project used audio-visual
media to capture and study patient experiences and nonverbal interactions with
clinical staff during interventional radiology, with a view to communicating
these experiences to clinical staff (2009).
Dianne Stadhams used visual anthropological methods to explore the
complex relationship between tourism development and poverty reduction in
the Gambia. Working with Gambia television (GRTS) between 2000 and
2002, on a pilot project funded by the UK Department for International
Development (DfID), she developed a television programme highlighting the
potential socio-economic benefits of tourism in the region (2009). Jayasinhji
Jhala’s research was conducted in the aftermath of the 2001 earthquake in
Gujarat, India. Using visual ethnographic methods, he studied the actions of
various government and relief agencies, and television crews, and the subsequent
effects on how locals felt they should behave:
Immediately after the earthquake, regional, national, and international

media teams converged on this unfortunate area in search of ‘stories’ …
Their methods of eliciting information established a pattern that I will call
the ‘television method.’ It impacted on local expectations of the ways
inquiring individuals behaved and the ‘proper’ stance that was to be
adopted when they interviewed earthquake victims.
(2009: 174)
Contemporary technologies have provided many new methodological choices

for anthropologists aiming to produce collaborative visual accounts of their
ethnographic research. For example, Eric Montgomery’s photo-essay about a
salah Gorovodu ceremony in Southern Togo uses a qualitative photovoice
approach. Three research participants and the anthropologist collaborated to
produce and edit a ‘shared’ ethnographic account, seeking to more accurately
represent the much misunderstood ‘voodoo’ religion.
Photo-voice and shared qualitative approaches offer a way through the

morass of representation by equipping the agents themselves with the tools
of the researcher, and thus opening doors previously half-shut, allowing for
more holistic and emic understandings of the most important aspects of
culture: language, religion and identity.
(2017: 305)
Some anthropologists have used cartoons or graphics to communicate their work:

for example, Dimitrios Theodossopoulos experimented with graphic anthropology
to explore anthropological reflexivity (2016). And, especially for this volume, Alex
Pavlotski has produced a graphic illustration describing his efforts to assist commu-
nication between design experts and the people who use their products.
Early ethnographers used sketches and photography to record fieldwork sites,
and digital technologies have now made it easy to keep a detailed visual diary
of places and events (in sharp contrast to the photographic slide films that
required a careful rationing of image collection). Some ethnographers use their
own artistic skills in collecting images in the field. Michal Glikson, for example,
learned about jhuggis, or tent homes, in Pakistan in part by making observa-
tional field drawings.
Seeing through drawing

Michal Glikson
In 2011 while doing research for a project on nomadic painting in Lahore, I

met Safia, a woman from a family of Jhuggi wallahs, the name by which
squatters are known in Pakistan. Safia was living in a tent on the footpath,
and I sat down to talk with her. For the next few months, I hung out with
Safia, her husband Amanat, and her family of six children. I became fasci-
nated with their life, with their struggle against discrimination in Pakistani
society, and with the idea of voicing their story through painting. Two years
later, I returned to Lahore and reconnected with Safia.
I was fascinated by Safia’s jhuggi, or tent, a complex construction that
over time revealed itself as a logical, evolving structure. I learned about the
jhuggi through making observational field drawings, a process of investiga-
tion through line. My drawings were of a kind described by writer John
Berger as arriving out of a series of confirmations and denials which ‘bring
you closer to the object until finally you are as it were, inside it’.
The jhuggi was a mosaic of the found and the recycled. A collection of old
handbags, hung out of reach of small children, contained medicines; an old
yellow shawl tied hammock-style stored pots and dishes. The floor was a
large piece of carpet, the comfortable seat I sat on had come off a bicycle.
The fireplace was built of found bricks, and filled with broken crates, ready
for cooking the next meal. The jhuggi was more than a home: it was a
symbol of ingenuity and ecological architecture.
With Safia’s family I learned to film in the way of the ‘unprivileged
camera’ – an ethnographic style where the filmmaker takes up normal and
available positions. My films allowed me fetch up details for paintings. They
Figure 9.3 Michal Glikson, Safia’s jhuggi: IndoPak scroll III: Australindopak
Archive 2012–2016. Watercolour, oil, graphite, found material, gold
leaf, shell silver, paper, embroidered panels.
Figure 9.4 Safia’s jhuggi. Film still from documentary. Photograph: Michal
Glikson 2014.
also inadvertently became a way of witnessing and recording injustice. One

day I arrived at the jhuggi to find it surrounded by a mountain of bricks. The
family had been ordered to stack and ‘mind’ these by the plot’s security
guard. I filmed Safia and her children moving the bricks before helping.
Advocating for the family added to the complexity of trying to portray their
life in paintings, but I felt that it contributed in important ways to the story
emerging. Witnessing Safia’s family’s search for stability through attempts to
Figure 9.5 Michal Glikson, Safia and the Bricks: IndoPak scroll III: Australindopak
Archive 2012–2016. Watercolour, oil, graphite, found material, gold
leaf, shell silver, paper, embroidered panels.
acquire land and education for their children helped me to make paintings
that contradicted societal perceptions of the family as ‘lifestyle gypsies’.
Thus, advocacy became not only my way of contributing, but also furnished
material that gave the paintings complexity and dimension.
I discovered how the combination of artistic and anthropological methods
could connect me with a cultural design of significance and complexity in the
form of the relli or quilt patterns that encapsulate the life and history of Safia’s
community. In winter, quilts kept the family warm, but on sunny days, hung out
to air, they became colourful beacons in the grey urban wasteland, announcing
the family’s presence. To harass the jhuggi wallahs, city authorities would
confiscate the quilts and hold them ‘ransom’. In spring, Safia began stitching a
new quilt from recycled fabrics. She explained the quilts were heirlooms, pas-
sing from mother to daughter, who was regarded as marriage-ready when she
could make her own. Safia’s designs were inspired by the tiling on suburban
houses, and I wondered if these expressed her longing for a house of her own.
Asking if she sold her quilts, I learned that Pakistanis rarely buy them because
they bear the stigma associated with jhuggi-wallahs.
Many anthropologists use collaborative visual methods in the field, for

example, co-producing maps is an integral part of work on land claims, and
maps themselves are a rich source of information. For example, as a student I
was much influenced by Benjamin Orlove’s classic piece ‘Mapping Reeds and
Reading Maps’ which explored the politics of representation in Lake Titicaca
(1991). This led me to consider, in my own fieldwork, the very different maps
produced by indigenous elders, cattle ranchers, national parks officers and
miners in North Queensland and what these revealed about how they under-
stood the surrounding environment, and their priorities in engaging with it. I
was struck, in particular, by their contrasting representations of what lay
underground: for the Aboriginal community a non-material domain inhabited
by ancestral beings held in the waters of the land; for the pastoralists, aquifers
from which water could be extracted for their cattle; and, for the miners, a
potential geological source of wealth and wellbeing (Strang 1997).
It is also important that – as with written ethnographic accounts – host
communities have access to the visual material produced with anthropologists.
Andrew Connelly comments that despite being of ‘great historical value for
the communities in which they were filmed’, ethnographic films are often
difficult to access by the very people who made them possible. This raises
questions not just about who is able to view the films, but about how the
films are received and used by present and future generations. Issues of dis-
semination and control highlight the important relationships between ethno-
graphic filmmakers and their ‘host communities’. As he puts it, ‘I review my
experiences screening ethnographic films with Trobriand Islanders, their
reactions, and the various ways in which local communities regain ownership
of these films, including re-narration and renaming’ (2016: 3).
Ensuring ongoing access may mean, as I have found myself, copying original
visual material, photographs and videos for the community, and also recopying
or scanning them later in new digital forms. But this is always fruitful, given the
capacities of visual media to elicit further conversations with new generations.
This serves to highlight the methodological potential of visual material over
time, and of course a similar point can be made about material culture: like
images, artefacts lend themselves to being ‘unpacked’ conversationally.
The material arts

As with imagery and performance, visual anthropology provides multiple ways
to unpack objects, not just within museums, but in everyday life. Material
culture quite literally ‘materialises’ cultural ideas and values, and is thus a
potentially infinite source of analytic attention in every domain of human life,
and at every scale. There is a whole sub-field of anthropology devoted to
material culture studies (Henare et al. 2007; Hodder 2012; Tilley et al. 2006),
as well as lively theoretical debates about materiality itself (Bennett and Joyce
2010; Coole and Frost 2010). Daniel Miller and his colleagues consider the
relationship between the individual and society through the lens of material
culture (2009). Annemarie Money focuses on people’s living room decorations
to consider consumption practices within the domestic sphere (2007). Phillip
Vannini’s collection on material culture presents ethnographic perspectives on a
range of objects including cars and microwaves (2009).
On a larger scale, there is an emerging area of anthropology focused on
infrastructures, which considers the materials used, and the large-scale social
aims of major infrastructural developments (Appel et al. 2015; Harvey and
Knox 2012). Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox’s ethnography of roads in
Peru, for example, shows us why roads matter – how they materialise and
form relationships between communities and the state (2015). My personal
fondness is for water infrastructure, which has much to tell us about why
giant dams are so alluring, and how societies think about controlling ‘nature’
(Strang 2013, 2020c).
There is also a growing sub-field in the anthropology of architecture. This
began with a traditional interest in vernacular architecture and domestic dwell-
ings: for example, Pierre Bourdieu’s well-known analysis of Kabyle houses,
which sought to discern the ways in which these reflected social and political
arrangements (1992) and Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones’s analysis, which
explored the capacity of the home to mediate and reproduce familial relation-
ships (1995). A focus on domestic spaces has also generated questions about what
constitutes a ‘home’ (Cieraad 2006), and the ways in which houses can be seen as
‘biographical objects’ (Carsten 2018). Victor Buchli, providing an overview of
how anthropologists have studied architecture, explores issues such as public and
private spaces, gender, the materials and technologies of architecture and ‘what
architecture “does” – how it makes people and shapes, sustains and unravels
social relations’ (2013). Marie Stender makes the point that anthropological
insights are useful to architects and planners not only in relation to vernacular
architecture, ‘but also in the contemporary urban environments in which most
architects work’ (2017: 27), and Siobhan Gregory makes a related case for design
anthropology to help local communities to articulate their needs and interests in
urban regeneration projects (2018).
Thus the anthropology of art and material culture offers a great range of
opportunities: the chance to use creative research methods; infinite choices of
art and design traditions and issues to consider; and multiple ways to engage
with, understand and assist diverse cultural communities.
Conclusion
In this text, I have tried to give a brief overview of the kinds of things that
anthropologists do in the main areas of human social and cultural activity.
However, with a theoretical and methodological ‘toolkit’ that enables
researchers to understand and articulate social behaviour, there is really no area
of life that does not raise interesting anthropological questions, and it is
potentially useful in any and all of them.
Throughout the text I have deliberately not drawn any distinction between
anthropologists located in universities, those who are employed by other
institutions, or those who freelance as consultants or advisors. In reality, we
are all just doing anthropology in a variety of ways: those of us in university
posts – because we generally conduct research directly with communities –
often do research that could readily be described as ‘applied’, and even the
most abstract theorisations can (and should) inform clear thinking on policy and
practice. Equally, anthropologists working as consultants, or who are employed by
non-academic agencies or organisations, have a contribution to make to theore-
tical developments in the discipline, and to the ethnographic canon.
Interdisciplinary anthropology
Many of the kinds of anthropology described in this book could be said to be
inherently interdisciplinary. Medical anthropology; bioarchaeology; environ-
mental anthropology: all integrate other disciplinary areas. Richard Handler
draws attention to the links between anthropology and global development
studies (2013). Writing about the ethics of orangutan conservation, Alexandra
Palmer and her colleagues discuss interdisciplinary methods at the ‘human/animal
interface’ (2015). Jonathan Ventura and Wendy Gunn make use of what they call
‘medical design anthropology’ (2017). Many individual anthropologists draw on
different disciplinary areas in their own research, and many work collaboratively,
not only with the communities whom they study but with other researchers and
practitioners in the field.
If you have made it this far through the book, you will already know this
really. In every chapter we have seen anthropologists working with other
experts: not just within the social sciences, but increasingly with the natural
Conclusion 205
sciences too; in the environmental arena with botanists, biologists, ecologists,
hydrologists and climatologists; in areas of governance with political scientists
and economists; in education and health with sociologists and psychologists; in
the health field with medical specialists; in urban planning and housing with
architects and engineers; in museums and other representational spaces with
designers and artists; in the legal arena with lawyers. The list goes on, with a
fairly infinite diversity of possible disciplinary combinations.
Waffles and spaghetti

Christian Wells, Linda Whiteford and Rebecca Zarger
One of our students describes the relationship between anthropologists and
engineers as like that between waffles and spaghetti. Engineers, she says,
think like waffles, which are made up of structured little compartments into
which everything (like the butter and syrup) fits neatly. Anthropologists, on the
other hand, think like spaghetti: ideas start out as one little strand of noodle but
then quickly connect to a big messy mass (of pasta). We like this analogy
because it not only reveals how anthropologists discover complicated inter-
connections among people and things, but also how scientists in distinct fields
think very differently (but not better or worse) about conceptualising problems
and solutions. Working together requires understanding our differences.
We work with environmental engineers on water, sanitation and hygiene
challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean. We help local communities
solve practical problems, create positive policies or advocate on their behalf
when they’re not allowed a seat at the table where decisions about them are
being made. We really like working with engineers partly because of the way
they think, like waffles. They’re really good at figuring out the technical
details of a problem, such as how to get water from point A to point B, and
then coming up with creative solutions that are sensitive to the local context,
for example, using local resources or knowledge. But solving water and
sanitation problems is only half the battle! People have to make use of the
solution and keep it sustainable over the long term. This is precisely where
anthropological thinking and expertise fits in. As anthropologists, we work
with communities to identify the problem (the one strand of spaghetti) and
then, with our holistic perspective and deep respect for culture and history,
we follow that strand to the mass of pasta it’s connected to, which often
includes a mess of intersecting social, economic and political issues. This is
the broader context of the problem that must be identified and understood
in order to use the engineers’ technology to fix it, and anthropologists are
uniquely suited to do just this.
Let us give you an example. The southern coast of Belize was hit by a
massive hurricane in 2001 that devastated the community and destroyed
most of the water and sanitation infrastructure. People have been trying to
rebuild, but there are many different ideas about how to do this. Engineers
206 Conclusion
have been an important part of the decision-making process, identifying

alternative technologies that take advantage of the low-lying coastal environ-
ment while also protecting it for local livelihoods, including tourism. One
solution to the infrastructure problem calls for water and sanitation systems to
be centralised and managed by a single organisation (i.e. the local utility).
However, another solution calls for resources to be managed by individual
homeowners, such as with the use of private septic tanks. Both solutions
have advantages and disadvantages, so which one should residents choose?
This is where applied anthropologists come in. Talking with residents and
getting to know how they think about their environment, as well as their
history of experiences with it, helps us identify the cultural models they use
to make decisions. In other words, we are studying people’s perceptions of
environmental problems and how those perceptions influence their interac-
tions with the environment. This helps communities identify the stakeholders
who will be impacted by the solutions in different ways – whether in their
health, livelihoods or civic participation, for instance. Communities can use
that information to consider alternative futures and then select which solu-
tion, if any, best suits their needs and interests. In this way, I guess you
could say that we’re sort of like fortune tellers or ‘fortune-suggestors’, with a
crystal ball full of local cultural context.
To jump to the end of the story, in Belize, residents began to realise that
diverse stakeholders wanted to increase tourism opportunities in the region,
providing jobs and incomes for many local residents, but the residents
wanted to do so while protecting the environment and safeguarding public
Figure 10.1 Placencia Peninsula Integrated Water Project notice, Placencia,

Belize. Photograph: Christian Wells.
Conclusion 207
health. Residents ultimately chose a centralised water and sanitation system,

but not without years of debate and sometimes controversy. Most of the con-
troversy, we found, stemmed from some stakeholders not being given a say in
the design or implementation of the system. Through conversations and
observations in the community over several years, we observed that equit-
ability in decision-making was lacking, leading to certain groups of people
being left out of the discussion. We recommended to the local utility that, in
order to improve relations and better engage with community members, they
find ways to incorporate local voices into infrastructure planning and develop-
ment. We also recommended ways the local village governments might med-
iate the relationship between the utility and residents, providing ways to collect
and voice residents’ opinions more effectively.
Were our suggestions successful? The jury is still out. The centralised
system is still in the planning stage, although it’s inching closer to comple-
tion. But now another problem has arisen… The community recently saw the
arrival of cruise ship tourism, which created new challenges, including
increased demands on water and sanitation (as well as energy), and con-
cerns about how to meet those demands with limited resources. It looks like
waffles and spaghetti will continue to be needed!
Over the two decades there has been an important ideological shift in many gov-
ernments’ approaches to research: a demand that it should be more utilitarian, solving
‘real world’ problems, and demonstrating ‘value for money’ (Hall and Sanders 2015;
Pink et al. 2017). This has been accompanied by increasing recognition that the most
pressing problems facing humankind – anthropogenically caused climate change,
environmental destruction, massive social inequalities and political conflict – cannot
be addressed sufficiently from specialised disciplinary perspectives. Complex problems
require multiple perspectives: a 360o view comprised of diverse disciplinary and cul-
tural understandings. In response to this recognition, funding agencies are encoura-
ging collaborative teamwork approaches, and pushing the natural and social sciences
and the humanities to work together.
Many problems require an interdisciplinary approach in the first place – not,
as Darryl Stellmach and his colleagues point out, one that tries to stick dis-
ciplines together in the middle of an emergency:
Social scientists, anthropologists in particular, have been recognised as

important players in disease outbreak response because of their ability to
assess social, economic and political factors in local contexts. However, in
emergency public health response, as with any interdisciplinary setting,
different professions may disagree over methods, ethics and the nature of
evidence itself. A disease outbreak is no place to begin to negotiate dis-
ciplinary differences.
(2018: n.p.)
208 Conclusion
My personal view is that interdisciplinary research can be a very fruitful
endeavour for anthropologists. Having run a research Institute of Advanced
Study since 2012, which traverses the entire disciplinary spectrum, I have found
it invaluable to be approaching this task with a background in anthropology.
Our discipline is the perfect starting point for any interdisciplinary collabora-
tion. Why? Two big reasons really: first, we have a great big theoretical fra-
mework that holistically encompasses every domain of human life, and every
aspect of people’s engagements with their material environments. This provides
potential areas of common ground with every other disciplinary area. Second,
anthropology is intrinsically open to alternate ways of thinking, and our train-
ing provides major skills in cross-cultural translation – the process of enabling
communication between radically different worldviews – which can readily be
redeployed to enable exchanges of knowledge between the particular lan-
guages, ideas and values of specialised disciplinary areas.
That is not to say that interdisciplinary research is easy. Contemporary
researchers work in a highly competitive and insecure funding environment
which leaves them short of time and money and long on rivalries and anxieties.
The majority of research situations in which disciplines come together tend to
be more ‘multidisciplinary’: specialised areas run in parallel doing their own
thing, often with unequal status and voice, and differential access to resources.
Participants must struggle to navigate territoriality, anxieties about disciplinary
identity, and stereotypical visions of each other. All too often, particularly in
projects led by powerful STEM sciences, anthropologists find that they have
been tagged on as an afterthought and are expected, like shamans, to ‘inject the
people stuff’ into the equation via some magical process that has not been
properly articulated. They are asked to cram big holistic ideas into a narrower
disciplinary frame, and to reduce rich qualitative data into physical science
brevities. Many colleagues have expressed concern that such circumstances, and
demands for rapid and utilitarian research responses, risk compromising the in-
depth integrity of ethnographic research. Alan Barnard also points to the diffi-
culty of integrating the major sub-fields even within anthropology itself (2016).
So when I wave the ‘let’s do interdisciplinary research’ flag at anthropology
conferences, my colleagues sometimes take on a ‘once bitten twice shy’ look,
and the suggestion that interdisciplinary research projects might actually be led
by anthropologists creates a frisson of unease.
But why not? Interdisciplinary projects really need a large and holistic intel-
lectual approach, which seeks connections and enables communication
between their disparate areas. They need to be set into a proper explanatory
context – given ethnographic grounding so that more specialised participants
can see how their contributions fit into the whole picture. They need facilita-
tion, mediation, and sometimes conflict resolution. They need non-judgemental
critical reflexivity; a high tolerance for differences, and an awareness of how ste-
reotypes can get in the way. All of these are things that anthropologists are well
accustomed to providing in their own disciplinary endeavours.
Conclusion 209
So I would encourage students thinking about studying anthropology to
think, also, about how this might help them to engage with diverse intellectual
perspectives, and provide leadership in bringing these together.
Pulling an interdisciplinary project together to the extent that the participants
achieve genuine exchanges of knowledge and ideas takes a lot of hard work, goodwill
and a strong commitment to equality (Strang and McLeish 2015). It is not enough
just to address a common problem: a joint project must also share overarching or
‘meta’ research questions; find theoretical common ground; decide what constitutes
data and the kinds of methods and analysis that can bring different datasets together;
people must learn each others’ languages at least to the extent that they can grasp the
basics of how others are thinking. But – and this is why I am waving this flag – as
anthropologists know very well, genuinely engaging with diverse worldviews, whe-
ther cultural or disciplinary, can be hugely enlightening for all concerned, permitting
original and imaginative thinking, and novel solutions to problems.
So I would encourage students in anthropology to make the most of
opportunities to undertake training in working with other disciplinary areas
(Pelto 2016; Strang and Bell 2013), and to consider how people are bringing
different areas of expertise together in addressing shared questions (Robson and
McCartan 2016).
Anthropology with students from different disciplines

Nursem Keskin-Aksay
Anthropology and ethnographic method have been always my main aca-
demic path, but sharing the practice and experience with students who have
never seen what anthropology can do adds another dimension. During my
ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, I had the chance to teach anthropological
methodology and postcolonial theory courses at Üsküdar University Post-
colonial Studies Research Center (PAMER). The students were from different
disciplines like Psychology, Political Science.
I decided to introduce them to ethnography to enable them to understand
how micro-level experiences can reflect systemic power relations, social
structures and how knowledge is reproduced. Ethnographic fieldwork trips
into the city for participant observation, fieldwork notes, photos and inter-
view records, enabled them to observe, ask relevant critical questions, pay
attention to the different dimension of contexts, begin to connect to the-
ories, analyse, and to be careful about ethical issues.
This experience convinced me that anthropological approaches can be
very effective for different disciplines. In Ibn Khaldun University I began to
teach a cultural anthropology course for the Counseling Psychology and
Guidance department. Through conceptual and theoretical discussions, and
related fieldwork experiences and assignments, students began to under-
stand how the social structures that individuals inhabit have different layers,
which they can never imagine or consider without the deeply investigating
210 Conclusion
Figure 10.2 Listening to the narrative of the coffeehouse, owned by Tacettin,

with my students at historical Fatih Horse Bazaar, 2019.
methods of anthropology. Thus, they have been equipped with the tools of
anthropology for the application in their profession.
Transferring anthropology
Not everyone who trains in anthropology goes on to employment as ‘an
anthropologist’. Some use it as a strong foundation for other training; others
Conclusion 211
simply carry their anthropological skills into different areas of work. One of the
beauties of the discipline is that it provides forms of expertise that are eminently
transferable to other career paths. The most obvious directions are the ‘people
oriented’ careers, such as social work, human resources, counselling, conflict
resolution, mediation, education, charity/NGO work, diplomacy, government,
conservation, tourism, legal work … Anthropological skills even come in useful
for politicians: for example, the late Mo Mowlam studied anthropology at
Durham University before making an outstanding contribution as New
Labour’s Northern Ireland Secretary:
She was … a refreshingly different politician who gave New Labour a lot
of its original zing. She helped to modernize her party and to beat a new
path towards peace in Northern Ireland. Much of this stemmed from her
personality, but the breadth of her political understanding and her effec-
tiveness in handling people and communities demonstrate the continued
value of training in anthropology for policy makers and politicians.
(Bilsborough 2005: 28)
There are many less obvious avenues opened up by training in anthropology

too, such as employment in social science publishing, science writing, and
journalism. Marcus Helbling, for instance, found it easy to make use of his
anthropological training in becoming a sports journalist:
I’ve never worked as an anthropologist: I started working as a sports

journalist during my studies. But I’ve always tried to find anthropological
issues in sports. I just got the chance to start working as a print journalist
for a newspaper. Today I work as a TV-journalist for Swiss television.
Most anthropologists are open minded, with sensitivity and interest for
‘the other’. They have the advantage of being scientists with a broad
approach – and research methods in anthropology can often be used in
journalism as well.
(Personal communication 2006)
In reality, an ability to analyse situations critically, and understand how groups

and organisations work, is a major advantage in any career, even those that
don’t focus directly on ‘people’ issues.
Future anthropology
As demonstrated by the range of examples in this book, anthropology is a
multicultural and diverse profession, and rapidly becoming more so. The dis-
cipline originally grew out of exchanges between European scholars and a
range of host communities, but there are now professional anthropologists in all
nations and in many sub-cultural groups, and a rapidly growing number of
indigenous anthropologists.
212 Conclusion
As well as changing demographically over the last century, anthropology has
been transformed by successive waves of new theories and methods. It remains
dynamic, constantly reflecting on its assumptions, and seeking new ways to
understand humankind. There are some obvious continuities in its central
curiosity about human lifeways, and many perennial areas of interest, but the
topics upon which anthropologists conduct research, and the contexts in which
they do so, are constantly changing.
There are also some important changes in how anthropologists work, which
reflect shifts in how research is supported. Increasingly they are encompassing dif-
ferent disciplinary areas in their own training. The GSAP survey data discussed in
the introduction to this volume reveals that over a third of respondents have a
post-graduate qualification in another discipline, 10% of which are PhDs
(McGrath et al. 2018: 15). Anthropologists are also working more collaboratively
with other researchers, and this trend towards multi- or interdisciplinary teamwork
seems to have considerable momentum. Disciplinary identities remain important
to academics, but many universities around the world are making significant efforts
to encourage cross-disciplinary teaching and research.
Outside the academy, anthropologists are increasingly involved in policy
developments, and there is a need for more ‘public anthropology’ which engages
audibly and visibly in societal debates. As illustrated by the inclusion of anthro-
pologists and other social sciences in SAGE, the UK government’s Scientific
Advisory Group for Emergencies, political leaders are beginning to realise that
‘the people stuff’ needs to be addressed with proper expertise. Thus there is a
widening range of opportunities in the field.
Why do what anthropologists do?

What kinds of people become anthropologists? The diversity of ‘what anthro-
pologists do’ means that the discipline attracts people with equally diverse cul-
tural backgrounds, interests, beliefs, ideologies and aims. However, it is possible
to say a few things about what anthropologists have in common. More than
anything, I think they share a burning curiosity to understand how the world
works and why people act in the ways that they do. They want to see ‘the
whole picture’ so that they can make sense of what is going on. Along with
this lively intellectual curiosity, they have to be able to gather, manage and
analyse a lot of data systematically and rigorously, which suggests a need for
considerable organisational ability and discipline. Even if they work ‘at home’,
anthropologists have to be comfortable with change: being in strange places,
dealing with strangers, embarking on unfamiliar activities, eating different
foods, and above all, engaging in a non-judgemental way with ideas and beliefs
that may be radically different from their own. Obviously, it helps if they are
generally inclined to like people and are good at getting along with them!
Although the aim of this text has been to describe ‘what anthropologists do’,
and to demonstrate the practical applications of anthropology and the potential
career directions that it offers, I’d like to conclude with a comment about ‘why
Conclusion 213
anthropologists do’. Why do people choose to spend their lives doing some-
thing that is plainly pretty demanding? Some motivations have peeped through
in the autobiographies included in the text. There are plainly some pragmatic
reasons: anthropological training gives people a lot of choice in the range of
careers open to them, as well as making them very employable. It is also flex-
ible – something that can be put to use in just about any context. But there are
deeper motivations too: for many of us anthropology is about understanding
and potentially leading social change – doing something that makes a positive
difference.
Being able to feel that one’s time is usefully spent, and not wasted on
something pointless is certainly a major bonus. Another major reward is the
pleasure of unravelling the puzzle of human behaviour. To understand what is
going on underneath the surface is immensely satisfying. And perhaps above all,
anthropology is exciting: humans are sufficiently complicated and diverse that
there is always more to learn and intriguing things to consider. Fieldwork
brings a host of new experiences. So a career in anthropology is often intel-
lectually and sometimes literally an adventure: a journey to interesting ideas,
people and places.
Glossary
advocacy representation promoting the rights and interests of particular

human groups, or those of non-human beings and ecosystems
Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) mediated conflict resolution fra-
mework, presented as an alternative to adversarial legal methods
Anthropocene, the the definition of a period in which human actions have
been a key driver of change on Earth
cosmology, cosmological beliefs a particular group’s or society’s vision of
‘how the world works’, which may be religious and/or secular
cultural heritage the tangible and intangible expressions of culture passed
from one generation to the next
cultural landscape a physical and ideational landscape formed by specific cultural
beliefs, values and practices
cultural mapping a process of collecting data on a specific cultural landscape,
sometimes linked with ‘counter-mapping’
counter-mapping the creation of culturally specific maps that present an
alternative to dominant representations of landscape
counter-movements political movements challenging dominant societal
values, beliefs and practices
cultural translation a role often carried out by anthropologists, which entails
interpreting the realities of a particular cultural group to others (and possibly
vice versa)
diaspora a cultural, religious or ethnic community dispersed internationally
discourse a specific, culturally and historically produced way of describing
the world
Glossary 215
discourse analysis the process of analysing and revealing the ideas and values
embedded in particular discourses
ecocide actions resulting in the destruction of ecosystems
ecological justice the protection of non-human rights
empirical based on evidence: experience or experiment
epidemiology the scientific study of epidemics
ethnobotany, ethnobiology, ethnoscience local (often indigenous) forms of
knowledge relating to flora and fauna, and to the material environment; can
be subsumed under the broader term ‘traditional ecological knowledge’
ethnography an in-depth, holistic account of a particular group or community
genetic modification (GM) a controversial form of genetic engineering
usually associated with agriculture
globalisation the transformation of local or regional phenomena to a global
scale; an idea of a unified global society and economy
governance the control and direction of a society or group
hypothesis a theory to be proved or disproved by reference to evidence, a
provisional explanation
infrastructure material and social arrangements shaping relationships between
people, and between humans, other species and the material world
interdisciplinary collaboration entailing an exchange of knowledge between
disciplinary areas, leading to an outcome that could not have been achieved
by separate endeavours
lexicon dictionary
life course analysis an ethnographic method that involves examining people’s
life histories within a particular context
material culture studies the study of human-made objects
materialism theories concerned with the dynamic relations inter-connecting
material and social domains
multidisciplinary work involving different disciplines in the same project
native title a legal concept recognising indigenous forms of land ownership
NGO-graphy the study of non-governmental organisations and their activities
orthography a word list recording an oral language, and applying linguistic
expertise in ensuring consistent spelling and pronunciation
216 Glossary
participant observation a research method that entails participating in the
daily life of the study community, and observing and recording events
participatory action research (PAR) collaborative research that assists
communities in the achievement of their aims
pedagogy the science of education, methods of teaching and learning
political ecology the study of how social, political and economic factors affect
environmental issues
population displacement where people must leave their homes as a result of
natural, political or technological events and disasters
repatriation the return of objects (usually from museums) to their place and
society of origin
social movements the spread of ideologies across groups nationally or
internationally, creating agitation for change
spatial relations the spatial distribution of people in relation to a material
environment and/or landscape in accord with specific cultural norms
traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) specifically cultural (often indigenous)
knowledge about local ecosystems (see also ethnobotany, ethnobiology and
ethnoscience)
transdisciplinary topic or problem-oriented research conducted without
foundation in any specific disciplinary base
user experience (UX) testing evaluating the outcomes of design, often
associated with digital or business anthropology
Appendix 1: Studying Anthropology
In most educational systems there are three major levels of study in anthropology:
undergraduate degrees, master’s degrees and doctorate degrees. At an under-
graduate level anthropology can be readily combined with ‘sister’ subjects like
archaeology, history, political science, sociology, human geography, and poten-
tially with other areas, such as development studies, environmental studies, edu-
cation, psychology, business management, architecture and urban planning. Many
undergraduate courses also have an honours year, which leads students towards
research and further study.
It is sometimes possible to shift across to anthropology from other disciplines
at a master’s level, by doing an intensive taught course, possibly followed by a
second year focused on research.
An honours undergraduate degree or a master’s in anthropology are both
useful qualifications for carrying anthropological skills into a variety of careers.
With either one of these it is also feasible to consider doing the doctoral
research that is the major qualification for practising as a professional anthro-
pologist. When students reach this stage, they usually look for a university
department that can provide experienced supervision in the area that they want
to study. Sometimes they make a direct approach to the person whose research
they feel their interests relate to most closely. As anthropology is one of the
‘original’ scholarly disciplines, it is offered in most good universities. In thinking
about where to study, prospective students should consider whether a uni-
versity has a well-established anthropology department, and whether this is
staffed by professional anthropologists who, as well as being teachers, are also
active researchers.
All of this information is readily available on university websites, and a quick
search will find lists of universities in each country, and their contact details.
Most are also happy to send prospective students further information, and many
hold open days and career days at which it is possible to talk to staff. University
websites generally list the people who are specifically responsible for student
applications at each level of study.
Prospective students might also want to visit the journals that publish
anthropological research and the websites of anthropology associations to get a
wider view of what is going on in the field (see Appendix 3 for a list of these).
Appendix 2: Suggestions for Further
Reading
General texts about anthropology

Aldenderfer, M. (chief ed.) 2020. Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Oxford, New
York: Oxford University Press, http://www.oxfordre.com/anthropology
(accessed 17 December 2020).
Andreatta, S. and Ferraro, G. 2013. Element of Culture: an applied perspective,
Boston, MA: Wadsworth, CENGAGE Learning.
Auge, M. and Colleyn, J. 2006. The World of the Anthropologist (trans. J. Howe),
Oxford: Berg.
Brown, N., de González, L.T. and McIlwraith, T. (eds) 2017. Perspectives: an
open invitation to cultural anthropology, open access e-book (http://perspectives.
americananthro.org), Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
Durrenberger, E. P. and Erem, S. 2015. Anthropology Unbound: a field guide to
the 21st century, 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Elton, S. and Hampshire, K. 2020. ‘An Introduction to Studying Anthropology’,
video posted by Jon Cheek, UniTasterDays, YouTube. (An introduction to
studying Anthropology at university | UniTaster On Demand, YouTube.)
Ember, C., Ember M. and Peregrine, P. 2005. Anthropology, Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson, Prentice-Hall.
Haviland, W., Gordon, R. and Vivanco, L. (eds) 2006. Talking about People:
readings in contemporary cultural anthropology, Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
Metcalf, P. 2005. Anthropology: the basics, New York: Routledge.
Nolan, R. (ed.) 2013. A Handbook of Practicing Anthropology, Chichester and
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Pawluch, D., Shaffir, W. and Miall, C. (eds) 2005. Doing Ethnography: studying
everyday life, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Pink, S. 2006. Applications of Anthropology: professional anthropology in the twenty-
first century, London: Berghahn.
Pountney, L. and Maric, T. 2015. Introducing Anthropology: what makes us
human? Cambridge: Polity.
Rapport, N. and Overing, J. 2014. Social and Cultural Anthropology: the key
concepts, 3rd edition, London, New York: Routledge.
Appendix 2: Suggestions for Further Reading 219
Careers in anthropology
AAA. N.d. Advance Your Career section, https://www.americananthro.org/
AdvanceYourCareer/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1783
Coleman, S. 2011. ‘Teaching Anthropology Today’, Teaching Anthropology
(Journal of the RAI), 1(1): 3–11.
Copeland, T. and Francois Dengah II, H. 2016. ‘Involve Me and I Learn:
teaching and applying anthropology’, Annals of Anthropological Practice, 40(2):
120–33.
Driessen, H. 2013. ‘Going Public: some thoughts on anthropology in and of
the world’, Teaching Anthropology (Journal of the RAI), 19(2): 390–3.
Ellick, C.J. and Watkins, J.E. 2016. The Anthropology Graduate’s Guide: from
student to a career, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Fedorak, S. 2017. Anthropology Matters, 3rd edition, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Field, L. and Fox, R. (eds) 2007. Anthropology Put to Work, Oxford: Berg.
Gooberman-Hill, R. 2014. ‘Facing Outwards. Anthropology Beyond Acade-
mia: Apply at the ASA Decennial Conference, Edinburgh, June 2014’,
Anthropology in Action, 21 (2): 42.
Kedia, S. and Van Willigen, J. 2005, Applied Anthropology: domains of application,
Westport, CT: Praeger.
McGrath, P., Acciaioli, G. and Millard, A. 2018. Report on the Preliminary
Findings of the 2018 Global Survey of Anthropological Practice, Perth: University
of Western Australia, World Council of Anthropological Associations.
Nolan, R. (ed.) 2013. A Handbook of Practicing Anthropology, Chichester and
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Nolan, R. 2017. Using Anthropology in the World: a guide to becoming an anthro-
pologist practitioner, New York and London: Routledge.
Pink, S. 2006. Applications of Anthropology: professional anthropology in the twenty-
first century, London: Berghahn.
Podjed, D., Gorup, M. and Bezjak Mlakar, A. 2016. ‘Applied Anthropology in
Europe: historical obstacles, current situation, future challenges’, Anthropology
in Action, 23 (2): 56–63.
Society for Applied Anthropology. 1949–. Human Organization: Journal of the
Society for Applied Anthropology, Washington, DC: Society for Applied
Anthropology.
Society for Applied Anthropology. 1978–. Practising Anthropology, Oklahoma
City: Society for Applied Anthropology.
Stein, F., Lazar, S., Stasch, R., Robbins, J., Sanchez, A., Candea, M. and
Diemberger, H. (eds) 2020. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com
(accessed 17 December 2020).
Sunderland, P. and Denny, R. 2008. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research,
Oxford: Berg.
220 Appendix 2: Suggestions for Further Reading
Teaching anthropology
Alexander, P. 2017. ‘Introduction: teaching anthropology in uncertain times’,
Teaching Anthropology (Journal of the RAI), 7 (1): 1–3.
Basu, P. 2016. ‘Anthropology Education and Public Engagement: Where do
we go from here?’ Anthropology Today, 32 (3): 3–4.
Coleman, S. 2011. ‘Teaching Anthropology Today’, Teaching Anthropology
(Journal of the RAI), 1 (1): 3–11.
Hall-Clifford, R. 2012. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: teaching in the field’,
Teaching Anthropology (Journal of the RAI), 2 (2): 1–2.
Hall-Clifford, R. and Frank, G. 2012. ‘Teaching for Human Rights Advocacy
in Guatemala: the case for transdisciplinarity’, Teaching Anthropology (Journal of
the RAI), 2 (2): 27–36.
Spruce, R. 2016. ‘Studying anthropology’, Teaching Anthropology (Journal of the
RAI), 6: 26–7.
Stefanelli, A. 2017. ‘The Afterlife of Anthropological Teaching’, Teaching
Anthropology (Journal of the RAI), 7 (1): 4–14.
Appendix 3
Anthropology associations and networks

American Academy of Forensic Science https://www.aafs.org/
American Anthropological Association (AAA) http://www.aaanet.org/
American Association of Physical Anthropologists https://physanth.org/
American Ethnological Society https://americanethnologist.org/
Antropologia2.0 https://antropologia2-0.com/en/
Anthropological Association of Greece http://www.aee.gr/english/1contents/
contents.html
Anthropological Association of Ireland http://anthropologyireland.org/
Anthropological Association of the Philippines (UGAT) https://www.ugat-a
ghamtao.org/about-ugatAnthropological Association of Sweden (SANT)
https://sverigesantropologforbund.org/sant-in-english/
Anthropology Matters Postgraduate Network http://www.anthropologyma
tters.com/
Anthropology Southern Africa (ASnA) https://www.asnahome.org/Asociación
de Antropología de Castilla y León (AAC-LMK) http://www.antropologia
castillayleon.org/
Asosiasi Antropologi Indonesia (AAI) http://asosiasiantropologi.or.id/
Associação Brasileira de Antropologia (ABA) http://www.portal.abant.org.br/
Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia (APA) https://www.apantropologia.
org/apa/
Association of Anthropologists and Ethnologists of Russia (AAER) https://
aaer.co/
Association for Anthropology and Gerontology https://anthropologyandger
ontology.com/
Association Française d’Ethnologie et d’Anthropologie (AFEA) https://afea.hyp
otheses.org/Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand
(ASAANZ) http://asaanz.rsnz.org/
Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth
(ASA) http://www.theasa.org/
Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism https://asen.ac.uk/
222 Appendix 3
Association for the Study of Food and Society https://www.food-culture.org/
Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology http://www.aima-underwa
ter.org.au/
Australian Anthropological Society http://www.aas.asn.au/
British Association of Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology https://
www.babao.org.uk/
Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) http://barabeta.bara.ari
zona.edu/instruction/
Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA) http://www.cas-sca.ca/
Česká Národopisná Společnost (ČNS) http://www.narodopisnaspolecnost.cz/
Colegio de Antropólogos de Chile (CAC) https://www.colegioantropologos.cl/
Colegio de Etnólogos y Antropólogos Sociales (CEAS) https://www.ceas.org.mx/
Colegio de Graduados en Antropología de la República Argentina (CGA)
http://www.cgantropologia.org.ar/
Croatian Anthropological Association (HAD) https://croanthrosoc.wixsite.
com/croanthrosoc/home
Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA) http://www.casaonline.cz/
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie https://www.dgska.de/
Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community (EPIC) https://www.epicpeople.org/
European Association of Social Anthropologists http://www.easaonline.org/
Finnish Anthropological Society (SAS) http://www.antropologinenseura.fi/en/
home/
Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe http://forensicanthropology.eu/
Hong Kong Anthropological Society (HKAS) http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ant/
hkas/
Indian Anthropological Association (IAA) http://www.indiananthro.org/
Institut Catalá d’Antropologia (ICA) https://www.antropologia.cat/
Instituto Madrileño de Antropología (IMA) https://ima.org.es/
International Association for Southeast European Anthropology (InASEA)
http://inasea.net/
International Society for Ethnology and Folklore https://www.siefhome.org/
International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES)
https://www.waunet.org/iuaes/
Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) https://isranthro.org/
Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology (SIAC) http://www.siacantropologia.
it/intro_EN.asp
Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (JASCA) http://www.jasca.org/
index-e.html
Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology (KOSCA) https://koanth.org/
Latin American Association (ALA) https://www.asociacionlatinoamericanadea
ntropologia.net/
Latvijas Antropologu Biedriba (LAB) http://antropologubiedriba.wikidot.com/
National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) https://www.
practicinganthropology.org/
Appendix 3 223
Network of Applied Anthropologists UK http://www.theasa.org/networks/
apply.htm
Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) http://nafa.uib.no/
Norwegian Anthropological Association (NAF) https://www.antropologi.org/
Pan African Anthropology Association (PAAA) http://www.africananthrop
ology.org/
Polish Ethnological Society (PTL) http://ptl.info.pl/aktualnosci/
Political Ecology Society (PESO) http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/eco~1.htm
Royal Anthropological Institute http://www.therai.org.uk/
Serbian Ethnological and Anthropological Society (SEAS) http://www.eads.org.rs/
Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) https://
www.salsa-tipiti.org/
Society for the Anthropology of Religion http://sar.americananthro.org/
Society for Applied Anthropology, USA http://www.sfaa.net/
Society for Cultural Anthropology https://culanth.org/
Society for Linguistic Anthropology http://linguisticanthropology.org/
Society for Medical Anthropology http://www.medanthro.net/Society for
Visual Anthropology http://societyforvisualanthropology.org/
Taiwan Society for Anthropology and Ethnology (TSAE) http://www.taiwana
nthro.org.tw/
Tunisian Association of Anthropology (TAA) http://www.ata.org.tn/
Uruguayan Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology (AUAS) http://
www.auas.org.uy/
Wenner-Gren Foundation http://www.wennergren.org/
World Archaeological Congress https://worldarch.org/
World Council of Anthropological Associations http://www.wcaanet.org/
Anthropology journals
Agriculture and Human Values https://www.springer.com/journal/10460
American Anthropologist http://www.aaanet.org/publications/ameranthro.cfm
American Ethnologist https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/
15481425
American Journal of Physical Anthropology https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journa
l/10968644Anthropology in Action https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/
journals/aia/aia-overview.xm1
Anthropology Matters Journal https://www.anthropologymatters.com/index.php/
anth_matters
Anthropology and Medicine https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/canm20/current
Anthropology Today https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtap20/
current
The Australian Journal of Anthropology https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/
17576547
224 Appendix 3
City & Society https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1548744x?ta
bActivePane=
Cultural Anthropology (Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology) https://
journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca
Cultural Survival Quarterly https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-
survival-quarterly/44-2-future-indigenous-health
Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.
wiley.com/journal/21539561
Curator: The Museum Journal https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/21516952
Current Anthropology http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/current
Ethnography https://journals.sagepub.com/home/eth
Ethos https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15481352
Evolutionary Anthropology https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15206505
Forensic Science International https://www.journals.elsevier.com/forensic-science-
international
Games and Culture https://journals.sagepub.com/home/gac
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/
hau/index
Human Organization (Journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology) https://
sfaajournals.net/loi/humo
Human–Wildlife Interactions https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/hwi/
Irish Journal of Anthropology http://anthropologyireland.org/ija/
Journal of American Folklore https://www.afsnet.org/page/JAF
Journal of Anthropological Research https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/jar/
current
Journal of Business Anthropology https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/jba
Journal of Forensic Sciences https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15564029
Journal of Material Culture https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mcu
Journal of Political Ecology http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute https://www.therai.org.uk/publica
tions/ journal-of-the-royal-anthropological-institute
Medical Anthropology https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gmea20/current
Medical Anthropology Quarterly https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
journal/15481387
Museum Anthropology https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/
15481379
Museums and Society https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas
Oceania https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/18344461
PoLAR https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15552934
Practicing Anthropology https://sfaajournals.net/toc/PRAA/current
Sapiens https://www.sapiens.org/
Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies https://sites.otago.
ac.nz/Sites
Social Anthropology https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14698676
Appendix 3 225
Teaching Anthropology (Journal of the RAI) https://www.teachinganthropology.
org/Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal http://teachinglearninganthro.
com/Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Development
http://the-institute-ny.com/WEB%20PAGES/JOURNAL/uasjournal.htm
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Index
activism 25–6, 32, 44, 85, 101, 105–6, Natalie 166–8; Logan, Ryan 142–3;
162, 176, 182; see also advocacy; Madhu Rajagopalan, Daksha 83–5;
participatory action research (PAR); Maxwell, Keely 101–2; Nakashima
social justice Degarrod, Lydia 185–6; Powell,
advertising 117, 127–8, 131; see also Elisabeth 118–19; Pyke, Michelle
communications media; consumer 76–7; Rios, Aisha 112–13; Roberts,
behaviour; market research; Charlotte 145–9; Schipf, Arjati 77–9;
representation Scott, Katherine 85–6; Sear, Cynthia
advocacy 6, 11–31, 94, 111, 143, 201; 130–2; Sillitoe, Paul 48–51; Strang,
see also activism; expert witness Veronica 72–4; Taylor, James 45–8;
agriculture 19–21, 38, 46, 52–5, 61, 74–5, Toussaint, Sandy 76; Vindrola-Padros,
80–9, 144; see also water management Cecilia 137–9; Wells, Christian 205–7;
alcohol 18, 115, 151–4; see also drugs Whiteford, Linda 205–7; Wilk,
animals, ecology, 69, 83–6, 89, 95; animal Richard 12–16; Wright, Thomas 64–6;
rights 27–8, 74, 79–81, 85–6, 88, 94 Zarger, Rebecca 205–7;
(see also rights, non-human; wildlife);
human-animal relations 79–82, 204 biodiversity 26, 28, 52, 54, 89; see also
anthropology associations 221–3 cultural diversity; sustainability
apartheid see race
architecture and urban planning 98, 112, capitalism 62, 124; see also globalization
133, 203, 205 ceremonies see rituals
art 182, 199–201; body art 181–2; dance charities 40, 115, 211
78, 181, 189, 196; material culture 6, children: adoption 113; care 17, 29, 53,
64, 76, 133, 169, 183–4, 202–3; 113–14, 131; education 108, 110, 117;
performance 169, 181–2, 189, health 36, 158, 160–2
194–7, 202; see also cultural heritage; citizenship 25, 33, 62, 107, 116, 172–4;
film and photography; identity; see also identity; nationalism
museums; representation; tourism climate change 22–3, 59, 64, 85, 91,
asylum seekers 28–31; see also refugees 96–7, 190–1, 207; see also energy use
autobiographies: Balzani, Marzia 29–31; cognition 107, 181; see also senses
Birckhead, Jim 56–8; Cooper, Audrey colonialism 24, 34, 41–2, 68
177–8; Dennis, Simone and Dawson, communications media: internet, social
Andrew 151–4; Dunham, Sean 190–2; media 3–4, 41,104–6, 115, 117, 126–7;
Espig, Martin 91–3; Glikson, Michal newspapers 30, 123, 126, 211; radio
199–201; Groen, Sisse 140–1; Haines, 126, 132; television 1, 126, 198; see also
Sophie 98–100; Howard, Penny advertising; film and photography;
122–4; Johnson, Ginger 157–8; museums
Keskin-Aksay, Nursem 209–10; conflict 23–4, 32, 39, 103, 106, 143;
Kushner Bishop, Jill 175–6; Langley, cultural 20, 54, 80–1, 193; land, water
Index 265
and resources 28, 61, 67–8, 86, 91, 94, elderly, ageing 36, 163
169; religious 11; see also genocide elites 33, 47, 88, 98, 116
conflict resolution 6, 19, 40, 92, 103, 112, employment, general 18, 53, 56, 61,
122, 208, 211; mediation 6, 208, 211; 63, 94, 141, 177; for anthropologists
see also cultural translation 5–6, 98, 135–6, 165, 187, 192,
conservation 28, 50–1, 54–5, 63, 79, 210–11
86, 89, 193, 195, 204; conservation energy 43, 72, 90, 102, 114–15, 207;
areas 50 (see also national parks); see also climate change
organisations and agencies 16, 26, 51, environmentalism, environmental
59; see also environmentalism; manage- organisations 63, 116, 195; see also
ment: land and resources; sustainability conservation; sustainability
consumer behaviour 96, 117–20, 128–33; epidemics, epidemiology 138, 150,
see also advertising; market research 156–60; see also disease
cosmology 51, 70, 74, 80, 132, 182, 190; equality and inequality 24, 42, 111, 114,
see also myths; religion; worldviews 124, 161, 170, 176–7, 209; gender
counter-development 68; see also equality 26, 53, 124–5; see also
development; globalization; social feminism; gender relations
movements ethics, general 61, 63, 79, 106, 135;
crime 27, 29–31, 98, 110, 145, 164–7; advocacy 19, 79, 204; biological and
see also drugs forensic anthropology 144, 146, 188;
cultural diversity 54, 70, 73, 80, 109, business and organisations 37, 128, 135,
144, 169; see also biodiversity; 195; ethnographic practice 6, 12, 16,
multiculturalism 31, 46, 76–7, 100, 103, 120, 188–9,
cultural heritage 55, 63, 78, 179, 181–96; 209; medical anthropology and health
memorials 179, 183; see also art; mining 66–7, 114, 161, 163, 207; museums,
heritage; museums; representation; 144, 188–9
tourism ethnobotany 21, 51
cultural landscapes and waterscapes 179, expert advice 17, 25, 165; expert witness
190, 103; see also sacred sites 11, 18, 28, 30–31, 74, 167
cultural mapping 25, 45–6, 73, 78–9;
see also methods; sacred sites fair trade 53, 66
cultural translation, cross-cultural famine 32, 38–9, 44; see also food;
communication 28, 43, 50, 62, 75, homelessness; poverty
121, 175 see also conflict resolution farming 19, 52, 61, 65, 80, 87–9, 131,
149–50; see also agriculture
dams 22, 39, 47, 59–60, 85, 90, 93, 203; feminism 24, 162; feminist anthropology
see also water, management 53, 161, 170; see also equality; gender
development 13, 22–3, 27, 32–9, relations
43–55, 60–4, 66–8, 75, 94; Sustainable fieldwork 7–8, 11, 126, 138, 199; see also
Development Goals 27, 73; see also methods
counter-development film and photography 2, 178, 183,
disease, illness 39, 94–5, 143–50, 155–8, 197–200, 202; see also art;
162–4; infectious 136, 156–8, 207; communications media;
see also epidemiology methods: visual anthropology
discourse 19, 21, 34, 94, 101, 106, 116, fishing, fisheries 27, 47, 49, 51, 60, 88
160, 172, 176; see also language food 20, 52, 87, 90, 144, 149, 180; aid
displacement 22–3, 28, 39, 60, 62, 179, 38; diet and lifestyle 86, 143, 150;
198; see also refugees marketing 150; nutrition 114, 143–44,
drugs 18, 114–5, 151, 154, 165; see also 150; production 52, 54, 61, 86, 88–90,
alcohol; crime 150; rights 17;security 20, 38–9, 87,
150; waste 95; see also famine; poverty;
ecology 69, 73, 75, 82; ecological jus- rights, human
tice see rights, non-human; political forests 13, 16, 46, 50, 88, 94, 189–93
ecology 87 fracking 91–3
266 Index
garbology 95; see also waste internet see communications media
gender 103, 110, 114, 143, 147; gender irrigation see water management
equality and rights 124–5; gender
relations 53; kinship 29–30, 132, 161; see also genetics;
gender roles and identity 151, 161, 164, human reproduction
197; sex 146–7, 167, 170; sexuality knowledge: anthropological 12, 17, 30–2,
170–1; see also equality; feminism 38, 47, 51, 84, 93, 178; bioarchaeolo-
genetics 144, 146, 148, 166, 171; gical, biological anthropology 146,
modification (GM) 20–1 167; co-production of 197–8, 209;
genocide 164, 166; see also conflict indigenous, local 19–21, 25–6, 48–52,
globalization 62, 116, 150; see also 74, 108–9, 186–9; traditional, health
capitalism; counter-development 138, 163; traditional ecological 56,
governance 33, 74, 88, 98, 115–16, 70–1, 75, 189, 192, 205; transmission
159; NGOs 6, 31–40, 75, 112, 195; 178–182
see also policy
land claims 25, 28, 201; see also rights,
health 39, 94–5, 136, 143–50, 155–8, human; native title
162–4, 207; see also disease; mental language 16, 63, 99, 121, 125, 169,
health 173–6; discourse 8, 19, 21, 34, 94, 101,
heritage see cultural heritage 106, 116, 172, 176; minority and
homelessness 39, 98, 111, 136; indigenous 85, 108–9, 171, 176–8,
see also famine; poverty 187; see also literacy; pedagogies
hospitals 137–9, 143, 160, 163; law 13, 26, 29, 56, 74, 114, 161, 182,
see also organisational analysis 188; regulation 114, 116, 154
host communities, relationships 2, 6–7, literacy 108; see also language
11–12, 63, 194–5, 197, 202, 211;
community service 16 management: agencies and organisations
human organs, trade 67 98, 102, 121, 125, 130; fisheries see
human reproduction 160–1; see also fishing, fisheries; health 40, 138, 143,
children; genetics; kinship 155, 160; indigenous 51, 54–8; land
human resources 211 and resources 24, 26, 46, 50–1, 61, 69,
human rights see rights 74–9, 88, 189–93 (see also sustainability),
hydrology, hydroelectricity see water museums and heritage 183, 186–7;
management waste 65–6, 95; water 26, 58, 61, 74–5
(see also water: management)
identity 161, 169, 172, 178, 180–2; manufacturing 75, 117
business, corporate identity 122 market research 113, 117, 128–30; see also
(see also organizational analysis); cultural advertising; consumer behaviour; social
identity 80, 103, 144, 162, 172, 174, marketing
179, 187 (see also stereotypes); digital media see communications media
identity 127; ethnic identity 169, 172; mediation 6, 11, 20, 24, 52, 61, 100, 194,
gender identity 170 (see also gender 207–8; see also conflict resolution
roles and identity); globalization and mental health 38, 111, 115, 155
identity 62, 66, 104 (see also citizenship; methods: cultural mapping 25, 73, 202;
nationalism); indigenous identity 39, fieldwork 7–8, 11, 101, 125–6, 199,
109, 198–9; national identity 172, 176, 209; focus groups 46, 102, 128–30;
181 (see also nationalism); racial identity interviews 7–8, 113, 128, 140, 175, 185;
171–2 (see also race; stereotypes); see also literature review 7; oral histories 178–9,
art; film and photography; 181; participant observation 3, 7–8, 82,
representation 84, 100, 127–8; participatory action
illness see disease; health research (PAR), participatory action 24,
infrastructure 59–61, 90, 92, 115, 179, 46, 155; surveys 5, 46, 57, 128, 130–1,
203, 205–7 140, 176; visual anthropology 197–8,
interdisciplinary research 46, 50, 68, 102 202 (see also film and photography)
Index 267
migrants, migration 23, 28, 39–40, 104, privatisation 27, 67–8, 73, 88, 115, 137;
108, 111, 155, 166, 179; see also refugees see also ownership; rights: land and
mining 21, 56–8, 93–4, 120 resources
multiculturalism 107–8, 121, 125, 129, prostitution see sex work; sex trafficking
172, 196, 211; see also cultural diversity
museums 183–9, 195; indigenous race, racism 40, 90, 103, 124, 171–2, 197;
involvement 186–9; repatriation see also identity; nationalism; stereotypes
188–9; see also art; communications recycling 102, 114
media; cultural heritage; performance; reflexivity 35, 72, 104, 106, 135, 138,
tourism 199, 208
music 73, 180, 182, 196–7; see also art refugees 23, 28–30, 38–9, 163, 166,
myths 50, 151; see also cosmology; 176, 184–5; asylum seekers 28–31;
religion; worldviews see also migrants, migration
religion, religious beliefs 41–2, 51, 74,
nationalism 104, 171–6; see also citizenship; 198; groups 11, 30, 40–2, 161, 169,
globalization; identity 172–3; practices 18, 158, 164, 188,
national parks 11, 54–5; see also conservation 196; see also cosmology; myths
areas representation 20, 23, 35, 96, 151, 163,
native title 25, 55–7, 78; see also land 169, 173, 178; art and performance
claims; rights, human 183–7, 194–8, 202; museums 183,
nursing 138, 145, 160, 163 186–7, 205; self 177–8; see also art;
cultural heritage; film and
oral histories see methods photography; museums
organisational analysis 36, 63, 117, rights, human 17–19, 21, 23, 32–3, 37,
121–2, 125 40, 67, 94–5, 122–4, 166; health 67,
ownership: knowledge 20, 187–9, 202 161–3, 94; identity 170; indigenous
(see also rights, intellectual property); 12, 24–7, 56, 58, 60, 88–90, 97;
land and resources 24–8, 68–9, 74, 87, intellectual property 20, 51, 184; land
115 (see also land claims; rights: land and resources 13–14, 24–6, 49, 56–8,
and resources; privatization) 60, 87–90, 182–4, 190; water 26–7,
58, 87; see also land claims; land and
pedagogies 108–9; see also language resources: native title; ownership;
performance see art privatisation
pharmaceuticals 20, 53, 114, 136; rights, non-human, ecological justice
see also drugs 27–8, 74, 85–6, 88, 94; see also animals:
policy, policy advice 9, 32, 57, 85, animal rights
90, 98–106, 116, 211–2; economic rituals and ceremonies 29, 78, 101, 107, 126,
policy, development 34, 43, 50, 66; 158, 173, 196, 198; food 144; mourning
educational policy 108–9; environ- 164; see also cosmology; religion
mental policy 22, 55, 72, 74, 94, 123;
fisheries policy 88; health policy 94, sacred sites 25, 55, 70, 73, 179; see also
114, 136, 143, 151–3, 162–3; housing cultural landscapes; cultural mapping
policy 111–12; immigration 23; see also senses, sensory experience, phenomen-
governance ological experience 84, 130, 180–2,
political ecology 87 196; see also cognition
pollution 27, 64–6, 91–5, 136; air pollution sex see gender
94, 136, 147; see also waste; water sexual behaviour 115
pollution sex work, sex trafficking 17, 23
poverty 12, 29, 32, 46, 49, 64, 89, smoking 18, 151
98, 111, 198; aid 36–8, 42; crime social impact analysis 59–60, 154
18, 29; education 107; health 67, social justice 31, 42, 53–4, 87, 172; see also
136, 150, 160; see also famine; activism; participatory action
homelessness social marketing 115, 151, 155; see also
prisons 18, 98 market research
268 Index
social movements 17, 22–4, 26, 66–8, 103, violence 17, 28–30, 42, 67–8, 103, 105,
105, 172; see also counter-development 110–11, 136, 151–4, 160, 166; see also
stereotypes 1, 3, 9, 40, 111–12, 197, drug cultures and crime
208; see also identity; race;
representation waste 64–6, 93–6, 101, 114; see also
sustainability 16, 21, 39, 43–4, 47, 61, management
66, 69–75, 85, 88–94; Sustainable water: health 13, 17, 27, 36, 53, 87,
Development Goals 27, 73; see also 101, 150; management 55, 58, 61,
biodiversity; conservation; 64, 73–6, 89, 116, 203, 205–6
environmentalism; management: (see also agriculture; conservation;
land and resources dams; farming; hydroelectricity;
infrastructure); ownership 67–8,
terrorism 40–1, 101, 106, 179 72–4, 87, 115 (see also ownership;
theory 2, 7–9, 75, 83, 102, 117, 120, privatisation); pollution 69, 72,
134, 183 92–4 (see also pollution); rights, access
think tanks 93, 98 24, 26–7, 74–6, 87 (see also rights);
tourism 54, 60, 62–7, 193–8, security 39, 7, 87
206–7; ecotourism 63, 194–5; wildlife 54–5, 63, 81, 192; see also animals;
see also art; cultural heritage; film conservation; rights, non-human
and photography; museums; witchcraft 159
performance worldviews 2, 11, 76, 108, 208–9; see also
travellers 40 cosmology; myths; religion

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What Anthropologists Do

Veronica Strang is a Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Insti-

ISBN: 978-1-350-09935-7 (hbk)

Appendix 1: Studying Anthropology 217

Meeting modern Maya 12

What do anthropologists do?

Although the writing on blogs is often not as precise and nuanced as in

Time was also spent convening, organising and presenting at conferences,

 Making recommendations: advising policy and decision makers, research

As this list suggests, anthropological research produces outcomes in several

Anthropologists have always had to make delicate judgements about where to

Meeting modern Maya

University of Arizona. The government refused, claiming that these Maya

Scientiﬁc knowledge, as provided by anthropologists and others, is valuable

Controversies about the selling of unsuitable or substandard goods in poorer

Facilitating cross-cultural communication

Defending livelihoods and knowledge

For rural peoples, the decline of community is reinforced by federal and

Symptoms experienced by swine CAFO neighbors are generally oriented

Another recurrent bone of contention in contemporary agriculture is the use of

First, ﬁeld-level studies demonstrated that farmers possessed a complex folk

Industrial agriculture is one of the major stresses on indigenous landscapes, and

Corporations … seek to assuage concerns by promoting uncertainty and

Michael Cernea has conducted decades of work with displaced populations

Involuntary population displacement and resettlement is one of the major

Brooke McDonald-Wilmsen draws on research collected during the development

Displacement – or migration – driven by climate change is not only a

Migration, traﬃcking and modern slavery

Activist scholars establish an alignment with an organized group of

The emergence of indigenous peoples as a social movement and as a

Me an expert? Anthropology, the law and asylum-seekers

Advocacy is thus an expanding part of anthropological activity, which draws

As this implies, international NGOs now form important transnational networks

Aid and ambiguity

Nongovernmental organisations are now considered heavyweight actors in

A discourse is a speciﬁc and historically produced way of looking at the world

Ethnographies of NGO and nonproﬁt practices are increasingly focused on

Focusing their analytic skills on the dynamics of interactions between groups,

These examples suggest two major roles for anthropologists in relation to

Anthropological input is often appreciated by local populations and

Some of these global institutions have ﬁnancially supported, and in some

Sometimes – as well as looking at the bigger picture – an anthropological

Civil society organisations (CSOs) need to keep monitoring and championing

Even – perhaps especially – in times of famine, a systemic view is useful,

Hansen’s work highlighted some of the dangers of short-term-introduced solu-

Adjacent to work relating to food and famine is a fast-growing area of

Dealing with displacement

Understanding race and racism

Moretti doesn’t comment on the potential for Muslim anthropologists to

Birgit Bräuchler’s research on Islamist groups in Indonesia considered how

Working in the highlands of Sulawesi, Tania Murray-Li traces the ways in

Technical specialists in development, metaphorically speaking, draw straight

refers to a knowledge hierarchy of ‘uppers’ and ‘lowers’ (delivering assistance

information or knowledge. We are co-learners in the ﬁeld, gaining knowledge

pologists for multilateral banks may include ‘social safeguards’, con-

Promoting meaningful participation in development

formulation of generalisations that might inform wider policy and practice. We

We cannot understand cultures by looking at individual parts of them in

As Paul Sillitoe implies, development is by no means a one-way street.

Anthropologists helped a team of post-harvest technology scientists generate a

The anthropologists succeeded in highlighting the farmers’ real concerns and

left the ‘expert’ practice of science and technology as an implicitly practical

huge sums have been invested in development projects in the postwar

He stresses ‘the need for adopting anthropological approaches by both the

Making recommendations: advising policy and decision makers, research