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Applying Anthropology

• What Is Applied Anthropology?• The Role of the Applied Anthropologist• Academic and Applied Anthropology• Urban Anthropology• Medical Anthropology• Anthropology and Business• Careers and Anthropology

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Applied Anthropology

– Academic anthropology – includes cultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic anthropology

– Applied anthropology – application of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and techniques to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems

• American Anthropological Association (AAA) recognizes two dimensions

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Applied Anthropology

– Medical– Development– Environmental– Forensic– Physical

• Has many applications

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Cultural Resource Management (CRM)

– Involves not only preserving sites but allowing their destruction if they are not significant

• Branch of applied archaeology aimed at preserving sites threatened by dams, highways, and other projects

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What Is Applied Anthropology?

• Practicing anthropologists practice their profession outside of academia

• Applied anthropologists work for groups that promote, manage and assess programs and policies aimed at influencing human behavior and social conditions

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The Role of the Applied Anthropologist

• Combats ethnocentrism – tendency to view one’s own culture as superior and to apply one’s own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures

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The Role of the Applied Anthropologist

– Identifying needs for change that local people perceive

– Working with those people to design culturally appropriate and socially sensitive change

– Protecting local people from harmful policies and projects that threaten them

• Proper roles of applied anthropologists:

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Table 2.1 The Four Subfields and Two Dimensions of Anthropology

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Academic and Applied Anthropology

– During 1970s, and increasingly thereafter, most anthropologists still worked in academia but others found jobs with international organizations, government, business, hospitals, and schools

– About half of students graduating with PhDs in anthropology will have careers outside academia

• Academic anthropology grew most after World War II

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Theory and Practice

– Theory aids practice, and application fuels theory

– Anthropology’s systemic perspective recognizes that changes don’t occur in a vacuum

• Ethnographers study societies firsthand, living with and learning from ordinary people

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Urban Anthropology

– Human populations becoming increasingly urban

– UN estimates that about a sixth of earth’s population living in urban slums

• Urban anthropology is the cross-cultural and ethnographic and biocultural study of global urbanization and life in cities

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Urban Anthropology

– Robert Redfield focused on contrasts between the rural and urban contexts in the 1940s

– In any nation, urban and rural represent different social systems

– Applying anthropology to urban planning starts by identifying the key social groups in the urban context

• Urban vs. Rural

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Medical Anthropology

• Disease – scientifically identified health threat caused by a bacterium, virus, fungus, parasite or other pathogen

• Unites biological and cultural anthropologists in the study of disease, health problems, health-care systems, and theories about illness in different cultures and ethnic groups

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• Illness – condition of poor health perceived or felt by an individual

Medical Anthropology

• Scientific medicine – distinguished from Western medicine, a health-care system based on scientific knowledge and procedures, encompassing such fields as pathology, microbiology, biochemistry, surgery, diagnostic technology, and applications

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Medical Anthropology

– Disease varies among cultures– Spread of certain diseases, like malaria and

schistosomiasis, associated with population growth and economic development

• Different ethnic groups and cultures recognize different illnesses, symptoms, and causes

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Medical Anthropology

• Naturalistic disease theories – explain illness in impersonal terms

• Emotionalistic disease theories – assume emotional experiences cause illness (e.g., “susto”)

• Personalistic disease theories – blame illness on such agents as sorcerers, witches, ghosts, or ancestral spirits

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Health-care systems

– All cultures have health-care specialists (e.g., curers, shaman, doctors)

– Curer – specialized role acquired through a culturally appropriate process of selection, training, certification, and acquisition of a professional image; a cultural universal

• Beliefs, customs, specialists, and techniques aimed at ensuring health and preventing, diagnosing, and treating illness

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Western Medicine

– Thousands of effective drugs– Preventive health care– Surgery

• Medical anthropologists serve as cultural interpreters between local systems and Western medicine

• Biomedicine surpasses non-Western medicine in many ways

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Western Medicine

• Overprescription of drugs and tranquilizers

• Unnecessary surgery

• Impersonality and inequality of the patient-physician relationship

• Overuse of antibiotics

• Despite its advances, Western medicine is not without its problems

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Anthropology and Business

• Applied anthropologists act as “cultural brokers” to translate managers’ goals or workers’ concerns to the other group

• Anthropologists may acquire unique perspective on organizational conditions and problems

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Key features of anthropology for business

• Cross-cultural expertise

• Focus on cultural diversity

• Ethnography

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Careers in Anthropology

– Knowledge about traditions and beliefs of many social groups within a modern nation is important in planning and carrying out programs that affect those groups

• Anthropology’s breadth provides knowledge and an outlook on the world that are useful in many kinds of work