7504762 PUBLIC ANTHRO Applied and Action Anthropology

Applied and Action Anthropology Ideological and Conceptual Aspects

John W Bennett

Current Anthropology Vol 37 No 1 Supplement Special Issue Anthropology in Public (Feb1996) pp S23-S53

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CURRENTANTHROPOLOGYVolume 36 Supplement February 1996 O 1996by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research All rights reserved o o 1 1 - ~ ~ 0 ~ ~ 6 ~ ~ s u p p - o 0 0 ~ $ ~ 0 0

Applied anthropology in the United States emerged as a mixture of New Deal humanitarian liberalism and progressive industrial management ideology and in Britain as a humanitarian advisory function for colonial administration in Africa In both countries applied practitioners were subjected to considerable ideological criticism during the 1960s and 70s In the US case one manifestation of this critical approach was Sol Taxs populist-inspired action anthropology which renounced the employment of practitioners by government or any large organization in favor of vol- untary academic projects engaging in intensive intervention in the problems and needs of local communities The approach did not prevail but its ideas continue to stimulate interest Mean- while applied anthropology was undergoing attenuation as cultural anthropology proliferated into institutional anthropologies The significance of these subfields (eg educational anthropology) was that they replicated the approach of sociology and economics social scientific intervention as a normal part of the institutional activities of modern society The basic problem in fitting anthropology for practical application was the preoccu- pation of the discipline with tribal (not contemporary urban- industrial) society

TOHN W BENNETT is Distinguished Anthropologist in Residence at Washington University (St Louis Mo 63130 USA) where he was the first chairman of that institutions anthropology department in 1967 Born in 1915 he received his BA from Beloit College in 1937 and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1946 He has had a long career in scholarly and applied anthropology and has contributed to all fields of the general discipline He has worked in Japan Taiwan India Africa Canada and the United States on problems related to sociocultural change and economic-ecological anthropology Among his books are The Eco-

I I have decided to confine my discussion of practical anthropology to the two main categories applied and action although I am aware that there are probably as many approaches as there are practitioners Steven Polgar (1979) distinguished four applied action radical and committed His applied is mine but my action would I believe assimilate his action radical and committed I feel that the key factor is the employed status of the practitioner in applied anthropologyj the other types avoid or reject this status on various ideological grounds My paper also ignores advocacy an increasingly important practical activity among anthropologists it deserves separate treatment (see Fetterman 1993 Peattie 1968 and Jacobs 1974 for discussions) I wish to acknowledge the assistance of George Crothers in bibliographical and processing work Rose Passalacqua on background research Richard Fox for critical comments on an early draft and Sam Stanley for helpful advice on the work of Sol Tax

logical Transition (Elmsford NY Pergamon Press 1976) Of Time and the Enterprise (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1982) Human Ecology as Human Behavior Essays in En- vironmental and Development Anthropology (New Brunswick Transaction Books 1994) and (with S Kohl) Settling the Cana- dian-American West 1890-1950 An Anthropological History (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1995) The h a 1 version of the present paper reached the Editors office 15 I 95

It is characteristic of the anthropologist that if he does continue his work of education into what is close to the political realm he acts as an independent agent taking upon himself the ultimate responsibility for satisfying his conscience in terms of the obligations he feels toward his colleagues and toward his fellow men

SOL TAX The Uses of Anthropology

The recipe for action that must be drawn from applied anthropology thus far is that of caution of modest expectations as to what can be accomplished by planning of humility as to what may be predicted with present instruments for observing and conceptualizing of preference for vis medica- turix naturae in many social situations

CLYDE KLUCKHOHNMirror for Man

We only do applied anthropology if someone is going to apply it We have to have a consumer

MARGARET MEAD Discussion of Anthropology and Society

The practical or applied side of academic fields in the human sciences is often viewed by scholars with ambivalence or even contemptI2 although sociology is more tolerant since its subject matter concerns contemporary society Anthropology has traditionally devoted itself to the study of tribal or nonurban societies and this has meant that i t has with difficulty accepted a role of practitioner

The anxiety over anthropologys detachment from the problems of modern society reached a peak in the 1970s~ as a wave of social protest and reform flooded the industrial countries with scholars and social activists re-flecting on the sins of the fathers-capitalists colonial-ists and dominant males Anthropologists caught short began to reexamine the basis of their intellectual heritage an effort encouraged by the rapid disappearance of

2 Philosophy-perhaps the most scholarly of all of the humanistic disciplines-has created an applied status applied ethics (see Winkler and Coombs 1993) which by the late 1980s had become a fairly well-established field with several departments in US universities offering degrees and with jobs opening up in medicine (as a result of the abortion issue euthanasia gene technology and other new-biology developments) law and business management The philosophy department in my own university has recently established in cooperation with the department of psychology and the medical schools neuroscience department a program in artifi- cial intelligence as applied to computer programming and kindred activities funded by a large industrial organization Practice is con- troversial in academic philosophy just as it is in academic anthropology

S24 I C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 37 Supplement February 1996

tribal cultures In a typical revisionist textbook of the period Anthropology and the Public Interest Peggy Sanday noted that writers like Anthony Wallace and Margaret Mead (and herself) considered anthropologys prestige derived from the disciplines specialization in non-Western cultures to be under severe challenge (Sanday 1976xvii) Financial support of anthropological research and instruction was in jeopardy unless the discipline made an effort to equip itself to study contemporary life3 From time to time the American Anthropolog- ical Association holds meetings on the need for research on and concern for contemporary issues or even endows special offices for the promotion of anthropological con- ~ u l t a t i o n ~Paradoxically practical anthropology in American anthropology generally lacks prestige in scholarly circles and even worse as one result of its 1940s background in management-oriented studies of industrial organization can be seen as politically reac- tionary or lacking in human warmth

Moreover even earlier British applied anthropology was often called colonialist anthropology since it began in Africa as an adjunct to the administration of colonial districts (although eventually it led to the establishment of the scholarly field of British social anthropology) One of the most prominent themes in the 1960s-1970s-era of protest was anti-imperialism and anticolonialism so anthropology was often viewed as part of the problem rather than of the solution How- ever by focusing on contemporary society as a new specialization the practical role of anthropology could be affirmed and at the same time identification with applied anthropology could be avoided (see Dell Hymess introduction to Reinventing Anthropology [1972] for a related point)

I once heard i t said at a meeting of the American An- thropological Association in the 1970s that anthropology was consumed with guilt shame and envy guilt

3 Well and good-but subsequently cultural anthropology took off on a flight into postmodern symbolism and hermeneutics and for a while the urge to contemporize was laid aside only to be revived again and again For example the February 1995 issue of the An- thropology Newsletter contains a piece by one Lloyd Miller who observes that anthropologists must communicate forcefully and comprehensibly on issues that matter (Miller 199592) citing Jules Henrys (1963) Culture against Man as an example of how to do it That is it is not only a matter of studying contemporary culture but one of being critical of it Miller accepts as fact Henrys indictments of enculturation processes in St Louis high schools of the 1960s (However looking at this from the chastened view- point of the ~ggos one is inclined to wonder if these processes might have been headed in the right direction Rather than in- dicting enculturation as undemocratic perhaps we should have more of it If anthropologists identify critical analysis with cultural truth they are bound to run into contradictions) 4 Walter Goldschmidts edited volume The Uses of Anthropology (1979) is the result of one of these episodes When the news about the growing number of degree-holding or degree-earning anthropologists in applied work hit the board and was announced at I believe the 1977 annual meeting the membership directed the board to prepare a special AAA publication on the field in order to show that the official profession accepted and supported it (On the attempts of the AAA to establish an applied consultantship center see Van Willigen 1993 1991 )

at having its foundations in colonialism whether the European or the American reservation form shame at spending so much effort on tribal and peasant peoples and ignoring modern industrial society and envy of the institutional social sciences which were part of this society and had the special knowledge to deal with it

The ultimate source of the ambivalence of the scholar toward practice is rooted in the intellectual heterogene- ity of the activity It has no central core of theory (though it may have sets of methods and empirical generalizations that can pass for theory) in fact i t cannot generate serious theory because it is engaged in solving myriad practical problems each of which demands a different set of concepts and that means multidisciplinary sources This multidisciplinary approach turns away scholars who like single-field consistency and loyalty Sociology has overcome these attitudes by using its cor- pus of empirical generalizations in which general statements about everyday behavior in contemporary urban- industrial society are pieced together to create a general social theory (see Merton 1949 chaps 2 and 3 for a classic discussion of this approach) That is while practice may be humdrum and devoid of great ideas the sum of many practice sessions can feed the intellectual reser- voirs of the discipline This has not happened in anthropology to any significant extent

My principal objective in this paper is to provide a kind of conceptual and ideological history of applied anthropology and a related form action anthropology There are other ways to classify the approaches of practical anthropology but for reasons of length and coverage I have collapsed them into two types I am not concerned with assessing the substantive contributions of practical anthropology since this would require far more space than allotted me the number and heteroge- neity of the contributions defy easy classification and analysis In any case this paper is a companion piece to my earlier essay on development anthropology (1988)~ which likewise did not attempt to pull together the ex- ceedingly scattered and diverse substantive materials

I have based the depth and length of the sections on applied and action anthropology on the volume of their respective contributions and their effects on the discipline Therefore the applied section is longer than the one for action Action anthropology was in essence the methodological apparatus for a single field research project dealing with the Fox Reservation and did not develop into a standard research model for anthropological practice However its approach and ideology had considerable influence on anthropology generally and therefore it deserves analysis It is one of Sol Taxs most important legacies to the discipline

To prepare for this paper I reread most of the thinkpieces concerning practical anthropology from the 1940s into the 1980s~ emphasizing the late 1940s and the 1950s This period might be considered the baroque era of practice because of the patronage of anthropology by foreign aid and rural development programs Without exception most of the thinkpiece productions I con- sulted were promotional or in-house writings so 1 de-

B E N N E T T Applied and Ac t ion Anthropology Szs

cided to attempt to write a co01~~ somewhat externally based view of the fields Of course my treatment is selective I have attempted to focus on what I believe to be the most intellectually significant events and ideas

The paper has just two sections the one to follow on applied anthropology and the second on action anthropology The applied section has a number of subsections dealing with history concepts ideology and the academic critique of the field the action section is somewhat differently organized I have introduced a number of personal reminiscences into the paper especially in the footnotes I have been associated intermittently with some form of practical social science from the 1940s and have served as president and program chair of the Soci- ety for Applied Anthropology But like a number of other people in the field I have not identified myself as an applied anthropologist mainly because I have so frequently viewed my applied work as an extension of my scholarly or theoretical activities

Applied Anthropology HISTORY AND CONCEPTS

The term applied anthropology is used in both Britain and the United States to refer mainly to the employment of anthropologists by organizations involved in inducing change or enhancing human welfare In recent years the term has become a generic designation with labels from the hyphenated or institutional anthropologies used to describe specific interests thereby reducing the ter- minological emphasis on practice or appl i~a t ion ~ Ap-

5 Is it possible to calcuate the number of applied anthropologists The problem is that applied anthropology is not so much a profession as a set of opportunities Moreover membership in the Society for Applied Anthropology is a poor index because many of these people from various countries were trained in disciplines other than anthropology or combined anthropology and some other field in their professional training and activity However for what they are worth a few figures can be inspected First of all there were in the early 1990s 1900 members of the Society for Applied An- thropology the membership of the American Anthropological As- sociation in the same period was 12300 I was not able to discover how many of the Society for Applied Anthropology members also belonged to the American Anthropological Association Taking a different approach I looked at the Interests list of the Associates panel for CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGYThese come from questionnaires the journal sends out at intervals to Associates The Associ- ates are found in about 89 countries worldwide Their Interests are strictly salient responses there is no precoding or later combining of entries In 1994 there were 2063 Associates whose questionnaires had been tabulated and 65 of these had entered applied anthropology as one of their interests Two additional persons had selected action anthropology When I slightly reclassified and regrouped the entries however and a somewhat different picture emerged If entries pertaining to culture change economic development economic medical educational ecological and social (ie the institutional anthropologies) are added to the 67 in applied and action the total is 882 and this can be compared with a total of 841 who provided Interest entries for the purely cultural symbolic ethnological physical and psychological anthropology fields This suggests that interest in the institutional fields plus fields which are concerned with the changes and problems of contemporary societies either equals that in the older conventional or exotic interest areas or may even exceed it It also implies that applied anthro-

plied anthropology has sometimes been represented as a distinct professional field but i t has not been possible to establish standards of performance and rules of certi- f i c a t i ~ n ~The topical coverage is too diverse and the roles played by the applied anthropologist are equally varied (see Peterson [1987] and Van Willigen [1gg33-51 who lists no fewer than 14) For this and other reasons the history of applied anthropology is not easily written

pology has been losing its role as the exclusive home for anthropologists interested in contemporary society

The 1975 (and last) edition of the Wenner-Gren International Directory of Anthropologists contained a list of Interests for a total of 4300 Associates The list of Interests was much longer than the 1994 selection and full of apparent and unexplained dupli- cation At any rate I 59 Associates listed applied anthropology And when one adds institutional and social change fields (though represented in 1975 with rather different language and terminol- ogy) the number increases to over 3000 so the patterns of the two samples are similar relatively few respondents were willing in both years to select applied (or action) anthropology but pluralities and even majorities professed interests in the subject matters and topics usually or often associated with applied work contemporary society and its institutions change development ecology etc (NB The single largest number of Interests for both the 1994 and the 1975 data bases was archaeology) Too much should not be made of these CA data since the salient-reponse system has termi- nological ambiguities To get an accurate count of research and practical interests one would need a more carefully constructed questionnaire and a certain amount of explanation and even precoding

Aside from numbers the question of professional identity makes counting difficult Some of the most significant applied work has been done by people who do not identify themselves as applied anthropologists-Richard N Adams is a case in point I myself have generally synthesized applied and theoretical-academic data and theory in the belief that there should be no real distinction between the two 6 Strictly speaking an essay on applied anthropology should include both archaeology and bio-anthropology The latter has a long and distinguished record of applied forensic service to medicine law enforcement and the military not to mention manufacturers of furniture and clothing Archaeologys applied phase is more recent Perhaps the most striking example is the work of William Rathje (Rathje and Murphy 1992) on trash and garbage landfills an undertaking which strikes some anthropologists as comical but contributes interesting information on the problems of waste and consumption patterns in industrial civilization A radically different approach to application in archaeology is represented by a special report of the Society of American Archaeology (Lynott and Wylie 1995) in which the authors argue for relevant and responsible archaeology that is work with significance for the preservation of cultural heritage Archaeologists says Wylie should be stewards of the past (Pyburn and Wilk 199571) No information is provided on precisely how to do this but it should be pointed out that archaeologists have been participating with federal state and local heritage and site-protection groups for many years with considerable success in the way of protecting sites saving artifacts discouraging private-collector sales and so on 7 Most texts and readers in applied anthropology contain a brief account of past developments but this is usually biased in some direction or other and ignores one or another key activity No one has attempted to pull all the case-study reports and attempts at theoretical summation together-the job would be a formidable one and its product hard to conceive of but it needs doing So far as the history of the field is concerned the most useful documents are the first chapter in Eddy and Partridge (1987) a typical reader- text and the second chapter of Van Willigen (1993) For material which will provide a view of the changing topics and concepts over the years the best bet is a chronologically ordered list of


There are exceptions but most of the work in applied anthropology is rooted in the contact of Western civilization with tribal and peasant cultures The earliest formal activity consisted of compiling descriptions of such peoples for European consumption the work of Peter Martyr dlAnghera (MacNutt 1912)~ an Italian scholar who made ethnographic compilations for the Vatican and the King of Spain in the 16th century is perhaps the first serious attempt The practice continued well into the 19th century and the materials formed the basis of theoretical armchair anthropology

The British form of applied anthropology began to emerge in the 1920s as an adjunct of colonial administration in Africa and an American analogue concerning Native American reservation administration and problems began in the late 1930s However American applied anthropology really has a triple origin the early work on Native American reservations (with the work of Clyde Kluckhohn and associates being a prime example) the Harvard studies of the sociocultural basis of industrial organi~ation~ and studies of American rural communities sponsored or stimulated by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics and Rural Welfare in the Roose-

hohn married a sociologist and had broad social-science training at Harvard and he conducted extensive ethnographic work with the Navaho Fred Richardson and El- liot Chapple also did fieldwork and Margaret Mead who became one of the founders of the Society for Applied Anthropology in the 1940s~ had cut her teeth on the cultural psychology of Oceanic societies

The orientation toward multidisciplinary approaches and concepts has its roots in the difficulties of using single-factor or reified concepts of social phenomena in applied work A rejection of single-factor causation is what underlay the Harvard interdisciplinary movement which finally in the 1950s~ surfaced in the form of the academic Department of Social Relations This department was based on the structural-functionalist theory of Talcott Parsons which claimed that all social reality is divided into three parts culture (anthropology) society (sociology) and personality (psychology) But applied practice went farther it had to investigate and manipu- late many phenomena other than those described in these three realms of social reality (economics for example)

This multidisciplinary approach implied a threat to velt Administrations Department of Agric~lture ~the panculturalism or whole-culturalism of anthropol- These early activities underscore the topical diversity of the field although they shared a conceptual kinship in the idea of interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) research and theory At the same time the majority of the participants had been trained as anthropologists and most of them had done classical ethnographic fieldwork Lloyd Warner a participant in the Harvard Business School projects did his doctoral research on the Austra- lian Aborigines (Warner I 937) and Conrad Arensberg did community cultural studies in rural Ireland Kluck-

reader-texts for example Spicer (1952) Anthropological Society of Washington (1956) Adams and Preiss (1960) Arensberg and Nei- hoff (1964) and Eddy and Partridge (1987) Barnett (1942) and Tem- ple (1914) provide notes on premodern applied anthropology and Richards (1944) reviews the early years of British applied anthropol- ogy8 The work of Clyde Kluckhohn and his students and associates is a landmark in the history of anthropology-let alone applied The point is that Kluckhohn simply did not draw a clear distinction between applied and pure mainly perhaps because he was not employed by some agency to do a specific job Kluckhohn was academically self-directed (as Sol Tax was later in the Fox Project) For examples see Kluckhohn Hill and Kluckhohn (1971) on Na- vaho material culture Kluckhohn (1944) on Navaho witchcraft a scholarly monograph on the sociopsychology of culture Leighton and Kluckhohn (1948) on personality development of the Navaho and Boyce (19741 summarizing the work on sheep-raising and other economic matters 9 For a sampling of this 1940s work (although some of the items were written later as retrospection) see Barnard (1950) and Roeth- lisberger and Dickson (1964) for classic statements of Harvard industrial sociology Chapple (1943) for a position paper on anthropological engineering which defines the prewar technocratic New Deal-oriented ideology of applied anthropology Richardson (1945) for a position paper on rural rehabilitation the New Deal agricultural community program and Warner (1940-41) for a paper on anthropological studies of modern communities 10 A convenient sample is the series Rural Life Studies produced by the USDA and republished in a collected edition by Greenwood Press (Culture of Con temporary Rural Communities I978)

ogys classic era (ca 1915-50) The transition away from the culture-dominated classic period began in the 1940s and was interrupted in one sense and reinforced in another by World War 11 This transition was characterized by confusing statements from people like Mead and Kluckhohn who defended and promoted the culture concept but in their own work branched out into other disciplines-for example Mead into psychiatry Kluck- hohn into sociological functionalism-although both endeavored to translate these approaches into anthropological culturalism wherever possible I believe it was the implied threat to the core idea-culture-that led to the unease and hostility with which much applied work was (and still is) greeted by many academic anthropologists

However there is this question If the founders of the Society for Applied Anthropology really saw the world in multidisciplinary terms why did they insist on call- ing it applied anthropology The answer has already been implied they perceived anthropology as the one single-but-multi-discipline Ralph Lintons famous Study of Man published in 1936 marks the beginning of broader theoretical approaches and just after the war in 1945 Linton edited The Study of Man in the World Crisis a book that staked out a claim for anthropology as the organizing practical multidiscipline for the social sciences Of course a simple answer to the question is that the founders were all trained more or less in the anthropological discipline and one does not readily deny ones natal home

The applied work done by anthropologists and their social science colleagues during World War I1 was extremely broad studies of military occupations and their reforms research on military and civilian morale information-gathering intelligence work updating Peter Martyr() on the life of peoples largely unknown to West-

ern scholarship work on democratic reforms in government and education public opinion surveys of the do- mestic front and so on As the war ended and the postwar occupations began to liquidate their control over Japan Germany and former colonies and islands these anthropologists came home ready to exercise their multidisciplinary consciences However some of these wartime refugees came back into anthropology with an aggressive procultural proanthropological view- point which seemed to say Now its time to make good on all those promises of theory made in the classic era Whatever the source this is exactly what happened and in the 1950s the discipline began to reject the multidisciplinary view of the prewar period

But applied anthropology which for reasons already stated could not afford to reiect this view continued the multidisciplinary tradition in both its ampembership and its practice The (American) Society for Applied Anthro- pology is officially hospitable to all disciplines and topics and its meetings are attended by social scientists of all kinds Its periodical in a statement printed on its back cover invites participation from all disciplines Human Organization publishes articles dealing with all areas of applied social ~cience~ Still the word an-thropology persists in the name of the organization and in the generic title given practitioners regardless of their

I I Ralph Nader who in the early 1950s took his first anthropology course as a freshman at Princeton later caught the essence The interesting distinction students made between anthropology and sociology in the early fifties was that sociology was utterly bor- ing and anthropology was exciting and creative Why I think largely for three reasons First anthropology had come out of the late thirties and World War I1 with an image of problem solving Anthropologists were pressed into service by a mobilized society to look from their unique vantage point into various attitudes that had to be understood in order to solve some of the problems in the war effort Kluckhohn in Mirror for Man of course made a strong point of the functional relevance of anthropological knowledge by giving examples from that period We were also told what an insightful study Ruth Benedicts Chrysanthemum and the Sword was The second reason anthropology somewhat stood apart from sociology and other social sciences was its tradition of describing human behavior in an interesting way Third anthropology tended to project a process of merciless self examina- tion both for society and individuals In short anthropology had not sought a high perch on the abstraction ladder But something has obviously happened in the last two decades and not to the good Anthropology has developed its own restrictive taboos its own little culture and has been surrounded if not stran- gled by it It has developed status symbols which proliferate trivia and even worse the quest for trivia as a status symbol in the profession [Nader 197531-32) 12 Pronouncements on the multidisciplinary hospitality of the Society for Applied Anthropology and Human Organization were frequent in the 1950-60 period but have fallen off in the past two decades It still constituted a definite philosophy although a bit pessimistic and defensive in the mid-1960s For example From the beginning for example the Society and its journal have expressed interest in the application of principles and methods from all sciences (biological and physical as well as social and behavioral) to the analysis and solution of human organizational problems Man was to be viewed whole as a biologically and psycho- logically complex organism and as a social being existing in a changing physical and cultural environment which could be controlled scientifically In practice the goal [whether valid or not) is yet to be achieved (Human Organization 196685)

B E N N E T T Applied and Action Anthropology I Sz7

actual disciplinary affiliations13 A quick check on the affiliations of authors in Human Organization articles in the 1980-90s period shows that nearly 60 had fairly definite anthropological orientations or degrees (though over half were not working for anthropological departments) so there remains a bias in the field toward the discipline of anthropology However judging by the language in many of the articles and occasional self- identifications at least half of all anthropologically af- filiated writers would probably identify themselves as institutional anthropologists ecological economic development medical and educational being the principal subfields for this period14

Disciplinary diversification encourages changes in the topics and geographical coverage of articles In 1966 Jo- zetta Srb a professional writer was commissioned to analyze the authorship and topical coverage of Human Organization from its founding in 1941 (Srb 1966) She showed that from the first issue in 1941 to the mid- 1960s the topics had not only increased in number but changed depending on world conditions and social problems Community studies dominated for a decade by 1966 developmental change as it was called then constituted a single general focus with many subdivi- sions In the years after 1966 however civil rights race issues and human rights problems in general would increase in number

American applied anthropology became intensely preoccupied with fieldwork methods in the 1950s and 1960s (eg Dean and Whyte 1958 Leighton Adair and Parker I 95I Richardson 1950 Rodman and Kolodny 1964) With some exceptions field methods had been generally taken for granted by academic ethnologists through the 1920-50 period with the topic of primitive languages and their translation being perhaps the main issue to receive some attention (eg the interchange between Margaret Mead [1939] and Robert Lowie [1940])

13 The original name of Human Organization in the period 1941-48 was Applied Anthropology There was a vigorous debate at a Society for Applied Anthropology meeting in 1948 where it was decided to change the name in order to give the journal a greater appeal and to create a wider audience [Human Organiza- tion 1949a3) There was opposition from members who felt that the advocates were overly fond of the wartime interdisciplinary outlook Then as now the two issues of greatest concern in applied as well as in the larger discipline of anthropology were the merits of anthropological study of contemporary life and society and whether anthropology could go it alone without help from other disciplines This latter issue is no longer so relevant given the institutional anthropological specialties which borrow freely from neighboring disciplines 14 One advantage of the institutional anthropologies is that one can do scholarly work but at the same time have it possess practical significance An example is the monographic books published by the Society for Economic Anthropology via the University Press of America which deal with such topics as economic development entrepreneurship local markets household economy and bargaining Some of the work reported in these monographs was based on contracted applied anthropology an equal amount represented doctoral grant-supported research The institutional anthropologies are simply a way that the anthropological discipline has found to echo the effort of the institutional social sciences-to get around the constraints of a focus on tribal society and perform interesting and scholarly social research on contemporary society


Field methods become important for applied work because of the responsibilities of application you had to be sure of what you considered to be knowledge of human behavioral ~roclivities when the fate or fortunes of real people-not ethnological subjects-depended on it Moreover the practitioner had to prove to his employer that his results were accurate which reauired statistical survey methods samples of topics and rkspondents and scientifically constructed questionnaires

The sources of the explanatory concepts used in applied studies have always been eclectic and have become more so as the institutional anthropologies have gath- ered steam in recent years From the beginnings of the American applied field in the 1940s there has been a consistent emphasis on cultural attitudes and values as the explanations of last resort and the use of anthropological versions of standard social-science ideas (accul- turation in lieu of social change for example) But there is no doubt that despite the rhetorical emphasis on anthropology the majority of applied work could not have been done without the help of concepts from other social disciplines It really does not matter where practitioners get their ideas however since the goal is not to produce general theory but to solve problems and whatever works works More important is post-hoc assessment of consequences and this is done rarely because organizations sponsoring applied work seldom really care what happens after the assigned budgeted task is completed15

Applied anthropological problems also benefit greatly from comparative research finding a match to the community or social situation studied One of the few re- searches of this kind is the classic monograph in development anthropology by Scarlett Epstein (1962)) funded by the Rockefeller Foundation which reported on the different responses to an ambitious regional irrigation system by two village communities almost identical in

15 However post-hoc assessment of results in planned change projects is a standard procedure in economic development and development anthropologists have participated in these evalua- tions Typically the anthropological member of the team is assigned the task of studying the social changes resulting from the project andlor the way social and attitudinal factors may have sab- otaged the projects goals In the early 1980s I did an assessment of some of these project evaluation reports for African pastoralism (Bennett Lawry and Riddell 1986) and on the basis of that work plus basic ethnological and economic-anthropological studies of pastoral peoples concluded that anthropologists had performed a competent job in determining the basic cultural economic ecology of pastoralism and its variants in different African environments Much of the best information came from the evaluative postproject studies a clear demonstration of how applied work can actually contribute to general anthropological knowledge Even more it showed how pressing social issues such as the need to develop sedentarize or improve production among a particular people can lead to stimulating ethnological research This possibility is still not fully understood among the conventional academic adherents of the discipline Comparative post-hoc ethnological studies have been made in a few cases (eg the famous Oscar Lewis [ I ~ S I ]

restudy of Redfields TepoztlAn) but without reference to particular institutional sectors or to change Lewis simply tested Redfields static depictions of Tepoztlan culture and acquired different results-naturally

culture and social organization In one the increased productivity afforded by irrigation opened the economy up to wider contacts in the other the social organization and value system were virtually unchanged because the irrigation facility did not alter traditional ideological and ritual culture Reasons for these differential changes are given in detail The study thus has significance for a theory of change the relative roles of values (culture) and socioeconomic relations the practical problem of inducing change and prediction of the results of introduced technical and organizational change-complicated matters which I cannot do justice to here The value of Epsteins study was not in its theoretical ideas which were generic for the social sciences of the period but rather in its relevance-oriented approach the idea of studying two similar communities that reacted differently to induced change and the isolation of particular factors that explained the differences Although she grossly neglected historical causes of the differences between the communities she did show that no one factor-social cultural or economic-could tell the whole story

Finally when you apply anthropology just what is it that you apply (cf Angrosino 1976) The question is seldom asked because there is no really satisfactory answer We have already seen that the field has to be essentially multidisciplinary in its theoretical and methodological resources And while the conventional answer to the question was the culture concept this really meant an attitude of tolerance and the acceptance of any form of social reality an attitude that frequently contradicted the demands for change embedded in the assigned tasks However if to apply anthropology means to translate cultural relativism into conservation of local ways and adaptations-that is to make sure that change is not overly punishing or that any induced change has a beneficial effect-then applied anthropology is at root a value-oriented endeavor However values were taboo during the classic era with its adherence to objective scientific methods Still the humanist- liberal ideology of the field kept coming through in the choice of topics and the critical appraisals of change projects appearing for example at the end of the case studies published in Human Organization

IDEOLOGY

To engage in practice requires purpose and purpose requires guidance from values Values function at two levels in applied anthropology they sanction particular interventions and purposes and they can defend and justify the activity of practice itself This latter function is distinctive for the practicing social sciences since they also believe in the value-freedom of scientific activity Hence special defenses or rationales have had to be supplied

In many cases it is not possible to distinguish between these two levels of ideology and I shall not do so in great detail In general applied anthropology has had two dominant ideological positions the earlier pater-

nalistic orientation of British colonial-applied anthropology and the egalitarian outlook of the American anthropologists The difference between the two positions was not great and perhaps mainly one of rhetoric the British were inclined to use the jargon of the colonial era with its implied condescension toward natives while the Americans were prone to use the language of American liberalism (for example People have equal rights to benefits or People should be treated with dignity)

A C Haddons 1921 book (actually the text of a lecture) The Practical Value of Ethnology is a good statement of the original British position Haddon ( I921 30) stated that colonialism ran roughshod over backward people and went on to point out that anthropology can show administrators how to deal with these people Obviously the only satisfactory method of dealing with savage barbarian or more civilized peoples is to behave in a considerate way to them and according to my experience they will respond because they are gen- tlemen (p 31) However there was always need for what he called control created by the application of anthropology to current statecraft and in conclusion he cited an address to the American Folklore Society by Frank Russell Know Then Thyself ( ~ g o z ) which advocated the study of the new science (p 562) of anthropology in order to understand the savage and the barbarian (p 567) Thus the British colonial-anthropology position was essentially paternalistic tribal people were to be protected their cultures understood their lives bettered Since i t was believed that colonial administration was often wrong-headed an-thropologists as members of the dominant race had a special obligation to help we shall then have appreciation without adulation toleration not marred by irre- sponsible indifference nor by an undue sense of superior- ity (Russell 1902 5 67)

A step beyond this classic paternalism appeared in the I 935 book Anthropology in Action by Gordon Brown and Bruce Hutt-the former a British social anthropologist the latter a colonial administrator for one district of the Iringa tribe in Tanganyika This collaboration between anthropologist and administrator was subtitled An Experiment and came at the end of a decade or so of sporadic interaction between ethnologists in the field and the administrators who were their official hosts It was a period of doubt and skepticism as to the value of anthropology since the anthropologist was assumed to have few skills in policymaking and administration- doubts which came through nicely in an Introduction by one P E Mitchell the colonial secretary for Tangan- yika who had to approve the experiment (see also Mitchell 1930) Mitchell laid it on the line i t would be for the administrator to ask questions and for the anthropologists to answer them (p xviii) In the concluding chapter the authors assured Mr Mitchell of their compliance when they wrote that anthropologists would refrain from criticism of the action taken by the administrator (p 231)~ since the latter had to take into account a great many factors other than those the an-

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thropologists were concerned with And that remains with some complicating factors the situation today for development-oriented applied anthropology in the Third World Certainly the volume of information supplied by anthropology for planning has increased but the role of the anthropologist in day-to-day operations remains pretty much that of a wise but rather passive adviser or evaluator16

Although Radcliffe-Brown produced some early writings on the topic (Radcliffe-Brown 1931)~ Bronislaw Ma- linowski was the intellectual father of British applied colonial anthropology he defined the field and trained a whole generation of fieldworkers (eg Firth 1931) as ethnologists-with-a-conscience His matter-of-fact approach is exemplified by the following comment Thus the im~or t an t issue of direct versus indirect rule needs carefuistudy of the various processes by which Euro- pean influences can reach a native tribe My own opinion as that of all competent anthropologists is that indirect or dependent rule is infinitely preferable (Malinowski 192923) And this research this study of processes and institutions is the job of the anthropologist leaving to statesmen (and journalists) the final decision of how to apply the results (Malinowski 1929 23 also Malinowski 1930 and see Hogbin 1957 for an interpretation of Malinowskis role) By I 93 5 as we have seen this meant that the anthropologist was there to answer questions but not to pose them But of course Malinowslzi believed that the anthropologist should be free to voice his opinions in scholarly journals such as Africa (For updated versions of British applied anthropology see Forde I 95 3 and Henshaw 1963)

To turn to the American tradition it is necessarv to point out that the absence of an acknowledged colohial system obscured the overt paternalism so evident in the British case At the same time the role of the anthropologist was basically similar he was (is) a member of the dominant majority secure in his social and ethnic identity and with the same benevolent attitudes toward the natives No matter how earnest he might be in his gesture at solidarity with the target population he is still not subject to the constraints of their position He is free to go and participate in whatever sector of the larger society he may choose

However the rhetoric of American applied ideology was different from the British it derived from basic turn-of-the-century American egalitarian populism- that anything that deprives people of their needs or desires should be changed or reformed Of course this ide-

16 The role of the anthropologist vis-a-vis the administrator doesnt change Barnetts (1956) Anthropology in Administration based mainly on his experience as a trust-territories anthropologist in Micronesia after World War 11 is in some respects an American parallel to the Brown and Hutt volume Like that volume it contains an introductory statement by an administrator in this case one J A McConnell the former deputy high commissioner of the trust territory who noted The expert scientist in his staff role should be a source of unbiased information and a neutral judge of the effect of alternative decisions Whether he fully achieves this position depends in part on the nature of his relationships with his administrator (unpaged preface to Barnett 1956)

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ology was updated in the rhetoric of the New Deal and its egalitarian-oriented paternalism Laura Thompson the great articulator of applied ideology in the 1950-6os put i t this way first giving her basic behavioral credo In essence it symbolizes both the desire and desirabil- ity of human beings to fulfill themselves individually and collectivelv to the maximum of their ~hvsical-

A

emotional-intellectual powers and to do so both as single personalities and in relation to other personalities (Thompson 1965 bzgo-9 I ) The job of the applied anthropologist was to help make this possible In a slightly earlier paper (1965~) she called it a responsibility of the anthropologist probably never in the history of the discipline have anthropologists operated effectively in positions of such responsibility in human terms (p 283)

A paper published in Human Organization in 1965 by Theodore Brameld an education historian and pioneer education ethnologist echoed the self-realization theme enunciated by Thompson but also pointed out that anthropologists had to respect the individual-and some individuals preferred to live in minimal interaction with society Brameld extended this to the small group and community its distinctive and integral local culture had to be respected by the anthropologist

If we go back to the 1940s~ however the ideology expressed in the early literature had little overt relation to liberal-humanist values The view~oint combined Dro- fessionalism with social engineeriamp applied work Lad to be done scientifically and if so done it would also enhance the scholarly position of the discipline Marga- ret Lantis (1945) felt that the practitioner had to guard against inserting his prejudices into this practice in order to render the local culture accurately She quotes with approval some remarks she had heard at a Washing- ton conference on local agricultural assistance participated in by anthropologists and sociologists now their prides and prejudices the innate strength of the common people and Their culture is their truth In other words the way to render a true vision of the culture and needs of local people and thereby help them to accept the shocks of culture change was to be a scientific anthropologist The professional credo of anthropology thus became coterminous with the appropriate ideology for successful applied work This in Lantiss terms was the public service of anthropology and i t was an essentially uncritical attitude anthropology if done scientifically could do no wrong Margaret Meads views were identical to though somewhat more critical or skeptical than Lantiss

These positions of the American school were chewed over through the 1960s~ 70s~ and 80s with little change Sol Tax in the final chapter (omitted in a later edition) for the 1964 edition of his edited book Horizons of An- thropology explains why applied anthropologists alone among the social scientists had never created a profes- sionally defined and accredited practical training cadre As self-identified professional anthropologists they had to remain apart to preserve cultural objectivity and a sympathetic identification with the population under

study Thus the anthropologist acts as an independent agent taking upon himself the ultimate responsibility for satisfying his conscience in terms of the obligations he feels toward his colleagues and toward his fellow men (Tax 1964255) But these colleagues are not onlv fellow ~rofessors or graduate students but the sub- jecis he is working with ind for

With the emergence of cultural and political dissent in the 1970s~ the mixed humanist-paternalist-scientism of applied anthropology came under attack along with nearly every other ideological and ethical aspect of the discipline The colonial past simply could no longer be ignored and so New Left-inspired ideologies began to be heard Roger Bastides (1971)book Applied Anthro- pology took a neo-Marxist position Although the arguments are none too clear some thoughts come through anthropology must accept the fact that it is a product of Western civilization and that the West is responsible for the oppression and exploitation of native peoples- peoples now engaged in revolutions of liberation Ap- plied anthropology should assist in these revolutions Still Bastide knows that this is complicated since some of the indigenes strive to enter the bourgeoisie which the Marxists regarded as the ex~loiters So what is to be done ~ n t h r o ~ amp ~ ~ i s t s should fampht against marginaliza- tion and new forms of exploitation and help the people farmers or urban squatter groups decide for themselves what they want to achieve Applied anthropology in Bas- tides terms should be both an experimental science designed to create a new theory of change and a practical science to h e l ~ the de~rived classes achieve a better life And this fiecd must be as much art as science Anthropology must acknowledge that true science can exist onlv if man is free to Dursue libertv And this means that he anthropologist must divest himself of the superstitions of class prejudice and unreason-cultural bias

THE ACADEMIC CRITIQUE

Through the years anthropologists have engaged in criticism of applied anthropology which falls into five main categories

The first of these is that applied anthropology has no theory of its own and that i t borrows only superficial ideas from academic or scholarly anthropology or other disciplines Actually especially in its early years it ben- efited more from sociology or economics than from anthropology given the fact that anthropology knew very little about the modern world And much academic anthropological theory was (is) simply not relevant to practice To reverse the issue it seems to me that many details of change theory as developed by anthropologists over most of a century have been tested by the applied people but the results are largely ignored by the academic theorists (mainly I suppose because they are still preoccupied with cultural essences rather than change) The point is that the tests were usually made in the context of specific everyday situations and lacked rhetoric which cut ice with the intellectuals To paraphrase

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a typical example We found that acceptance of wells dug by power equipment was much more easily come by than acceptance of irrigation canals dug with locally made wooden shovels Basic principles of the relationship of change processes to material culture and symbolism might be embedded here but if so they are not apparent as written However applied anthropologists have from time to time assembled such statements as collections of case studies of change or as thinkpiece essays but much of this material is considered thin or trite by scholars From the scholarly point of view theoretical statements of cultural behavior ought to be ~h rased in exotic terms such as svmbolism or some ampher behavioral or mental process therefore if theory is hidden in empirical generalizations it is viewed as a matter of routine reporting But this also means that applied anthropologists test social-behavioral theory by using i t and constantly rediscovering its basically mun- dane nature Actually the paucity of general theory in applied anthropology can also be viewed as a boon since it excuses practitioners from becoming involved in tran- sient intellectual controversies and faddism

The lack of power to effect change or influence policy is a second criticism and is often voiced by the applied anthropologists themselves especially when writing for academic periodicals These tend not to be very convincing because they usually dodge the basic issue that influence on planning and policy in any political system is based on actual power and power is defined in the administration of social affairs by those who commapd the authority to order punitive sanctions or who are en- dowed by some even higher authority with the power to dictate change (recently Scheper-Hughes [1995] has demanded a militant anthropology) There is always however informal persuasion and certainly applied anthropologists have had numerous successes at this talking to their superiors and co-workers and getting them to accept modified versions of the plan This sort of activity became a fine art in the British colonial service and probably as well in American Indian affairs although it is hard to find details in the literature

However until the basic organization of bureaucracy changes the role of anthropologists and friends will be largely advisory and their power largely informal a matter of individual ability and diplomacy The question of roles is especially critical in development anthropology because as often as not the anthropologist is ambivalent about the way the change programs may affect the target population (for discussions see Bennett in Bennett and Bowen 1988 and the reference in n 23) Aside from all the complaints the practitioner frequently has really nothing much to offer his best effort boils down to nay- saying or qualification he says in effect Do it my way

17 See for example Spicer ( I ~ s z ] Adams and Preiss (19601 Arens-burg and Niehoff (1964) Anthropological Society of Washington (1956) Clifton (1970) Maday (1975)and Eddy and Partridge (1987) and for books Boas (1928) Evans-Pritchard (1946) Kluckhohn (1949) Leighton ( ~ g q g ) Mead (1955)Erasmus (1961) Foster (1969) Weaver (1973) Bodley (1976) Wulff and Fiske (1987)Van Willigen (1991) and Smith (1993)

and it will be easier or I wouldnt do it all because it will cause resistance This is not the rhetoric of directed power but that of consultation

A third criticism concerns the high failure rate of many applied anthropologically conceived or anthropologically advised projects This is sometimes represented as proof of theoretical inadequacy or basic igno- rance on the part of applied anthropologists This criticism seeems foolish to me given the high rate of failure in all human affairs advised by anthropologists or otherwise In actually many of the failures are really successes given that in social life we learn best from mistakes In addition the expected rate of success in the administrations that plan such projects is usually low In the 1970s and 1980s the US Agency for Interna- tional Development was content with at best a 20 success rate in its pastoralism projects as measured against the expected accomplishments listed in the project papers Still an anthropologist implicated in some phase of a project with something in the 10-20 success rate would be tarred with the failure brush (for details see Bennett Lawry and Riddell 1986 see also Hirschman 1967 and Tendler 1975 for discussions of problems of failure and unanticipated consequences in development work) Some of the failure critiques also stem from a few disasters or at least awkward projects in which the applied anthropologists had difficulties with the indigenous population sometimes being asked to leave the site Cornells long-term team study of Vicos an Andean community experienced some problems of this kind18

Another criticism concerns the paucity of training programs This is in part a function of the fact that applied anthropologists have tended to be part-time employees since so many applied jobs are temporary or strong on consultantship but lacking in career opportunities A second reason is the diversity and disparateness of the subject matter Since any institutional aspect of contemporary society in any nation can become a focus of applied work it becomes difficult to establish training for specific needs and subjects What can be offered is training in field methods and in the diplomacy needed to handle the target populations (as well as the bosses) Very few formal degree-offering training programs exist the University of South Floridas is the best- known and best-publicized but other anthropology departments offer occasional courses seminar training sessions and some fieldwork opportunities (for descriptions of the South Florida training program see Angros- ino 1981 1982 Van Willigen 1987 is a manual issued by the National Association for the Practice of Anthro- pology American Anthropological Association)

A final criticism concerns the ethics of intervention in the lives of target populations and the publication of information obtained from applied research From its

18 For accounts of the Vicos study certainly one of the applied- development-action-anthropology classics see Dobyns and Vasquez (1962) Holmberg and Dobyns (1962) Laswell (1962) and Holmberg (195 5)

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British beginnings in the colonial era applied anthropology has exhibited uneasiness with its role as information gatherer and interventionist since three domains of motives and preferences are always involved in practical activity those of the people who are the subjects of the experiment or project those of the organization running the project (the employers) and those of the applied social scientists (the employees) This is a much more complicated situation than is encountered in ordinary scholarly research and one that inevitably generates ethical conflicts Moreover because a measure of historical guilt is involved in much applied work the conflicts are easily heightened

Probably most ethical issues are simply not resolv- able they tend to peter out or to be set aside with a series of compromises and these compromises vary by situation given the endlessly variable contexts of social action and change Attempts at setting forth basic ethical principles in applied anthropology-and in anthropology and ethnology generally-have taken the form of codes of ethics19 sets of principles that anthropologists are advised to follow in order to safeguard their own positions with their employers to ensure the well-being of the target population and to salve their own consciences at being placed in ethically contradictory positions

The early codes for applied anthropology tended to emphasize the practitioners role vis-a-vis his employer However as time passed the emphasis shifted to the human subjects of the work whether for example developmental change was really in their best interest or not or whether publication of the results of the research even when names and places were disguised constituted a breach of confidence These issues became important as modernization or economic development and political nationalization drew the indigenes into the world of legality and human rights

THE ETHICS OF INTERVENTION

The intervention issue has some special aspects worthy of extended comment In the background lie some abso- lutes common to democratic humanism in Western culture One of these is the admonition against being ones brothers keeper intervention for the sake of bettering the lot of brother is acceptable ethically provided that it is done freely without expectation of some recom- pense or payback Payback then becomes the absolute ethical issue i t involves commercializing or corrupting the act of intervention Imbedded are other values such

19 See the Report of the Committee on Ethics ( H u m a n Organi- zat ion 19qgb) and the Proposed Statement on Professional and Ethical Responsibilities Society for Applied Anthropology (Hu-m a n Organization 1983) a revision of two earlier codes (eg Hu-m a n Organization 195 I ) that includes more material on the interaction and exposure issues than the previous versions Both this and the AAA Code of Ethics are often criticized for inhibiting ener- getic and penetrative field inquiry For a thoughtful general paper on ethics see Jorgensen ( 1 9 7 1 )Additional items are Adams (1981) Chapple ( I ~ s I ) Dillman (1977) Fluehr-Lobban ( ~ g g ~ ) and Gjess- ing (1968)

as the Christian idea of love as freely granted with no special motive of gain to the person offering it

Well and good but people continually intervene in the lives of other people this is in fact a prime requisite of organized society Redfields elaboration of the Ge-meinschaft concept or folk society as he called it was a rendition of a world without the necessity of formal intervention since society functioned harmoni- ously on the basis of common understandings This was in large part a romantic fiction (significantly it was called an ideal type and was a product of 19th-century German romantic social thought) since in most small communal societies rigorous intervention takes place continually so as to maintain the moral order The considerable influence the folk society scheme had in anthropology during the 1940s is testimony to the nostalgia built up around tribal culture by the classic-era ethnological program After World War I1 the folk society idea was rapidly eclipsed as anthropologists began taking a more realistic view of human behavior at all levels of social development

Another concept associated with intervention is the fear of inverted gratitude-the idea that those who help other people are never really forgiven for it This is often elaborated into a fear of retaliation on the part of the presumed benefactor and this in turn can lead to alien- ation and separation

In the face of confusion over the ethics of intervention i t is apparent that in order to intervene-that is to execute a program of intentional benevolent intervention-a special rationale is required which offers a way through the contradictory pathways We have seen that this rationale has varied through the years for the Brit- ish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries i t was a matter of the white mans burden which eventually became negatively identified as paternalism as the former colonials sought and acquired political freedom (and the possibility of retribution)

Another important ethic is responsibility or as Robert Rubinstein (1986273) has put it responsibility toward the target population and responsibility toward the employer (see also Berreman 1968) I shall focus here on the first rather than the second meaning As noted previously this involves confrontation between the self and the other on the one hand the practitioners career interests and intellectual motives and on the other what he owes to the people he is studying and presumably benefiting Does he have the responsibility of helping them of protecting them against exploitation (which means acting against his employer) or of simply seeing to it that nothing he does will injure them And a third dimension is the responsibility to scholarship or science as i t is called in much of the earlier literature on the subject How can one judge this threefold list of responsibilities when one or two are always going to be in some kind of conflict

Let us dwell on the question of responsibility of bene- faction Is the success of the intervention (or at least the anthropologists role in the intervention process) a responsibility that must be shared by the anthropolo-

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gist At this point we join forces with the pluralistic moral order of our times the answer given by probably every practicing anthropologist in the development field is (paraphrasing) It is my responsibility to do m y best to ensure favorable outcomes but I cannot guarantee it Perhaps he or she is saying It is really not my responsibility-if anything I pass it on to someone else because I want to live to be a practical anthropologist another dav

The reamponsibility to science ethic quoted as a defense against ethical strictures is I believe tricky and probably spurious in most cases where i t is used If Thomas Kuhns ideas about the social determination of basic scientific paradigms is mainly correct then most scientific ideas are projections of the culture of their time and will change sooner or later The classic era of anthropology is littered with ideas which commanded fervent attention and dimensions of responsibility at the time And the economic development field which has dominated applied anthropology for several decades is likewise strewn with passe predictive theories many of them unrealistic or inappropriate to the circumstances of Third World socioeconomic structure [see Cochrane 1971 for a highly personal critique)

So-exactly what is intervention Intervention for what The term itself is vague because it is almost impossible to find a clear pattern-only historically and situationally specific instances There can be major intervention in religious systems as in the case of the Christianizing of natives all over the world and there can be minor intervention in the methods of drawing water substituting a drilled well for a seeping spring And the ethical responsibility associated with such ex- tremes of intervention also ranges from major to minor

In the last analysis as with so many ethical issues in a plural cultural framework i t is up to the individual The disquisitions on the ethics of intervention in applied anthropology literature boil down to this that the individual practitioner must decide whether he really ought to do the work and how best to do it to minimize harm

Therefore minimization of harm is probably the most frequently adduced ethic for practical anthropology It has two main forms the ethics and advisability of accepting a job or task if the possibility of harm is great and the ethical aspects of continuing in the job if it becomes apparent that harm is possible The underlying issue is what sociologists call unanticipated conse-quences a strong pattern in human affairs or what Al- bert Hirschman the analyst of economic development projects called the hiding hand (Hirschman 1967) In the face of such uncertainties ethical questions are difficult to answer and It depends on the situation or the individual is once again the conventional way of settling accounts Guilt once again enters the arena as a contingency resulting from harm done as a result of unanticipated consequences (For some practitioners one way of minimizing these unpleasant possibilities is to accept relatively minor interventionist assignments)

So far as the second aspect of responsibility-

responsibility to ones employer-is concerned this clearly lies behind the insistence on the part of applied anthropologists on having their cake and eating it too- accepting employment but maintaining a considerable degree of independence and freedom to criticize the boss or defend the human subiects against undesirable conse- -quences In colonial anthropology this was simply for- bidden the administrator was the decision maker and the anthropologist the information gatherer But this restrictive role has never been acceptable-at least in theory-to American applied anthropologists Sol Taxs action anthropology rebellion (as we shall see later) held that the onlv wav to retain ones academic and moral z

conscience in practical work is to avoid employment by the powers that control the scene-choosing altruistic vs assigned intervention the former having a larger quotient of personal responsibility But letting the subjects rather than the bureaus control the problems being researched usually doesnt work very well in practice because the subjects would frequently just as soon stay the way they are in which case the practitioner has to accept the further responsibility of telling them what he thinks is good for them (paternalism again)

Finally we come to the issue of exposure or publication I consider that for the time being this issue has been resolved The guidelines on publication of results of applied investigations are fairly clear and for the most part practitioners follow them The classic trouble case documented in Human Organization during the late 1950s and early 60s~ is the Springdale episode involving the premature and unauthorized publication of a teamwork community study made by Cornell Uni- versity in a small upstate New York town Arthur Vid- ich the senior author of the book Small Town in Mass Society (Vidich and Bensman 195 8)) had been a member of the research team and had agreed not to publish any of the results without review and ~ermission with his supervisor Urie Bronfenbrenner f t e r his departure from the project and acceptance of an academic job he prepared a book manuscript with Joseph Bensman a writer but not a member of the original research group The townspeople took serious offense at the book and satirized it in a Fourth of July parade with the towns prominent citizens riding on a float wearing masks identifying them as the pseudonymic characters from the book and an effigy of the books main author afloat on a manure spreader University deans and presidents were harangued suits were threatened and the general uproar finally made the pages of Human Organization The last word was had I feel by William F Whyte the editor of Human Organization who responded to one of Vidichs attempted defenses with the following We are convinced the Vidich-Bensman answer will not serve [Vid- ich] seems to take the position that he has a responsibility only to science Has the researcher no responsibility to the people whom he studies (Whyte 1958)~

20 In add i t ion t o t h e V i d i c h and B e n s m a n b o o k and W h y t e s edi to- rial o n t h e Springdale s to ry see Evans (1960-61) H u m a n Orga-n i z a t i o n (1958-59 195ga b 1959-601 and V i d i c h ( 1 9 6 0 )

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And the collective answer is of course yes The Vid- ich and Bensman case changed the rules once and for all After the episode nobody in applied anthropology could entertain the possibility of publishing without some consultation with the project director and the subjects of the research And that is where the matter stands today

Action Anthropology in the Career and Intellectual Outlook of Sol Tax GENESIS

I have already mentioned Sol Taxs rebellion against the employment approach of applied anthropology This rebellion produced what came to be called action anthropology whose principal difference from applied anthropology lay in its voluntaristic approach The approach was designed to avoid the basic paternalism of applied anthropology with its overtones of guilt and co- optation

To summarize Applied anthropology entered the 1950s with an eclectic intellectual heritage a culturological emphasis partly contradicted by the multidisciplinary approach of prewar and wartime practical anthropology including the Harvard industrial management research and its aura of right-wing ideology the social relations disciplines-within-interdisci-pline orientation and New Deal liberal paternalism Sol Tax although a staunch anthropologist and a participating member of the Society for Applied Anthropo- logy became increasingly dissatisfied with applied anthropologys paternalistic and mechanistic slantz1 He withdrew from intimate participation in the Society for Applied Anthropology but as interest in his action anthropology began to develop Human Organization pub-lished a number of articles and communications con- ~ -

cerning it Throughout the 1960s and 70s action was considered part of a larger or generic applied anthropology there was never a complete break or divorcement

Action anthropologists were expected to help communities as volunteer scholars using their own funds or with the help of research grants The human subjects were to be treated as equal participants and the goal was to help them articulate their grievances and then

21 I myself witnessed one instance of the disagreement It occurred at a meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology board some- time in the late 1950s attended by Chapple Richardson Mead and Tax myself [as program chairman for a forthcoming meeting) and possibly one or two others [I suspect I am the only living witness) A vigorous argument ensued over several key issues the Code of Ethics which was in a state of debate at that time editorial policy for Human Organization and relations between the Society for Applied Anthropology and the US government on some issues long forgotten Tax seemed to feel that the Old Guard members were overly deferential with respect to large organizations overly dependent on government support and funds and overly concerned with applied anthropology as a distinct discipline in its own right The administration of the Society for Applied Anthropology began to go downhill about this same time and during the 1960s reached a nadir with revelations of scandals concerning subscriptions and other things

conduct discussions in which the various parties tried to find ways of meeting needs or solving problems In essence this was community development a field which led practical social science in the first development decade of the 1950s~ when rural life and economy were considered a major target of postwar reform in the former colonies (and which also was very much in the air in Chicago in the form of Saul Alinskys Back of the Yards movement)

Action anthropology was born in and largely confined to a single research venture the Fox Project involving the study of a community on the Fox Reservation in Iowa The methodology of this project resembled Robert Redfields approach in Latin American communities in which of course Tax had collaborated (see Rubinstein 1991) The approach required a team of students super- vised by a senior professor with members of the team assigned particular topics or emphases and with the work expected to continue over a period of years Train- ing students in the senior professors theories and methods was part of the deal

David Blanchards paper in the Tax Festschrift volume (Hinshaw 1979) established the origins of Taxs ideas about action in his intellectual biography (details which I confirmed and added to in a day-long interview with Tax in the spring of 1994) Tax grew up in Milwau- kee His parents were German immigrants of proletarian or lower-middle-class background and were adherents of the 1848 radicalism shared by many Germans who came to Milwaukee in the latter half of the 19th century Tax spent his childhood listening to his father and older brother Ervin discuss socialist ideas and the need for the little man to defend himself against the Interests- ideas that were also part of the populist heritage of the Midwest The Milwaukee version was called social- ism and the city had socialist mayors for years Their main contribution consisted of public ownership of some city facilities an advanced welfare system and excellent public e d u c a t i ~ n ~ ~

Taxs own populist career started at age 12 when as a volunteer newsboy he was arrested by the police for selling papers without a permit A kind of school-board- sponsored company union-the Newsboys Republic- existed and one had to belong to this in order to obtain a permit The purpose was benevolent to prevent news- paper publishers from exploiting children Tax joined the Republic promptly and received his permit thus

22 Our Milwaukee paths crossed just once Tax was eight years older and in adolescence that meant an eternity One of Taxs allies in the Newsboys Republic wars was Frank Zeidler later to become the longtime socialist mayor of Milwaukee Zeidler was a senior at West Division High when I was a freshman and sopho- more there On one occasion Zeidler gave a talk at a West Division assembly on the Newsboys affair along with Tax at which I was present due to a compulsory attendance rule (reconstructed during Tax-Bennett conversations in spring 1994) Zeidler and I later became rival feature writers for the West Division student literary magazine [Tax went to a high school on Milwaukees East Side) (The reader might wonder at such sophisticated activity in high schools in the 192os but high school education in Milwaukee at that time was probably equivalent to contemporary junior college)

cancelling the court trial with which he was threatened However he was outraged at such adult domination and after many battles took over the Republic and built it into a genuine union winning bargaining rights-all be-fore he was I 5

Tax went on to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (after an aborted semester at the University of Chicago) but had problems keeping up with his courses because of his editorial work in an independent student liberal paper and his strenuous promotional activities on behalf of Hillel and the student Liberal Club Tax had difficulties with the Communist student organization which infiltrated and virtually destroyed the Liberal Club Tax told me that this experience convinced him once and for all that extreme left-wing organizations with revolutionary ideologies were inappropriate for reformist advocacy in American society In general Taxs biography from early days in Milwaukee through his peripatetic college period defines an activist personality determined to defend the underdog and to avoid collaboration with the organizations in power-one who understood that anything worthwhile in life takes organizatiion determination and intense action

Taxs undergraduate honors thesis written at Wiscon- sin (seen by both Blanchard and myself) distinguished two kinds of science pure and therapeutic It would seem that the [therapeutic] effort might at least have the best knowledge of its subject that it possibly can and the pure science anthropology must furnish that knowledge (quoted in Blanchard 1979422) Tax continued to refer to this distinction in his student papers and reports over the next few years but sometimes expressed concern that pure science rarely offered the kind of information one really needed in order to do therapeutic practice since it was preoccupied with basic theory rather than the nitty-gritty of everyday life Attempts to apply this dialectic were made in his first pre-graduate-study fieldwork experience with Ruth Benedicts Mescalero Apache study but he was unable to follow through because he was accepted as a graduate student at Chicago where he went to study anthropology at the source

He started his fieldwork as a Chicago student with short visits to various Algonquian tribes including the Fox But this too was a brief episode because Redfield soon sent him to Latin America to open the Guatemalan branch of the Redfield program The next decade was spent there and in Mexico The period also saw the earliest precursors of action anthropology with Tax recording Indian demands for reform experimenting with democratic methods of teaching and running participative nondirective fieldwork with parties of Mexican anthropology students Throughout his Latin American episode Tax never relinquished his conviction that anthropology students needed to get closer to their informants in the field and to treat them as fellow humans coupled with an intense conviction that the poor and exploited needed help and protection Blanchard suggests that the upshot of his Latin American fieldwork experience was to conclude that anthropology had

B E N N E T T Applied and Action Anthropology I S35

failed because it had not produced the data needed to solve social problems (Blanchard 1979426)

Sol Tax was repeatedly disappointed by anthropologys inadequacies in the therapeutic field yet he never deserted the anthropological ship Why not Be- cause he believed that of all the social sciences anthropology offered the most hope of humanistic socially rational application while anthropologists did not fully appreciate the need to treat subjects as equals they nevertheless did so to an extent greater than the elitist sociologists and economists And after a long period of research-associate status much of i t went at a table-desk in a dead-end side hall of the chicago department Sol was appointed an associate professor with tenure He then emerged as a major proponent of the core program of graduate education established by the department in the early postwar period This program was a manifestation of his conviction (eg Tax 1955) that anthropology consisted of four or five fields and that these had to stay together because topical diversity helped im- plement value relativism the basis of a humanist world view unity in diversity he called it in a hectographed classroom leaflet used in the early core program And this urge showed up again in his organizing activity on behalf of CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGYwhich perhaps more than any other professional event kept the discipline from fragmenting in the 1960s and early 1970s

In 1948 the department asked Tax to start a field training program for ethnology students on the Fox Reserva- tion recalling his brief work there 12 or so years earlier Tax accepted the challenge and that was the beginning of the Fox Project (see Gearing Netting and Peattie 1960 for a history and interpretation of the whole episode) Tax conveyed to the students in preparatory semi- nars his vision of a participative ethnography in which the informants were coinvestigators and the investiga- tors were students of the informants

Above all Tax asked his fieldworkers to ask themselves key questions Where are the Fox going and what do they want out of life Such questions were not ordi- narly associated with anthropological fieldwork because depiction or reconstruction of tribal cultures was the principal objective of the classic era The question implied that the Fox were in fact-in addition to their Native American identity-Americans in a small town with fears hopes and needs Lisa Redfield Peattie a member of the team made some positive suggestions as to how to sponsor meetings and social occasions among the factions on the reservation in order to foster better communication and get them thinking along construc- tive social-change lines Tax at first rejected the philosophy behind this but then rejected his rejection (Gearing Netting and Peattie 196032) noting the need for inserting values into anthropological research and including the informants or subjects-the Fox-as active participants in the intellectual process of assessing needs and finding values to support them He called this action research and eventually i t became action anthropology For information on the Fox Project and its possible aftermath the documentary history produced by


Fred Gearing and other members of the project (Gearing TAXS EXPOSITION O E ACTION ANTHROPOLOGY

Netting and Peattie 1960) is the single best source although a few articles on methods and results were produced including Taxs own paper in Human Organiza- tion (1958) However as is the case with so many of the applied anthropology projects little or nothing in the way of follow-up research on the community organizational reforms has been accomplished

After the Fox Project Tax participated in a number of marginal action projects or episodes with Southwestern and Northern Plains tribal groups but none of these ma- tured into a full-dress actionist undertaking The Fox Project students and other students of Tax did likewise-attempted to use action in their subsequent individual fieldwork Few of these later efforts seem to have taken place over a sufficient period of time to accomplish any substantial change in the communities but Karl Schlesiers work with the Southern Cheyenne apparently bore fruit the tribe apparently developed a successful community action program (Schlesier 1974283)

If accomplishment is measured by economic and demographic magnitudes then Taxs most successful endeavor was his community housing and development program in the 55th and 57th Street neighborhood just north of the University of Chicago (Tax 1959 1968) Us- ing his persuasive interviewing and group discussion techniques coupled with intensive deal-striking interaction with politicians and real estate people Tax managed to build a series of new single and multiple-family units on the lots created by clearance of substandard and aging buildings He was also able to get the residents to take responsibility for various community ventures designed to upgrade housing and income standards which had the effect according to critics of keeping out lower-income residents from deteriorated areas to the north This type of project-emphasizing neighborhood voluntarism-was in the Chicago air as a result of Saul Alinskys Back of the Yards a rehabilitation community-organization program designed to alleviate substandard conditions in the stockyard district and also to assist the labor unions in getting a better deal for the stockyard workers (Slayton 1986 Alinsky 1971) Tax knew Alinsky and Alinsky once told me that while he admired Taxs energy he felt that the objective (never stated as such by Tax) of creating a barrier to protect the university district from demographic deterioration was not exactly admirable (Maybe so but it most likely saved the University of Chicago from moving to the sub- urbs) community organization or activist social work (many social work schools in the 1960s and 1970s created programs like this as field training for their degree candidates) was also in the air from the late 1950s on through the whole 1960-70s era of social unrest and reformism (Borman 1979)) and in that context Taxs approach simply represents the appearance of this general approach within a n t h r o p ~ l o g ~ ~

23 For a convenient bibliography of classic early studies of community-based development projects participated in by anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s see Arensberg and Niehoff (1964

Tax wrote several papers defining and justifying action anthropology from the early 1950s into the 1960s~ and the text became the basis of lectures in his travels as a representative of CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY The version I use here was entitled Action Anthropology and appeared in CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY in 1975 (A footnote tells us that its original form was a lecture given at the University of Michigan in 1958 and published in the lournal of Social Research at the University of Ranchi Bihar India in I 95 924 Still another version appeared in 1952 in the journal Amdrica in dig en^^) In this paper Tax says that anthropologys central concept is culture and that this concept features the notion of lifeways diversity which in turn enriches the materials available to anthropologists to define alternative solutions to social problems We might paraphrase Taxs several long passages in the following way Awareness of social problems is a world-wide syndrome (Tax 1975514) and it is the responsibility of the anthropologist to help people convert their awareness of social need into social action This intervention must be done in the field I cannot imagine action anthropology except in the context of field work (p 515) He defines fieldwork as a clinical or experimental method of study (p 5 I 5)-that is it is study11 or research and at the same time i t is aimed at real-life problems of the population in question Here lies the essence of action anthropology it is something the academic anthropologist does as research but i t is

appendix A) See Goodenough (1963) for a classic account of community development research For some assessments of the development-anthropology subtype of applied anthropology see Gow (1991 1992) Mead (1955) Mair (1969) Poggie and Lynch (1974) Hoben (1982) and Scudder (1987) The monographs published by the Institute for Development Anthropology in Bingham- ton NY provide an example of contemporary development anthropology literature The IDA is also the preeminent anthropologically oriented contract research agency in the development field For a polemical defense of development anthropology as against conventional applied anthropology see Cochrane (1971) 24 Tax spent about two weeks in Ranchi where D P Sinha an Indian ecological and economic-applied anthropologist was teaching in a department of anthropology Tax was selling the CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY network and did so by delivering a series of lectures on anthropology and its role in Third World rehabilitation I visited the Ranchi department and worked with Sinha a month or so following Taxs visit and received an account of how he had managed to charm the administration and promote his action- oriented conceptions of applied anthropology 25 The first formal presentation of action anthropology to the anthropological profession occurred in November 195 I at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chi- cago A session entitled Applied Anthropology chaired by John Useem included papers on action by Sol Tax and Robert Merrill Other panelists were John Adair Edward Kennard George Foster and Jean Comhaire As I recall the session the tension between the classic applied stance and the participative value-oriented action approach was apparent Incidentally the first publications on action anthropology to appear in Human Organization were papers by Tax (1958) and Lisa Peattie in a symposium entitled Values in Action Action here referred not to action anthropology but to activist research in general The other panelists were H G Bamett and Allan Holmberg but their papers referred to the need to take account of values in scientific anthropology not to create or advocate values


simultaneously something he does for humanity This is a neat trick because the anthropologist must obtain his own support or funding yet avoid employment by any agency in charge of the basic resources that the group under the study requires in order to survive

But Tax argues that action anthropology goes even farther The worker must be willing to make things happen The actionist must encourage change foster it encourage the informant-participants to experiment with changes in their habits and institutions and discover new values And to do all this is to transcend the contemporary cognitive apparatus of the discipline- current theory is never enough (p 515) Neither conventional academic theory nor conventional culture can provide sufficient guidance for the actuality of social behavior in change (The ideas here would seem to be related to Firths [ I954 I 9551 structure and organization In other words Tax like any other practicing social scientist in any era or nation had discovered that social existence does not necessarily conform to social theory or to cultural values)

And he goes still farther asserting that the basic problem the action anthropologist deals with is community organization and that his chief tool is education (1975 5 I 5) The actionist must use art and experience as well as theory and method that is action anthropology emerges from the life and career and hopes and fears of the anthropologist as much as i t does out of the lives of the people under study and the actionist must convey these feelings to the people and encourage them to respond26

Such ideas articulated in plain English were a challenge to the American Anthropological Association Old Guard and many Society for Applied Anthroplogy stalwarts as well At the time Tax was saying these things the Chicago department was in the hands of inner-core mecialists like David Schneider and while bv that time 1-was long gone from chicago echoes of reactions of the Peabody-Chicago-Berkeley axis to Taxs ideas were radiating out over the profession By 1975 when the paper was published in full format in CURRENT ANTHRO-POLOGYthe ideas were on the whole expected and accepted but back in the 1950s and 60s they were strange and shocking (Margaret Mead made similar points although with a different rhetoric during the late 1950s and early 1960s at American Anthropological Associa- tion Society for Applied Anthropology or American As- sociation for the Advancement of Science annual meetings) Tax and Mead were in a sense the opening guns of the rebellions in the ranks of anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s and yet the two were at odds over the applied vs action issue all through this period

Tax goes on to discuss the ethical and moral issues (p 5 16) Truth is important anthropologists seek the full truth of social context Freedom is equally important anthropologists must value freedom because they

26 In academic jargon the theory of practice asserts the primacy of subjective experience in the formation of objective knowledge [Partridge 1987223)

cannot reveal the whole context of cultural diversity without it Self-determination is something we believe in and help others to seek although we should not necessarily impose it on them But these and other values embedded in action anthropology are all Tax seems to say common human values to advocate them should not give anthropologists any pangs of conscience since sooner or later all humans express or want them (This sounds like de Tocqueville humans want and need freedom) In another paper Tax called this the freedom to make mistakes (Tax 1956) people want to run their own affairs but they can benefit from help from knowledgeable and concerned professionals Whether they wanted such help was of course one of the issues not usually faced by the actionists and constituted one theme exploited by critics (eg Thompson 19762)


Some academic criticisms of action anthropology have been suggested and others can be anticipated That it was a kind of social work was a slur often heard at meetings and occasionally seen in print and the criticism leveled by Peattie in particular that i t was a viola- tion of correct scientific method or logic was reported often with varying rhetoric Others claimed that action anthropology was really a figment of Taxs peculiar methods of fieldwork and could not be done by anyone else Some critics still felt that values had no place in science especially when you mixed them as casually and vigorously as Tax seemed to advocate

I can add a theory-oriented criticism If Tax and his co-actionists were really serious about discovering social problems and solutions in the context of everyday ongoing behavior and attitudes they needed something better than the American cultural anthropology of the time to do it Tax did say that available theory was inade- quate but perhaps he failed to look far enough Not only as suggested earlier did he not formally employ concepts from British social anthropology but he also ignored the Harvard-based behavior science or social relations theory which still retained a considerable following in anthropology By pushing classic four-field anthropology as the sole or at least major source of ideas he was rejecting or neglecting the multidisciplinary approach and I believe it was a fairly conscious rejection since he was at intellectual odds with the Harvard gang just as he was estranged from and uneasy in the presence of Margaret Mead and the applied gang (I have been told that in the field as in the classroom Tax was congenial to all theories and concepts but this is ambiguous in his writings) The former represented in his view a break with anthropology the latter the take- over of decent liberal reformist anthropology by the technocratic scientific applied people In one sense action anthropology was simply Taxs way of declaring his independence of both groups However this entailed especially in the case of the social relations concepts a certain cost the neglect of more systematic approaches to social behavior And in the annals of the actionists


one finds references to disordered note taking mind changing and other ratiocinations which are perhaps an inevitable part of all fieldwork but in light of their goals a frustrating impediment What do these folks we are studying really want And who are we to tell them What new problems will emerge when we solve the old ones

Some light would have been thrown on such questions if action anthropology had used an adaptational approach to social behavior Instead Tax insisted on culture as the master concept-because of his inveterate faith in classic anthropology and its basic diversity and eclecticism Even the conventional Parsonian pattern variables would have helped what values or ideas are universal in the community and which ones are specific to situations Do the people seek diffuse understandings of social roles or specific ones And so on Tax was not overtly hostile to this kind of conceptualizing but it is fairly clear in this writings from the 1950-70 period that he did not feel comfortable with formal modes of social thought Throughout his career Tax was a kind of contained rebel distrusting the establishment but at the same time working for i t and trying to improve it

Finally the precepts of action anthropology were not unique (nor would Tax have claimed they were) but shared much with applied anthropology-or-and this would take a lot of work to determine-action began to influence applied In any case Tax was crystallizing a concrete and particular field situation the Fox Project in terms that were familiar to him from high school onward (eg Tax 19882 where he says he held the basic values of anthropology from the third year of high school)

Lisa Redfield Peattie certainly one of the Fox Project students most responsible for the coming together of the action approach in the field later developed doubts on rather abstruse grounds Influenced by the writings of Paul Diesing (1991)~ a philosopher she noted that action anthropology used a John Dewey-inspired means-end schema in which the discovery of the problem and the search for its resolution proceeded simultaneously in their own real time Peattie felt that this schema vio- lated the standard scientific scheme of applied anthro-pology-namely that through research one discovers what the problem is and then does more research in order to find a solution (a rational or linear-temporal approach) Peattie was worried about the fact that in the Deweyan approach one must continually seek some sort of evaluation of procedure and conclusion whereas in the linear approach the mode of evaluation is clear the worker either has done what he set out to do or he hasnt However action anthropology would need con- stant discussion and argument and thus could easily de- volve into a kind of group dynamics among the fieldworkers and participants And the trouble with the linear approach is that it has strong tendencies toward authoritarian dictation of both problem and solution by the outside expert In addition the need for more research to define solutions means that the problem inevitably will be redefined so the linear-rational approach is likely to dissolve into the Deweyan because reflexiv-

ity is a fundamental characteristic of human behavior I have engaged in both types of activity at different times and do not see a choice on abstract or logical grounds it is all situational depending upon the fieldworker the people studied and the others in the background who call the shots or hold the ultimate power Action anthropologys circular-participative decision making is as likely to be successful as applied (linear-causal decisions) in its appropriate setting Both are likely to be time-consuming frustrating and prone to mistakes (see Held 1984 for a recent book on the problem of rationales for social action)

In the 1970s and 1980s many articles in Human Orga- nization ex~ressed ideas reminiscent of action anthropology altiough rarely if ever was credit given to the source (if i t was a source-and that is difficult to judge since Tax was writing on the verge of a general rebellion against establishment-oriented theory which blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s) For instance Wayne Warry in a 1992 paper published in Human Organization entitled The Eleventh Thesis Applied Anthropology as Praxis defines his field as follows Praxis offers an important focus for practitioners of social science one in which theory is integrated with praxis at the point of intervention He goes on to advocate the structuring of means- end relations on the basis of grounded reason and com- municative action and claims that a praxis approach would involve study participants as equal partners in open discussion of theoretical assumptions that un-derpin the search for pragmatic solutions to everyday problems (Warry I 992I 5 6) Is this action anthropology cast in fashionable I 980s jargon

Laura Thompson by the mid-1970s had joined the postcolonial critics who were attacking applied and development anthropology as handmaids of the exploiters Her 1976 paper in Human Organization is an attempt to reformulate the role of applied anthropology in a postcolonial world and she sums up her prescription as follows (19766)

an applied anthropologist may help a client group as consultant by defining the groups practical options in local regional national and global contexts Using understanding of group behavior in the context of its ongoing life situation a clinical anthropologist may predict within certain limitations the probable effect that the selection of each option would have on the client community were it to be selected and implemented by the membership Choice of a preferred alternative and its enactment however should remain the prerogative and responsibility of the client

Although this passage has some characteristic Thomp- son phraseology a residue of the 1950s behavior-science era it could serve as a statement of the methodological approach of action anthropology although in the same paper she criticizes action for its lurking paternalism Did the Fox really ask for help or did Taxs group tell them they needed i t (See also Thompson 1950 in which she uses the phrase action research) In any case in this and other critical assessments of practical

anthropology in this period of the mid-1970s and early 1980s one sees effects of the disciplines era of anxiety and guilt Tax seems not to have been influenced by the guilt element for him anthropology and culture were their own excuses for being and the most important thing was to avoid co-optation by the Big Boys who run the show But Thompson although imbued with some of the ideas of action anthropology and possessed of a generic humanism still accepted the employment frame of applied anthropology

Still another example is a paper by Anthony Paredes (1976) in Human Organization that defined the ethnographic enterprise as a transaction between human beings and claimed that anthropological research should become a palpable element in the stream of their [the researched groups] recent history In a comment on the paper Nancy Lurie proposed that the ethnologist or applied anthropologist should become a partner with the community These ideas were part of a growing restlessness among anthropologists who felt that the discipline was saturated by detached inhu- man approaches

The origin of much critical commentary was not the discipline but left-humanist political ideology Paradoxi- cally much of applied anthropology was identified by these critics with colonia1and elitist postures probably largely because of the extensive participation of anthropologists in economic development projects But from the standpoint of methodology and the concepts that supported it in practical anthropology the ideas of people-oriented research and the treatment of subjects as human beings to whom one owes a degree of love and assistance certainly had roots in various practical modes and perhaps especially in action anthropology

Although the left was critical of anthropology as an imperialist undertaking anthropologists sympathetic to such ideas nevertheless saw their discipline as a way out of exploitation via the doctrines of cultural tolerance humanist identity and respect for the local community Taxs action anthropology was precisely this kind of approach in that it obliquely answered the anti- imperialist left-wing criticism in anthropology with a populist doctrine of egalitarian participation and respect for the indigenous population Yet as Thompson pointed out such respect for the indigenes could also be construed as paternalism Was paternalism implied in action or was it an attitude actually held by Tax and his students In the documentary evidence (Gearing Netting and Peattie 1960) there is nothing that would justify accusing Tax of being paternalistic There is evidence on the contrary that he was aware of its dan- gers and did his best to avoid them Above all Tax insisted on discovering and using the desires and needs of the people and avoiding the preferences or values of the intellectual fraternity Thus action anthropology had inevitable paternalistic implications but lacked the value-rationalized paternalism of so many previous episodes in the history of relations between Native Ameri- cans and the majority society

So far as I could determine from the limited information available Taxs action anthropology did not foment


rebellion on the Fox Reservation but it could have if it had lasted longer and had been more effective in raising levels of aspiration or expectation Something of the sort did happen in Vicos where the anthropologists obviously were not capable of changing the basic power structure the landlords remained in power and the ten- ants eventually under the stimulation supplied by the project protested

Are anthropologists supposed to be revolutionary cad- res Paternalism or whatever-if you train local people to articulate their grievances there is no telling where it will end up It is my feeling that fear of such ambiguous or unpredictable outcomes is another reason action did not become a more influential mode of practice in anthropology But perhaps even more fundamental is what I have called the ambiguous engagement (Ben- nett 1988) of anthropology with all forms of social practice the desire to participate reined in by the fear of undesirable transformation or destruction of existing and integral cultures

Comments

J A M E S M A C H E S O N

Department of Anthropology University of Maine Orono Maine 04469-5773 USA 17 VIII 95

Bennett begins by distinguishing between what he calls applied anthropology done by anthropologists em-ployed by organizations involved in inducing change or enhancing welfare and action anthropology engaged in by anthropologists on a voluntaristic basis I will restrict my remarks to applied anthropology since I have direct experience in that area

Bennett says that his paper is a conceptual and ideological history of applied anthropology It accomplishes that task but it also provides a description of the problems dilemmas and ethical traps that have plagued applied anthropology from its inception His paper is well written interesting insightful subtle and devoid of preaching He gives a good picture of how applied anthropology got where it is at present

Bennett clearly is an advocate for appliedaction anthropology but his analysis scarcely promotes confidence in our record or ability to solve problems He admits that in some part at least our lack of influence stems from our advisory role He assumes-and for good reason-that the ability to influence planning is based on power and very few anthropologists occupy positions with power attached Why are we relegated to an advisory or consultative role Why has applied anthropology not become a policymaking science Why is it so difficult to envision an anthropologists administering a large agency that has the power to change societies Ben- nett gives no definitive answer but he does point out that the ability and willingness of applied anthropologists to act is strongly constrained by the ethical dilemma in which we find ourselves We are caught between the interests of an employer who seeks to impose

S4o I C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 37 Supplement February 1996

change and a concern for and loyalty to the target population which may be adversely affected He goes on to point out that the basic ethical principles of applied anthropology are designed to maintain the target group our jobs and our consciences in the face of this ethical contradiction He depicts applied anthropologists as more comfortable standing outside the fray commenting on plans rather than making policy

What do applied anthropologists contribute to the agencies and organizations that employ them Bennetts answer seems to be not much In this regard he says that the practitioner frequently has really nothing much to offer his best effort boils down to nay-saying or qualification he says in effect Do it my way and it will be easier or I wouldnt do it at all because it will cause resistance (I must admit that these phrases capture the essence of much of the sage advice I used to offer my colleagues in the Fisheries Service in the 1970s)

Bennett is I think being unusually pessimistic about the value of applied anthropology The ethical dilemma he describes so well may be the source of our greatest strength and professional worth For an administrator it may be very useful to have a couple of in-house Ham- lets wringing their hands over the latest agency initiative defending cultural practices that seem to stand in the way of progress and pointing out the unanticipated consequences of agency action It may be very useful to know which policy options will cause resistance and why and which ones are more congruent with existing norms and practices Such information may save a program not to mention ones job

Moreover the needs and best interests of the target population are not easy to discern If anthropologists can define these they will have performed a major service Communities in the peasant and industrial world ex- hibit a good deal of intracultural variation Their inhab- itants have different characteristics exist in different circumstances have different opinions and support different policies In addition there are few policies and rules that are universally beneficial A rule in the best interests of one person will almost certainly impose costs on someone else The problem of identifying best options and interests is compounded by the fact that what is best for an individual may be detrimental to the community It is this lack of congruence between individual and social goals that is the essence of the so-called common-property problem

Many applied anthropologists write as if change were always imposed by outside agencies At times even Ben- nett succumbs to this notion The idea that people in local communities are capable of generating institutions to achieve goals has only begun to be appreciated There is a small but growing body of literature on the institutions that local communities use to manage essential resources (eg communal lands fisheries irrigation systems) In other societies administrative hierarchies exist in which governments set general regulations while leaving smaller bodies free to manage at the local level Those local-level units in turn constrain the larger bodies Helping people in local communities to develop effec-

tive institutions to attain their goals should prove a fruitful area for applied anthropologists

Last it is generally assumed that agencies and change agents know far more than the target populations which can benefit from intervention Pepeatedly anthropologists have described cases in which target populations had a far better idea of their real options than the outside experts in addition in a few instances anthropologists have pointed out that local conceptions of reality have led to more workable policies and practices than those of scientists whose scientific concepts were flawed The idea that people in the industrial West have much to learn from Third World cultures does not suggest itself easily but it may be the greatest contribution applied anthropology can make

M I C H A E L V A N G R O S I N O

Department of Anthropology University of South Florida Tampa Fla 33620 USA (angrosinlunacas usfedu) 21 VII 95

Bennett has touched many bases and raised many important issues in the history and ongoing development of applied anthropology I applaud him for this service and will limit my comments to some reflections stimulated by his discussion of the role (or lack thereof) of theory in applied anthropology

He notes that applied anthropology has been unfairly criticized by academic anthropologists for the superfi- ciality of its theory it actually had to borrow its theory from the other social sciences because anthropology knew very little about the modern world Moreover applied research was often in a position to test propositions derived from scholarly theory but it had very little impact on the discipline the plain-spoken rhetoric of the applied report usually failed to resonate with the scholars As Chambers (198517) has pointed out applied researchu-as distinct from basic researchu-is subject not only to scientific criteria of validity and reliability but also to various criteria of utility-such as relevance significance and credibility mainly because it results from creative collaboration between pro- ducers and consumers of knowledge It therefore represents an essentially different culture from that of the academic researcher

What is remarkable about Bennetts characterization is that he is speaking of the period when there was at least some superficial continuity between the predomi- nant theoretical interests of the mainstream of the discipline (functional analysis culture change) and the projects on which applied anthropologists were working The situation has only grown more polarized The 1970s~ the very era that saw the emergence of the large and growing class of nonacademic practitioners was the period in American anthropological theory dominated by French structuralism I know of no practitioners who have attempted-even in jest-to introduce Levi-Strauss to the world of program evaluation and needs assessment In our own time there has been at least a

token effort to harmonize postmodern theory with applied anthropology (Johannsen 1992)~ but this sporting gesture has not touched off a trend It has indeed sparked strong criticism (Singer 1994) that seems likely to chill further rapprochement

I do not entirely share Bennetts presumption of the irrelevance of theory in contemporary anthropology In my own work with people with mental retardation for example I have made use of certain aspects of the postmodern approach particularly as it contributes to the analysis of narrative and discourse since much of my research involves the collection of life histories of adults trying to adapt to the noninstitutional community But this use comes to the fore only when I publish on aspects of my project in scholarly journals it is essentially invis- ible to the decision makers on whose behalf I analyze public policy and recommend program implementa-tions And even in my most antipositivistic moments I do not claim that it could form the basis of an entire approach to application in the way that functionalist or culture-change or evolutionary theory once did In any event there is nothing specifically anthropological about postmodern narrative theory we are now merely borrowing more widely-from the humanists as well as from other social scientists-and getting farther away from the ideal of an applied anthropology

I am not yet willing however to view this situation as a dead end although I believe that the intellectual coherence of anthropology taken for granted by anthropologists prior to the 1970s no longer obtains When the question Do applied anthropologists apply anthropology (Angrosino 1976) was first asked the symposium participants agreed that contemporary practitioners (as distinct from academically based applied anthropologists) had to be proficient in both anthropology as traditionally constituted and a related professional field of application (eg medicine education urban planning) It now seems to be the case that practitioners must be conversant with a variety of methods theories and bodies of substantive data that transcend any one discipline-that include but cannot be limited to materials traditionally associated with anthropology

Some of our colleagues may cling to the hope that even if anthropology no longer coheres at the level of method or theory or even of a common store of empirical data we at least remain united by its special perspective Bennett certainly disabuses us of this fond notion when he characterizes the prevailing ideology of (American) anthropology as a kind of populist humanism It sounds fine but even if this credo can still be mined for nuggets of insight in the complex landscape of contemporary politics the fact remains that it is scarcely an anthropological property it is a very fragile reed upon which to hang our asserted disciplinary and professional affiliations

Wulff ( I97648) long ago suggested that for programs of applied anthropology judicial subtraction may become a corollary to eclectic addition This will necessi- tate a painful assessment of traditional curricula The recently circulated guidelines for training programs ap-

B E N N E T T Applied and Action Anthropology I S ~ I

proved by both the Society for Applied Anthropology and the National Association of Practicing Anthropolo- gists (Kedia and van Willigen 1992)~ represent a long- overdue step in this direction but they propose mainly some very general categories of instruction No one has yet come up with a thoroughgoing review of the conceptual methodological and substantive inventory of the discipline and its allied fields so that we can confidently say what we can jettison as well as what we can profit by adding to our lore

We should not tumble heedlessly into eclecticism an intellectual temptation that has grown more problem- atic as new technologies provide us with instantaneous access to a seemingly unlimited pool of information Given the nearly uncontrolled explosion of information (is it significant that we speak of the information superhighway rather than the knowledge superhighway or the wisdom superhighway) to what morass do we condemn the modern eclectic What guidelines can we provide to allow such a practitioner to choose carefully from among the available materials Generaliza- tion rather than narrow specialization is often the key to survival But we have not even begun to think about how the information revolution potentially makes us generalists of a species unheard of in human experience The question Do applied anthropologists apply anthropology already sounds quaint Of what further use are any disciplinary labels What kinds of professions will emerge when those disciplinary boundaries are irrevoca- bly blurred

J O H N H BODLEY

Department of Anthropology Washington State University Pullman Wash 99164 USA 14 VIII 95

This provocative history of applied anthropology provides an excellent basis for assessing anthropologys practical impact on the contemporary world and its potential for shaping the future In my view there need be no conflict between a multidisciplinary practical an-thropology and a culture-centered practical anthropology However Bennett is certainly correct in pointing to conflicts between a multidisciplinary practical an-thropology and a scholarly (discipline-centered) anthropology and between a practical anthropology focused on the culture concept (multicultural tolerance) and an applied anthropology in the service of development agencies

Although I agree with Bennett that much of anthropological theory is not particularly relevant to world problems in my view the culture concept is vital The key problem for practical anthropology is understanding the impact on communities of increases in the scale of cultural systems especially as represented by larger governments and larger commercial markets and corporations Discussion of scale brings into focus anthropologys ex- pertise with small-scale systems because locally organized communities offer many human advantages whether they exist as autonomous tribes or as partici-

S4z I C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 37 Supplement February 1996

pants in the global market Anthropologys interdisciplinary focus is also important because understanding communities holistically may also require demographic social medical political and economic data and ana- lytic methods

While Bennett made effective use of the example of small-scale cultures in his Ecological Transition (1976)~ such as with his instructive juxtaposition of equilibrium societies and disequilibrium societies here he is too quick to sweep them aside For example he calls Red- fields folk-society construct a romantic fiction suggesting that Redfield out of nostalgia over passing tribals mistakenly thought that folk didnt intervene in the lives of others I suspect that Redfield understood that the folk did intervene in others lives The problem for applied anthropology is not intervention as such but the locus of power and decision making and especially the distance of decision makers from impacted communities or target populations Interventions directed by globally organized institutions serving global commercial interests may not be significantly different in their local impact from the interventions of colonial administrations The real issue of small-scale cultures is that they draw attention to the presence of political centralization and market economies which magnify the human problems of poverty and environmental deg- radation Governments and commercial interests are likely to be more responsive to the human problems they create if they can be controlled by smaller-scale cultural systems but of course devolution of power is not without risks

The problem with applied anthropology is not that the practitioners are hired What counts is who is doing the hiring and who defines the problems Development agencies that further the interests of the global elite are likely to find little use for a humanistic practical anthropology hoping to defend genuine cultural diversity in the interests of local communities The historical failure of the old applied anthropology whether it was colonial anthropology or development anthropology was due to its failure to place its work within the context of the global political economy and to acknowledge the advantages of smaller-scale cultures Breaking anthropology down into subdisciplinary institutional anthropolo-gies is not the answer I would argue that a new applied anthropology is in fact evolving Its practitioners are working for hundreds of small nonprofit organizations around the world that are dedicated to social justice and sustainable development They use anthropologys ho- listic methods and deal with cultural systems I propose that action anthropology shift its research focus up- ward to what Bennett calls the others in the background who call the shots or hold the ultimate power the basic power structure or the Big Boys who run the show These people are the CEOs board members and stockholders of the major for-profit corporations that are daily growing larger and gaining more control over everyones life I am not suggesting that anthropology become a revolutionary cadre (to answer Ben- netts rhetorical question) but practical anthropological research teaching and publishing drawing on

old-fashioned strucural-functional ethnography cultural ecology and postmodernist analysis could help citizens to act more effectively in their self-interest

ROY A R A P P A P O R T

Department of Anthropology University of Michigan Ann Arbor Mich 48109-1383 USA 7 VII 95

We owe a debt to John Bennett for so admirably fulfilling one of the duties of tribal elders by reminding us in a judicious and comprehensive review of developments in the application of anthropology to the worlds problems transpiring sufficiently long ago that the older of us have forgotten about them and the younger have never heard of them at all His review is timely because interest in bringing anthropology to bear upon contemporary social and environmental problems is once again waxing and it is well for us all to reflect upon how much of what we may think is new has been thought and done before Our discipline has memory problems and we therefore fail to learn as much as we should from its experience We reinvent old mistakes as frequently as we do old ideas-all very wasteful It would be interesting to investigate our institutional memory to discover what is retained what repressed what forgotten and why but be this as it may Bennetts article is something of a corrective for our institutional amnesia Its bibliography could easily serve as the syllabus for the first half of a course on what I and some others prefer to call engaged anthropology to distinguish it not at all polemically from applied anthropology action anthropology and anthropology as cultural critique

I do have some minor disagreements with Bennett I am not persuaded that applied anthropologys implicit threat to the core concept of culture was (and still is) the reason for academic anthropologys hostility to or disdain for it More serious challenges to the culture concept were it seems to me being pressed during the thirties forties and fifties within academic anthropology itself by such developments as culture-and-personality and more recently by developments as different as practice theory (which resembles culture- and-personality in many respects) and world political economy I am more inclined to the view also discussed by Bennett and made explicit by some earlier critics that a good deal of the antagonism of the academic toward the applied focuses upon applied anthropologys relationship to its clientele which is structurally one of subordination This is of course a legitimate concern but as grounds for blanket impeachment it comes close to stereotypifying bigotry Subordination is structurally intrinsic to contract research but a good deal of anthropological research on contemporary problems is funded by grant rather than contract Further- more not all contract research is equally susceptible to being bent to conform to the agendas of clients Environ- mental impact research a field in which many anthropologists are engaged required as it is by federal law is less pliable than say research into the most effective ways to administer colonized people

B E N N E T T Applied and Action Anthropology ( S43

Subordination is one thing the capacity to benefit the subjects of study is another That applied anthropology is itself without power to effect or avoid or mitigate change will not as Bennett makes clear be news to anyone least of all applied or engaged or practicing or critical anthropologists We approach theoretical matters here

Applied or engaged anthropologists are not empow- ered to effect or avoid changes in the social systems which they study but they do command data bearing on those systems disorders A question basic to any theory of application one of theoretical interest equal to its practical importance suggests itself How can information concerning the disorders of a system be introduced into that system in ways that are likely to amelio- rate rather than to exacerbate them Possible answers to this question would present themselves to us as ele- ments of a larger theoretical structure that-the critics are correct-does not yet exist a general theory of application or correction a general theory that is of how to apply what social sciences think they know or are capable of discovering to the alleviation of the worlds trou- bles Central to such a theory of course would be some sort of principled conception of the nature of societys ills or disorders If this sounds grandiose it is important to keep in mind that such a general theory does at present seem to guide the worlds attempts to understand and correct its difficulties and that some of us think that it makes matters worse and should be challenged I am speaking of course of formal economics

Because afflictions from which the world suffers are if substantively defined innumerable and therefore in- corrigible I think that they should be conceived in structural terms and elsewhere (most recently in Rappa- port 1994) I have suggested that a limited number of deformations of adaptive structure underlie and thus may generate many or most of the substantive problems currently threatening us If this is at all near the mark the guiding principle of anthropological engagement or application is to find ways to restore adaptiveness (the capacity for autonomous self-correction) to social systems or structures that have become maladaptive Ben- nett also mentions adaptation in passing and has written about it extensively elsewhere

These suggestions are at odds with some versions of cultural relativism and may also fly in the face of fashionable dicta condemning all meta-narratives or to- talizing accounts out of hand but he who claims to have rejected all meta-narratives is in the possession of one of which he is unaware We need more rather than fewer meta-narratives and I urge those not attracted by concepts of adaptation to think of others

P R I S C I L L A R E I N I N G

3601Rittenhouse St NW Washington DC 20015 USA21 VIII 95

In his abstract John Bennett restricts applied anthropology in Britain to the period of colonial administration

in Africa Forget the British Empire-even in the United States Sol Taxs Fox Project was very modest compared with his ongoing efforts in the Guatemala highlands To confine anthropology to the study of tribal society is simply not correct if ones scope extends to indigenous societies outside of western Europe-to all the societies speaking (or which spoke) any of the extant 5000 languages recorded by linguists Some of those languages were spoken by members of indigenous states encom- passing millions of people In this commentary I take an anthropologist to be a person with a doctorate from an accredited institution

Fortunately I am able to go to the work of Conrad C Reining (my late husband) who not only studied a development scheme in the Sudan (1966) but had earlier published an article entitled A Lost Period of Applied Anthropology (1962)~ based on his B Litt paper A His- tory of Applied Anthropology in the British Empire Although it is true that the title alludes to the recurrent discovery and repeated discussion among practitioners of anthropology the fact is that references to the practical values of anthropology go back to the very beginnings of anthropology and ethnology as recognized fields of study That the early British anthropological societies were not strictly academic is not so surprising if we real- ize that they had their origins in the active humanitarian movements of the time especially the anti-slavery activities (p 593) The slave trade was abolished in 1807 The 1840s~ ~ o s bas 70s~ and 80s were a period of lively debates in England over the role of the anthropologist and the stance of professional societies A then- new trend began to emerge in 1870 which led anthropology to become more esoteric and to eschew practical applications (p 598) From then on practical applications tended to be forgotten-hence the lost period until they were rediscovered in the 1920s and 30s Ben- nett can be excused for not remembering the lost period although if his research for this article had been thor- ough he might found the title of Conrads 1962 article in the index of the American Anthropologist

There is another point of perhaps equal importance and that is the whole idea of praxis in anthropology When Conrad and his colleagues started the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists in 1975 he deliberately chose the word professional to bridge the world of anthropological experience as it informs theory and theory as it is used to inform guide and instruct research and practice in the field for whatever purpose That is not meant to be a dichotomv

In the section on ideology I think Bennett is mixing up two time periods by the 1930s Americans may have been using the language of American liberalism but the real damage to American Indians in the 18th and 19th centuries did not have or intend to use that language Similarly if Bennett had had experience in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa or India he would have had a better perspective on the attitudes of colonial officials They certainly were capable of denigrating the indigenous peoples but the vast differences in size complexity of organization and history of American Indian populations-where the word tribe can properly be used-


compared with the same parameters of African ethnic groups makes the comparison more like one apple to an orchard For example Red Lake Indian Reservation in the 1950s had a population of 3000 and probably 50 employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (school hospital administration fisheries roads etc) In Bukoba Dis- trict in Tanganyika (as it was in the 1950s) there were 300000 Haya 3000 Asians and 300 Europeans of whom fewer than 30 were colonial officials The ratio of I English official (that includes the 2 hospital nursing sisters and the head of the public works department) to 30000 Haya resulted in a situation not well captured by the word condescension There was Pax Brittanica just (In Kenya there was Mau Mau) They were different worlds then and are now

The source of funds for anthropological endeavors certainly matters and to an important extent questions around those who pay and those who use anthropological results and the distribution of results have properly engaged many anthropologists and many donors Ben- nett is right in noting that the discussion can be acrimo- nious-especially if anthropological endeavors are essentially secret or involve the military If they are not secret it is a different matter What matters is that the results be available so that they can speak to the profession whether academia or in the many nonacademic agencies that employ anthropologists

Finally it seems to me that Bennett is posing the question so that he can give the answer he gives Im not sure that the question reflects the world of the anthropologist in the nineties

J O H N V A N W I L L I G E N

Department of Anthropology University of Kentucky Lexington Ky 40506 USA (ANT~o~ukccukyedu) 1 5 VIII 95

This essay on the practical or applied side of anthropology purports to be a general statement about the conceptual and ideological basis of applied and action anthropology Bennett has to keep things straight by using the term practical anthropology as a kind of cover term for the topic In any case his essay deals with a limited number of types of practical anthropology He does note that he has chosen not to discuss advocacy anthropology and that there are probably as many approaches as there are practitioners As his essay is limited in the number of different types of approaches it is also limited in both historical depth and applicability to current conditions

The emergence of a conceptualized applied anthropology is much earlier than Bennett suggests The first published use of the term applied anthropology appar-ently was in a 1906 puff piece that described the training program in the Department of Anthropology at Cambridge University This clearly indicates that Brit- ish applied anthropology emerged somewhat earlier than the 1920s as indicated by Bennett A similar pattern appears in the United States where the initial program of

the Bureau of American Ethnology was focused on what was called applied ethnology as early as 1879 Both cases suggest that the potential for application served as an important justification for the creation of the earliest basic disciplinary activities What was the ideological and conceptual basis for the emergence of these early programs Why did Cambridge and the BAE bait and switch

During the war the numbers of anthropologists involved in practical anthropology increased dramatically Following the war the amount of applied anthropology in Britain was greatly reduced along with the size of the empire In the United States what emerged was an anthro~olowof the cold war in which the use of anthro- pologyAintik design and evaluation of international aid programs increased dramatically In addition in the United States as an apparent counterbalance to big- development-program anthropology there emerged a richly conceptualized ideologically explicit practical anthropology that was value-explicit and involved-in- the-action as was action anthropology There was very little of this kind of activity in Britain The action anthropology of Sol Tax and his students discussed at length bv Bennett is but one kind Also im~or t an t is theu research-and-development anthropologyL of Allan Holmberg and students and the use of the action research model of social psychologist Kurt Lewin manifested in the work of TheseLaura ~ h o m ~ s o n approaches are supplemented by others such as community development cultural brokerage collabora- tive anthropology and cultural action and participatory action research To an extent the proliferation of approaches related to the need to separate oneself from the negative meanings that adhered to applied anthropology Bennett points this out in the casebf action anthropology and I suppose that he uses the term practical anthropology to escape the born-of-colonialism l l~ocial engineering and paternalistic labels that have adhered to applied anthropology in his mind My own conception of applied anthropology is anthropology put to use and is probably identical to what he means by practical anthropology Practical anthropology is a reasonable term but it can become confused with practicing anthropology and is used in reference to what they do by anthropologists who work in Chris- tian evangelism and missions

The essay peters out when i t comes to the recent period of a ~ ~ l i c a t i o n factor in the formation An im~or t an t of anthropology continues to be the choices available to and made by the increasing numbers of anthropologists graduating with BA MA and PhD degrees While many choose careers in application for ideological reasons the facts of the job market are very important Today the modal anthropological work setting is multidisciplinary demands a radically increased range of skills and tends to isolate the anthropologist from the flow of disciplinary concerns about theory What are the ideological and conceptual bases of these kinds of anthropology What differences in ideology and concepts are implied by the use of the terms applied anthropol-

ogy and practicing anthropology Many practicing anthropologists simply do not allow themselves to be called applied anthropologists even though they apply anthropology

This essay is informative but the rhetorical thread is picked up too late and dropped too early It ignores much of the rich diversity of approaches developed in practical anthropology I think it is best read as an interpretation of the dramatic changes that occurred in American applied anthropology for the early 1940s to the 1960s rather than as a general statement about applied and action anthropology in Britain and the United States This is a period of substantial change and development on much of which Bennett is uniquely situated to comment For example the discussion of the ideological orientation of Sol Tax is very useful for understanding the emergence of involved-in-the-action approaches for applying anthropology

M U R R A Y L W A X

Department of Anthropology Washington University St Louis Mo 63130 USA 24 VII 95

I never saw such a goddam lot of improbable people Sukmit was the only acknowledged shaman but he wasnt a leader He was no chief no weheelu among them We went around the brush Always there was a spring near by I never knew where we were going We were going somewhere I didnt care at all We were going somewhere maybe And if we were not going somewhere we were not going thats all

The university would not help me took no interest would not even give me enough money to have the records [of Sukmit] transcribed and made perma- nent on modern disks Decent anthropologists dont associate with drunkards who go rolling in ditches with shamans [de Angulo 1979(1950) zzo z z ~ ]

Whether the ideological practice is applied or action an-thropology its enacting requires human beings In the case of action anthropology these were invariably graduate students Of Taxs (University of Chicago) students several proved to be extraordinarily gifted at working with American Indians (as had de Angulo with Califor- nia Indians in the first quarter of this century) but among the male students i t seemed that their talents for action anthropology were inversely related to their position within the degree-granting program The better they succeeded as action anthropologists (willing-like their predecessor de Angulo-to roll in ditches with shamans) the less the odds of their emerging with a PhD

Working with American Indian people required a commitment overshadowing such demands as graduate studies or museum exhibits The commitment emerged naturally from a personality which rebelled against the formal requirements of academia So the ideological program of action anthropology had a cost and this cost was in the welfare of a number of students Their men-


tor Sol Tax never faced the issue The enactment or realization of his idealism rested upon their dedication and their willingness to become incorporated into the social fabric of a particular community

Perhaps action anthropology should have created its own graduate certification distinct from that of the rationalized reified and bureaucratized discipline of that department and that university However i t was or is not just the issue of action anthropology but the disparity between the formal anthropology of academia and the wild and tragic realities of life in the field among marginalized and subordinated peoples Action anthropology requires an enduring egalitarian intimacy reci- procity and commitment The contributions of Jaime de Angulo (1979[1950]) and Robert K Thomas (nd) could not formally be recognized in their day but in the postmodern era the profession has come to accept the work of some of those willing to careen through the brush with improbable people

Bennett mentions the Fox (Mesquakie) Project about which much has come to be written Equally if not more revealing were Taxs other activities for American Indi- ans notably the Workshops on American Indian Af- fairs conducted for Indian college students [twice directed by Rosalie H Wax) the ~ g e r i c a n ~ndiahChicago Conference where Nancy 0 Lurie played a leading organizational role and the Cherokee literacy project (Car- negie Corporation Cross-Cultural Education Project) involving the anthropologists Robert K Thomas and Albert Wahrhaftig together with the linguist Willard Walker As a University of Chicago PhD (sociology and anthropology) married to another Chicago PhD (Rosa- lie H Wax) I was eyewitness to these although not to Taxs final achievements the great postwar conference on anthropology leading to Anthropology Today then to CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY and to his then becoming director of the Smithsonian Institution

To comprehend the disparity between the ethos of academia and that intrinsic to at least one kind of action anthropology let me quote Thomas (reared among Cher- okee) on the eastern Cherokee

The Cherokee tries to maintain harmonious interper- sonal relationships with his fellow Cherokee by avoiding giving offense on the negative side and by giving of himself to his fellow Cherokee in regard to his time and his material goods on the positive side

sharing was and is a great value in which ev- eryone was the same size economically and there is no concept of borrowing or debt They all prosper together or they all starve together Such things as investment return repayment of debts re- investment of returns developing a community in terms of the capitalistic system are just not meaning- ful

[The Cherokee] does not see the providing of jobs by a source which makes profits and offers indirect help to individuals as help In Cherokee thought when you want to help a person you give him goods


and services he expects such services and goods without strings attached and he gives such services and goods when the positions are reversed

The Cherokee did respect knowledge but the securing of a graduate degree by studying Malinowski and Rad- cliffe-Brown would scarcely have been understood Had they regarded i t as important to have a credentialed voice via Robert K Thomas they would have leaned upon him to complete a degree and then he would have had to do so and thus to pressure Sol Tax into recognizing his own academic and ethical obligations to his students In retrospect Thomass papers on the eastern Cherokee still constitute an extraordinary resource (co- vertly circulated among the knowledgeable) and should have earned him a degree

To the generalization about the relation between gifts as an action anthropologist and a professional career Nancy 0Lurie is a partial exception since some of her achievements were recognized by the profession Yet she too found academia difficult managing to survive ethically and emotionally by resigning a departmental chairmanship and situating herself as a museum cura- tor where she was able creatively to enlist Indian groups and individuals in the design of exhibits The Indian exhibits at the Milwaukee Museum are indeed remarkable but even more remarkable was the consensual and cooperative process by which they were constructed (Just as the University of California Berkeley would not assist de Angulo as linguist and cultural anthropologist in recording texts of the Pit River and Modoc so the federal government would not allow its funds to be used for the feed [banquet] that brought several hundred Indians to the initial planning sessions for the museum exhibits)

Ignoring these practical ethics of working with Indian groups and communities Bennett turns to the ideological and partisan namely Jorgensens 1971 essay in CA This is sad because that essay is essentially a political document emerging from the bitter conflicts about US involvement in Southeast Asia Jorgensen begins by using the then-conventionally distorted portrayal of Proj- ect Camelot (cf Wax 1979 Horowitz 1967) and elabo- rating on that fantasy That sort of polemical distortion muddied analysis and was used to justify vicious in- fighting among anthropologists On the issues of ethics Bennett might better have noted the handbook published by the AAA (Jacobs and Cassell 1987)) which to the AAA1s disgrace has been allowed to go out of print On Springdale he might have noted the essays by Johnson (1982) and Cassell (1982) and on the relationships between Indians and researchers the essay by Ja- cobs (199 I) the empirical review by Wax (1991) and the commentary by Deloria (1991) as well as Delorias and others contributions to the special issue of Social Prob- lems devoted to ethical problems of fieldwork (Cassell and Wax 1~801

As enn nett be l l notes If you train local people to articulate their grievances there is no telling where they will end up The colorful demonstrations of Red

Power asserted Indian grievances and claims but they also injured innocent parties as well as some persons who had been of significant service to local Indian communities The occupations of Alcatraz Wounded Knee and the Washington Office of the Bureau of Indian Af-fairs were dramatic and some anthropologists rushed to endorse them despite the fact that numerous individual Indians and many legitimately elected tribal governments distanced themselves Wounded Knee was a particularly sordid story (Lyman et al 1991)

My view of Sol Tax is more grounded in the actuali- ties of programs and social movements than that of Ben- nett and therefore more nuanced Sad to say Tax was unwilling to accept the realities of Indian political life It was typical of Taxs ideological partisanship that he tried to bury the honest portrayal of how the local Nav- ajo community was exploiting the opportunities inci- dent to the Rough Rock Demonstration School (School Review 1970) Taxs action anthropology well suited the American anthropological temperament which is to be critical or even adversarial to the federal government while simultaneously looking to governmental agencies for reformative resources That he should have been reared in turn-of-the-century Milwaukee with its Ger- man socialist tradition makes sense In historical actuality the pre-World War I socialist party of Germany was a relatively conservative organization but its ethos was benevolent and reformative In any event Taxs political orientation was akin to that of most American field anthropologists bringing a project of benefit and uplift to an oppressed and subordinated people like the Mesqua- kie (Fox) of Iowa the Cherokee of eastern Oklahoma or more generally the American Indians of the post-World War I1 period of relocation who were granted an authoritative voice via the American Indian Chicago Con- ference A generation or more later i t is easy to derogate such projects as paternalism but that is too easy a dismissal of a vital boost of hope and resource

Bennett has incorporated his memoir of Tax within a sketch of the movement toward applied anthropology as it was becoming institutionalized as the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Tax dissociated himself from the others in that movement and the Society by labeling his version action anthropology The names and leaders have changed but during the half a century following similar interdisciplinary movements for community involvement have resurfaced within the SfAA Hessler New and May (1980) advocated a posture close to Taxs as did and do Jean and Stephen Schensul (Schensul 1980) (New was and Jean Schensul now is president of the SfAA)

Perhaps a major difference between the applied anthropology of the generation of Tax and that of the present day is that todays practitioners are more inclined to define themselves by their substantive area (eg medical anthropology or educational anthropology) rather than by the generic applied anthropology The rationale is apparent there is very little of abstract or theoretical anthropology (or sociology or psychology) to be applied To be applied is to be situated outside the

towers of academia What is applied or utilized is a research orientation-a craft-and what then becomes distinctive is the knowledge and the process of inquiry which are so acquired For the medical anthropologist it is as if the various medical occupations constituted a set of tribes (savage or otherwise) and the basic knowledge were how to behave observe and inquire amongst these tribes within such peculiar locales as the modem hospital Such knowledge is idiographic and interdisciplinary-anthropological only in the broadest sense (or in philosophical jargon the weakest sense)-and Bennett to the contrary only for a handful does i t rest upon the concept of culture It is not the knowledge of abstracted medical culture but the immersion and participation in the social life that is fundamental

Whatever the Iabel action or applied there needs be concern not only for the peoples targeted but for the agents at the site The ideological goal of helping others must not override respect both for the agents whose energies drive the project and for the truth about the human characteristics of those others If we must dis- tort our image of these others we have no anthropology applied action or otherwise As de Angulo ( I979[1g~o] 187 my translation) wrote to his friend Blaise Cen- drars There is nothing supernatural in the universe nothing hidden The world is a great open book but one must know how to read mustnt one It is only human stupidity that gives birth to the miracle ( and then only retrospectively)

A L V I N W W O L E E

Department of Anthropology University of South Florida Tampa Flu 33620-8100USA (alwolfecfrvmcfrusfedu)I 5 VIII 95

While I enjoy reading Bennetts direct fast-moving no- nonsense prose I worry that CA Associates who are not already familiar with applied and action anthropology will come out with a rather slanted picture of its ideological and conceptual aspects if this is all they read about it They certainly would have almost no idea of the current practice of applied anthropology I just want to call to the attention of CA readers some highly relevant sources that Bennett does not tap in his review of what he calls the practical or applied side of the discipline Anyone interested in this subject must look at the journal Practicing Anthropology described in its masthead as A Career-Oriented Publication of the Soci- ety for Applied Anthropology Practicing Anthropology began in 1978 with a guest editorial by Sol Tax whose earlier visit to the University of South Florida graduate program in applied anthropology had stimulated the founding of the publication Among many other things his editorial (Tax 19788) said

I il ny a rien dans lunivers de merveilleux I1 ny a rien de cache Le monde est un grand livre ouvert mais il faut savoir lire nest pas Cest seulement la sottise humaine qui donne nais- sance au miracle ( et mCme du vol en arrikre)


I foresee this possible future ( I )that some thou- sands of anthropologists and persons interested in anthropology who are in the nonacademic everyday work force will tell one another publicly that they are behaving differently from their colleagues and in some ways more effectively and that they would like to have other anthropologists join them at work (2)that personnel offices civil service commis- sions and others would begin to recognize the positions for which training in anthropology is beneficial and (3) that more and more identified anthropologists would enter the occupational structure and the process would snowball

That same issue of Practicing Anthropology reported on a survey sponsored by the Society for Applied Anthro- pology that discovered that the I I 3 nonacademically employed anthropologists they were able to find reported having jobs in every one of a list of 32 topical areas adapted from the USDictionary of Occupational Titles The conclusion of that report (Wolfe 197816) was optimistic

The failure to find definite clusters of activities associated with any of the functional modes of applied anthropology supports the hypothesis that anthropologists tend to be jacks-of-all-trades any one of whom may engage in a variety of specific activities We should not be disheartened that we cannot easily delineate the domains of our activities rather we anthropologists should be encouraged for in a world increasingly specialized we have maintained a broad perspective and a wide range of sorely needed skills not only useful in the study of exotic peoples but also in application to contemporary problems in this country By our training and by our experience anthropologists are proving themselves willing to deal with issues in ways others have failed to imagine

Since that time hundreds of anthropologists have been trained specifically to work in all the nonacademic sectors of society practicing their profession of anthropology This aspect of applied and action anthropology goes far beyond what Bennett implies by devoting only one paragraph to training programs saying essentially that the situation is hopeless-too few full-time jobs the subiect matter too diverse He mentions onlv the Uni- versity of South Florida program whereas theie are now at least 16 serious graduate-level programs in applied anthropology And while there hasnt been a full survey of the jobs of applied anthropologists for almost 20 years there is a lot of evidence of a lot of full-time jobs There is stilI reason for optimism In 1995 Elizabeth Briody president of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) and herself a full-time professional with General Motors initiated jointly with the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) a very well- organized effort involving scores of practicing anthropologists for the marketing of applied and practicing anthropology CA readers interested in an updated view of the ideological and conceptual aspects of applied and


action anthropology will be interested to know that the president of the SfAA during this joint initiative with NAPA is Jean Schensul who with her colleague Ste- phen Schensul has been over the years a strong advocate of advocacy anthropology There is much more than what Bennett reports

J O H N W B E N N E T T

St Louis Mo 53130 USA 27 IX 95

The space allotted me is not really sufficient to address substantive issues in detail The commentators do offer a few critical remarks about one or two of the issues raised in my paper but most of the criticisms seem to concern omissions and no one really tries to handle my provocative reconstruction of underlying ideologies It is difficult to document the development of applied anthropology because of a scarcity of ideological commitment and the absence of routine assessments of results And the many approaches in applied anthropology are up for grabs-there is no authoritative classification and anyone can provide one I chose to focus on applied and action anthropology because of their dominance in the intellectual history of the field but as I note in the paper there are obviously many other types

Acheson is critical of my pessimism as to the general accomplishments of applied work He may be right in implying that I exaggerated the powerlessness and he notes that the ethical dilemmas and hesitancies of applied anthropology may be the source of our greatest strength While he offers no data to support this the point is worth thought The trouble is as I have said that we simply dont know the outcomes of most interventions My work in the Japan Occupation had this ambiguity The Supreme Commander Allied Powers agencies solicited and liked our research and our reports were models of clarity and full of information but i t was hard to know exactly what influence they had That they did change minds and modify policies we knew but the details were hard to come by Bodley is also concerned about my pessimismj I do tend to feel that applied anthropologys practitioners often overrate its significance in solving human problems and avoid assessment of its results and effects Without such assessment there is room for both my skepticism and Bodleys and Achesons optimism

I note also that Bodley wants to stick with the concept of culture Well and good but how much does i t really contribute to the solution of problems of say the distribution of resources and power It certainly does as I have said give a philosophical and humanitarian dimension to applied anthropology and that is good-no argu-ment That is why for example Sol Tax stuck with anthropology even though he was well aware of its shortcomings as a source of practical ideas and methods If this is what Bodley is talking about again no argu-

ment I note that structural-functional ethnography is in Bodleys view old-fashioned But an idea is an idea a method is a method If i t helps solve problems it has no date

Angrosino questions my skepticism about the utility of theory in applied work noting that in the time period I give major attention to there was indeed some continuity between the academic theorist and the applied worker This is presumably what I referred to as the interdisciplinary social science era a period of dominance of sociologically inspired fuctionalist theory with its emphasis on social behavior and institutions The eclipse of this approach by purely culturological interests is certainly one cause of the cognitive dissonance in the applied field My view is simply that contemporary cultural anthropological theory contains little of value for the interventionist but then Sol Tax had come to the same conclusion much earlier

The underlying trouble is of course the term applied anthropology The basic ambiguity of the identification has dogged the field since the founding of the house organ with its multidisciplinary aspirations and we continue to stumble through the confusion The paradox is that while applied anthropology was the first real inter- or multidisciplinary social science i t could never face up to this publicly but had to cling to its disciplinary mother herself always less than willing to deny the parentage

But for the dedicated practitioner the source of concepts and theories should be irrelevant This is the reason for the persisting multidisciplinary attitude in applied anthropology The fundamental contradiction in the field is the stubborn desire (need) to cling to a discipline which has never offered much of the intellectual fodder necessary to accomplish the assigned tasks There really is no issue however concerning theory in practical endeavor you use what works Applied anthropology is not a discipline or even a subdiscipline but a set of opportunities that some people with anthropology degrees pursue out of hunger or genuine social dedication or both Why worry about disciplinary allegiances

Reining is concerned that I used only the African colonial episode as my model for British applied anthropology Space limitations forbade me to go farther afield and in any case I was not really concerned with doing portraits of the many episodes of applied work in countries around the globe I wanted to focus on the seminal arguments and contradictions that have concerned applied and action anthropologists and I had to select the crucial documents and episodes Conrad Reinings paper on a lost period of applied anthropology should have been mentioned however even though I would not have had the space or the agenda to discuss it

I am somewhat bemused by Rappaports characterization of me as a tribal elder Ah the ethnologization of role theory in the anthropological heaven I have a cherished image of myself as a feisty rube or perhaps an abrasive private eye-but tribal elder Maybe he meant i t as a compliment As a matter of fact i t is im-portant for seniors to speak out especially if they have nothing better to do and there are few seniors from the

B E N N E T T Applied and Action Anthropology I Sqg

classic era of anthropology who can still pound a key- board I appreciate Rappaports appreciation of my attempt at interpreting (not reconstructing) the past

His one major disagreement is of greater moment and I am pleased that he spotted it I refer to the culture- concept business Yes the disagreements with the concept as a guiding light were perhaps more articulate in the past but that is precisely the issue The concept is no longer something to criticize but something to accept without question or with a see-no-evil attitude The literary anthropologists deserve credit for recognizing that culture is a basically humanistic idea and playing with it at that level As an old-timer raised in the scientific tradition I cannot go along but more power to them As a scientist I cannot use culture as an integrating concept for anything other than description and conden- sation of complex behavioral data

The clientele issue is perhaps the issue that causes most friction with the scholars and academics but I see no hope for any change in the situation Scholars operate with a credo of absolute independence (not that they can exercise it consistently but i t is what they live by) practitioners operate with a de facto ethic of satisfying the employer But as I have noted the problem is that the academic heritage is powerful and the applied anthropologist tries to have both his independence and his dependency This is the dominant theme of two or three decades of tortuous reasoning and no small amount of whining on the part of appliedv anthropologists The ambivalence the incompatible values will continue How- ever as with everything in real life we muddle through Such issues are never reallv resolved thev iust fade away And of course as ~ a i ~ a ~ o r t notks the situation determines just how important the subordination really is-not all instances produce severe conflicts of interests and conscience

His suggestion of a need for creating more adaptive structures is of course well taken But I think the problem is that the capacity for creating such adaptive solutions has considerably diminished with the rise of the very maladjustments he cites ethnic identity as an absolute winner-take-all violence as a problem-solving mechanism etc-not to mention what I suspect is one of the key causes of the general cultural decay of our time the increase in population and the increase in the number of discarded and unwanted populations With this increase the value placed on human life correspond- ingly diminishes and that triggers the increase in may- hem and unreason I seriously doubt if anthropologists have any answers to such problems because their tradition is of one liberal humanitarian faith in human order and reason-not that that is a bad thing but it does not equip them very well for dealing with the present Adaptation is a fine idea but one that has two sides one can adapt passively and humanely or actively and inhumanely By itself adaptation is no solution to anything so far as the observing specialist-scientist is concerned

Van Willigen Wax and Wolfe-applied anthropology stalwarts-find fault with my highly selective choice of

documents and episodes Let me respond to all three with a general clarification of my objective

The distinctive contribution to applying anthropological knowledge to practical affairs made in North America was to declare that a field or discipline called applied anthropology did in fact exist How- ever despite persistent attempts to define and even reg- ulate this discipline or subdiscipline i t has not been possible to achieve a convincing unity This means that applied anthropology is not a genuine academic field and this in turn means that its accomplishments are extremely diverse I rejected any attempt to deal with the substantive results of applied work since this could not possibly be done in a single article and probably not even in a book And in any case the depictions would have lacked consistency and unity since each topic is governed and illumined by concepts and values that ~ e r t a i n to its uniaue domain As one famous anthropologist remarked to me years ago The trouble with applied anthropology is that there is no there there

Facing this problem I decided to select the contributions that possessed what I considered to be conceptual theoretical and ideological depth or relevance And such material was to be found mainlv in the North American contributions to the field f r o i the 1930s through the 1950s Only in North America was a substantial general- izing literature created which aimed at identifying a field for better or for worse To some extent as I have acknowledged i t also occurred in Britain Of course there are innumerable projects and efforts in application in various countries which I imore To include them

u

would inevitably have forced me to attempt a review of substantive topics and this as I have noted is simply impossible in a single article Despite these shortcomings and omissions I believe that I have located the important issues and difficulties which in varying degrees confront applied workers everywhere I did indeed omit much important material and I appreciate the commentators attempt to fill some of the gaps I am puzzled in fact by the absence of criticism for my omission of any discussion of the Latin American applied and action anthropologists Applied anthropology in Mexico was for a while concerned with helping the indigenous population which constituted the backbone of the countrv and wasthe target of official social reform especially dring the CBrdenas era

Now for a few details Van Willigen is concerned about my emphasis on action anthropology and the Tax episode and Wax is concerned about my omission of biographical and professional details in Taxs career I was interested in action anthropology because it constituted a conceptual ideological and operational challenge to mainline applied anthropology and space limitations forced me to be very economical with details In addition there is a lot of printed information available on Tax and his action anthropology episode I wanted to add only things I thought were underrepresented Wax objects to my featuring of the Jorgensen paper since he notes that it is really a polemic associated with the Viet-

Sso I C U R R E N T A N T H R O P O L O G Y Volume 37 Supplement February 1996

nam era That i t certainly is mostly-but that is not the point Jorgensen raised serious ideological issues which continue to play a role in how we think about anthropology and its duty to indigenous populations These issues are by no means dead

Wolfe is particularly concerned about my omission of citations from the journal Practicing Anthropology To some extent he is right However I honestly cannot say that its articles have improved my understanding of the conceptual and ideological aspects of the field They are mostly it seems how-to pieces and they accept applied anthropology as a given I have implied that applied anthropology exists perhaps more in sufferance than utility Would the world be any different if there had never been an applied anthropology Why doesnt Human Organization ask for nominations for the single most useful or influential piece of applied work The results would provide the beginnings of a data base for an assessment of the fields significance

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W U L F F R O B E R T M 1976 Anthropology in the urban planning process A review and an agenda in Do applied anthropologists apply anthropology Edited by M Angrosino pp 34-52 Athens University of Georgia Press [MVA]

WULFFR O B E R T M A N D S H I R L E Y J F I S K E 1987 Anthropo-logical praxis Translating knowledge into action Boulder Westview Press

CURRENTANTHROPOLOGYVolume 36 Supplement February 1996 O 1996by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research All rights reserved o o 1 1 - ~ ~ 0 ~ ~ 6 ~ ~ s u p p - o 0 0 ~ $ ~ 0 0

Applied anthropology in the United States emerged as a mixture of New Deal humanitarian liberalism and progressive industrial management ideology and in Britain as a humanitarian advisory function for colonial administration in Africa In both countries applied practitioners were subjected to considerable ideological criticism during the 1960s and 70s In the US case one manifestation of this critical approach was Sol Taxs populist-inspired action anthropology which renounced the employment of practitioners by government or any large organization in favor of vol- untary academic projects engaging in intensive intervention in the problems and needs of local communities The approach did not prevail but its ideas continue to stimulate interest Mean- while applied anthropology was undergoing attenuation as cultural anthropology proliferated into institutional anthropologies The significance of these subfields (eg educational anthropology) was that they replicated the approach of sociology and economics social scientific intervention as a normal part of the institutional activities of modern society The basic problem in fitting anthropology for practical application was the preoccu- pation of the discipline with tribal (not contemporary urban- industrial) society

TOHN W BENNETT is Distinguished Anthropologist in Residence at Washington University (St Louis Mo 63130 USA) where he was the first chairman of that institutions anthropology department in 1967 Born in 1915 he received his BA from Beloit College in 1937 and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1946 He has had a long career in scholarly and applied anthropology and has contributed to all fields of the general discipline He has worked in Japan Taiwan India Africa Canada and the United States on problems related to sociocultural change and economic-ecological anthropology Among his books are The Eco-

I I have decided to confine my discussion of practical anthropology to the two main categories applied and action although I am aware that there are probably as many approaches as there are practitioners Steven Polgar (1979) distinguished four applied action radical and committed His applied is mine but my action would I believe assimilate his action radical and committed I feel that the key factor is the employed status of the practitioner in applied anthropologyj the other types avoid or reject this status on various ideological grounds My paper also ignores advocacy an increasingly important practical activity among anthropologists it deserves separate treatment (see Fetterman 1993 Peattie 1968 and Jacobs 1974 for discussions) I wish to acknowledge the assistance of George Crothers in bibliographical and processing work Rose Passalacqua on background research Richard Fox for critical comments on an early draft and Sam Stanley for helpful advice on the work of Sol Tax

logical Transition (Elmsford NY Pergamon Press 1976) Of Time and the Enterprise (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1982) Human Ecology as Human Behavior Essays in En- vironmental and Development Anthropology (New Brunswick Transaction Books 1994) and (with S Kohl) Settling the Cana- dian-American West 1890-1950 An Anthropological History (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 1995) The h a 1 version of the present paper reached the Editors office 15 I 95

It is characteristic of the anthropologist that if he does continue his work of education into what is close to the political realm he acts as an independent agent taking upon himself the ultimate responsibility for satisfying his conscience in terms of the obligations he feels toward his colleagues and toward his fellow men

SOL TAX The Uses of Anthropology

The recipe for action that must be drawn from applied anthropology thus far is that of caution of modest expectations as to what can be accomplished by planning of humility as to what may be predicted with present instruments for observing and conceptualizing of preference for vis medica- turix naturae in many social situations

CLYDE KLUCKHOHNMirror for Man

We only do applied anthropology if someone is going to apply it We have to have a consumer

MARGARET MEAD Discussion of Anthropology and Society

The practical or applied side of academic fields in the human sciences is often viewed by scholars with ambivalence or even contemptI2 although sociology is more tolerant since its subject matter concerns contemporary society Anthropology has traditionally devoted itself to the study of tribal or nonurban societies and this has meant that i t has with difficulty accepted a role of practitioner

The anxiety over anthropologys detachment from the problems of modern society reached a peak in the 1970s~ as a wave of social protest and reform flooded the industrial countries with scholars and social activists re-flecting on the sins of the fathers-capitalists colonial-ists and dominant males Anthropologists caught short began to reexamine the basis of their intellectual heritage an effort encouraged by the rapid disappearance of

2 Philosophy-perhaps the most scholarly of all of the humanistic disciplines-has created an applied status applied ethics (see Winkler and Coombs 1993) which by the late 1980s had become a fairly well-established field with several departments in US universities offering degrees and with jobs opening up in medicine (as a result of the abortion issue euthanasia gene technology and other new-biology developments) law and business management The philosophy department in my own university has recently established in cooperation with the department of psychology and the medical schools neuroscience department a program in artifi- cial intelligence as applied to computer programming and kindred activities funded by a large industrial organization Practice is con- troversial in academic philosophy just as it is in academic anthropology















































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Documents

7504762 PUBLIC ANTHRO Applied and Action Anthropology