Applied anthropology is one of two dimensions of anthropology, the other being theoretical/academic anthropology.
Applied, or practical, anthropology is the use of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess, and solve contemporary problems involving human behavior and social and cultural forces, conditions, and contexts.
One of the most valuable tools in applying anthropology is the ethnographic method because it allows for a firsthand study of societies by living with and learning from ordinary people.
Anthropology's holistic perspective—its interest in biology, society, culture, and language—permits the evaluation of many issues that affect people.
The Role of the Applied Anthropologist
Early Applications
Application was a central concern of early anthropology in Great Britain. This concern, however, was in the context of colonialism, raising ethical issues.
During World War II, American anthropologists studied Japanese and German "culture at a distance" in an attempt to predict the behavior of the enemies of the United States.
Academic and Applied Anthropology
Applied anthropology did most of its growing after World War II.
In the United States, the baby boom fueled the expansion of the American educational system and thus of academic jobs.
During the 1970s, an increasing number of anthropologists joined international organizations, government, business, hospitals, and schools. This shift towards application benefited the profession.
Applied Anthropology Today
Today, most applied anthropologists see their work as radically removed from the colonial perspective. However, ethical problems continue (e.g., in market research, ethical issues may arise as anthropologists attempt to help companies to operate more efficiently and profitably).
Ethical questions include:
To whom does the researcher owe loyalty?
What problems are involved in holding firm to the truth?
What happens when applied anthropologists don't make the policies they have to implement?
How does one criticize programs in which one has participated?
By instilling appreciation for human diversity, anthropology combats ethnocentrism—the tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to use one's own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other societies.
Proper roles for applied anthropologists include:
identifying needs for change that local people perceive,
working with those people to design culturally appropriate and socially sensitive change, and
protecting local people from harmful policies and projects that may threaten them.
Development Anthropology
Development anthropology is the branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues in, and the cultural dimension of, economic development.
Development anthropologists help to plan and guide policy.
Foreign aid usually does not go where it is most needed, and planners' interests do not always coincide with the best interests of local people.
Equity
A commonly stated goal of recent development policy is to promote equity. Increased equity means reduced poverty and a more even distribution of wealth.
Wealthy and powerful people typically resist projects that threaten their vested interests.
Strategies for Innovation
In planning development projects, using anthropological expertise to ensure cultural compatibility is cost-effective.
To maximize social and economic benefits, development projects must be culturally compatible, respond to locally perceived needs, involve men and women in planning and carrying out the changes that affect them, harness traditional organizations, and be flexible.
Overinnovation
Development projects must avoid overinnovation (too much change) if they are to be successful.
People generally resist development projects that require major changes in their daily lives.
Development projects need to be sensitive to traditional cultures and the specific, down-to-earth concerns of people.
Underdifferentiation
Underdifferentiation is the tendency to overlook cultural diversity and view less-developed countries as more alike than they truly are.
Many development projects incorrectly assume either individualistic productive units that are privately owned by an individual or couple and worked by a nuclear family, or cooperatives that are at least partially based on models from the former Eastern bloc and Socialist countries.
The most humane and productive strategy for change is to base the social design for innovation on traditional social forms in each target area.
Indigenous Models
The best models for economic development are to be found in target communities.
Realistic development promotes change but not overinnovation, by preserving local systems while making them work better.
The Malagasy example illustrates the potential benefits of basing development programs on traditional social forms (e.g., descent groups).
Indigenous forms of social organization will not inevitably break down into nuclear family organization, impersonality, and alienation as countries are drawn into the world capitalist economy.
Descent groups, with their traditional communalism and corporate solidarity, have important roles to play in economic development.
Anthropology and Education
Attention to culture also is fundamental to anthropology and education, involving research that extends from classrooms into homes, neighborhoods, and communities.
Some examples: Sociologists and cultural anthropologists work side by side in education research, finding that certain practices were preventing Hispanics from being adequately educated.
Urban anthropology
The roles of cities in the world system have changed recently as a result of the time-space compression made possible by modern transportation and communication systems. That is, everything appears closer today because contact and movement are so much easier.
The proportion of the world's population living in cities has been increasing ever since the Industrial Revolution.
Urban anthropology, which has theoretical (basic research) and applied dimensions, is the cross-cultural and ethnographic study of global urbanization and life in cities.
Urban versus Rural
Recognizing that a city is a social context that is very different from a tribal or peasant village, Robert Redfield, an early student of urbanization, focused on contrasts between rural and urban life in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.
In any nation, urban and rural represent different social systems.
However, cultural diffusion or borrowing occurs as people, products, images, and messages move from one to the other.
An applied anthropology approach to urban planning would start by identifying key social groups in the urban context. After identifying those groups, the anthropologist might elicit their wishes for change, convey those needs to funding agencies, and work with agencies and local people to realize those goals.
One role for the urban applied anthropologist is to help relevant social groups deal with urban institutions, such as legal and social services, with which recent migrants may be unfamiliar (for example, working with the Samoan community in Los Angeles).
Medical Anthropology
Medical anthropology is both academic/theoretical and applied/practical and includes anthropologists from all four subfields.
Medical anthropologists examine such questions as which diseases and health conditions affect particular populations (and why) and how illness is socially constructed, diagnosed, managed, and treated in various societies.
Disease refers to a scientifically identified health threat caused genetically or by a bacterium, virus, fungus, parasite, or other pathogen.
Illness is a condition of poor health perceived or felt by an individual.
Perceptions of good and bad health, along with health threats and problems, are culturally constructed, meaning that various ethnic groups and cultures recognize different illnesses, symptoms, and causes and have developed different health care systems and treatment strategies.
Some suggestions of how applied anthropologists can help ameliorate the large health disparity between indigenous peoples and other populations include:
identifying the most pressing health problems that indigenous communities face,
gathering information on solutions to those problems, and
implementing solutions in partnership with the agencies and organizations that are in charge of public health programs for indigenous populations.
In many areas, the world system and colonialism worsened the health of indigenous peoples by spreading diseases, warfare, servitude, and other stressors.
The kinds and incidence of disease vary among societies, and cultures interpret and treat illness differently.
While standards for sick and healthy bodies are cultural constructions that vary in time and space, societies do share "disease-theory systems" to identify, classify, and explain disease.
Personalistic disease theories blame illness on agents, such as sorcerers, witches, ghosts, or ancestral spirits.
Naturalistic disease theories explain illness in impersonal terms (e.g., biomedicine which aims to link illness to scientifically, demonstrated agents that bear no personal malice toward their victims).
Emotionalistic disease theories, which assume that emotional experiences cause illness.
All societies have health care systems consisting of beliefs, customs, specialists, and techniques aimed at ensuring health and at preventing, diagnosing, and curing illness.
If there is a "world's oldest profession" besides hunter and gatherer, it is curer, often a shaman.
We should not lose sight, ethnocentrically, of the difference between scientific medicine and Western medicine per se.
Despite advances in technology, genomics, molecular biology, pathology, surgery, diagnostics, and applications, many Western medical procedures have little justification in logic or fact.
Still, biomedicine surpasses tribal treatment in many ways. However, industrialization and globalization have spawned their own health problems (e.g., modern stressors such as noise, air, and water pollution, poor nutrition, dangerous machinery, impersonal work, isolation, poverty, etc.).
Medical anthropologists have served as cultural interpreters in public health programs, which must pay attention to local theories about the nature, causes, and treatment of illness. Health interventions cannot simply be forced on communities.
Medical anthropologists increasingly are examining the impact of new scientific and medical techniques on ideas about life, death, and personhood (what is a is not a person).
Anthropology and Business
Anthropologists who study business settings, or who are employed by companies, may acquire a unique perspective on organizational conditions and problems; act as "cultural brokers," translating the goals of executives/managers or the concerns of workers to the other group; or even study how consumers with different cultural backgrounds use products.
For business, key features of anthropology include:
ethnography and observation as ways of gathering data,
cross-cultural expertise, and
focus on cultural diversity.
Careers and Anthropology
Anthropology's breadth provides knowledge and an outlook on the world that are useful in many kinds of work.
Anthropology majors go on to medical, law, and business schools and find success in many professions that often have little explicit connection to anthropology.
