Volume 63, No. 4, Winter 2004
The Future Lies Ahead: Applied Anthropology in Century XXI
Robert A. Hackenberg and Beverly H. Hackenberg
We are challenged to define a new applied anthropology to meet the terms and conditions of a new century. First, it requires us to recognize the epigenetic transformation in the sociocultural landscape that defines our field. The new landscape is shaped in the image of globalization: the worldwide expansion of neoliberal political structures and the capitalist economies which they facilitate and promote both at home and abroad. Second, we must cultivate new working relationships with the emerging social components occupying that landscape--supergovernmental units (World Bank, diversified corporations, global NGOs) at the top and microlevel indigenous peoples' organizations--often victims of capitalist expansion--at the bottom. Third, we need to acquire and manipulate the concepts and processes that define this landscape as scientists see it. Finally, we must build models to apply this revised mindset to the improvement of the quality of life for those who request our services. Applied anthropology must “come of age” in this kaleidoscopic environment. We can’t go back to Samoa! New research strategies based on methodological individualism are being tested. New ways of reading recent history to produce strings of contingencies and connections have analytical value. Intervention models based on political ecology are coming into use. And our professional organizations are exploring opportunities for engagement with critical issues. Perhaps, as Paul Bohannan suggested a quarter century ago, "applied anthropology will provide leadership toward the policy sciences" and upgrade our professional status in the future which, beyond any doubt, lies ahead.
Key words: nonlinear dynamic systems, methodological individualism, social movements, bureaucracy, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social capital, civil society
Clouds in the Crystal Ball: Imagining the Future While Reimagining the Past A President’s Reflections
Linda Whiteford
Being able to imagine the future requires a selective memory of the past as conceptualized from the present. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, W. H. R. Rivers, and others are used to exemplify the continuity between past and future in applied medical anthropology as seen from the contextual history of the Society for Applied Anthropology.
Key words: applied medical anthropology, history, future, SfAA
An Anthropological Problem, A Complex Solution
Michael Agar
This article means to introduce complexity science, more specifically agent-based models, to an anthropological audience. It does so by laying out a research problem that has concerned the author for some time--how can illicit drug epidemics be explained? Traditional social research is simply not adequate to the task. After introducing the newer framework of agent-based modeling, the author argues that both complexity and anthropology focus on “a narrative of connections and contingencies.” With an example of an agent-based model from his own work, the author shows the promising synergies between complexity and anthropological theory and practice.
Key words: complexity, agent-based models, substance use, epidemiology
Partnerships, Not Projects! Improving the Environment Through Collaborative Research and Action
Diane E. Austin
The knowledge we can obtain through direct experience is often only a fraction of what is necessary for understanding our interactions with the environments upon which we depend. We often know little about the environmental impacts of agricultural practices, water projects, or oil extraction activities that supply what we want and need. Knowledge gaps are exacerbated by technologies that enable the mobility of people and resources. Those who act to fill the information gaps wield tremendous power in defining cause and effect, problems and solutions. This article describes a particular model of developing partnerships for community-based research and action that seeks to address the gaps and then provides an example of the model’s application.
Key words: collaborative research, partnerships, community-based research, U.S.-Mexico border
The Convergence of Applied, Practicing, and Public Anthropology in the 21st Century
Louise Lamphere
The interests of applied anthropologists, practicing anthropologists, and those engaged in public interest anthropology are converging. More anthropologists are creating collaborative relationships with the communities they study; they are presenting their research to a wider public through museum exhibits and Web sites, and they are working to change public policy. This article summarizes innovative, ongoing work in each of these areas and suggests how training in collaboration, outreach, and public policy research can be incorporated into graduate programs.
Key words: public anthropology, collaborative research, public policy and anthropology
Going Public: Responsibilities and Strategies in the Aftermath of Ethnography
Roger Sanjek
This paper examines professional responsibilities after fieldwork and writing stages of anthropological work. After reassessing Boas’s public anthropological stance with respect to Native and African Americans, it identifies an alternative history that includes Morgan, Cushing, Wilson, Goldschmidt, and recent practitioners of advocacy anthropology. It then discusses the author’s experiences with public audiences and media following publication of an ethnography of political change in a multiracial Queens, New York, neighborhood. It concludes with an overview of anthropological approaches to engaging “society as a whole.”
Key words: professional responsibility, Boas, advocacy, media, public engagement, New York
Going Global in Century XXI: Medical Anthropology and the New Primary Health Care
Craig R. Janes
I argue here that there is a need for medical anthropology to innovate conceptual and methodological tools to work effectively within complex social spaces created by the articulation of the global and the local in the liberal nonstate. The need for such innovation is suggested by a criticism of the local consequences of global neoliberal health reform and consideration of the potential practical health policies that emerge from such a criticism, especially the need for greater “community participation” in health. In this criticism I draw on the example of market-based health reform in postsocialist Mongolia. This example suggests that the applied medical anthropology of the future must be one that integrates across multiple levels of analysis, straddling the local and the global. It should cast a critical eye on local civil society, the local manifestations of global policy, and take an activist orientation to global health advocacy. Anthropologists must become master synthesizers, sensitive to local meanings and social processes and structures. They should attend to the biological realities of sickness, be cognizant of the lines of power extending from global to local, and be able to wield this knowledge effectively within the emerging networks of global health governance.
Key words: globalization, primary health care, social capital, Mongolia
Community Autonomy and the Maya ICBG Project in Chiapas, Mexico: How a Bioprospecting Project that Should Have Succeeded Failed
Brent Berlin and Elois Ann Berlin
The autonomy of indigenous and local communities is widely recognized by international, national, and local laws and customs. This autonomy includes the recognized rights of communities to grant permission to enter into agreements for access to their resources, including the commercial use of these resources based on fair and equitable benefit-sharing arrangements. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their allies have questioned the autonomy of local indigenous communities, which they claim have no rights to enter into agreements for bioprospecting projects. Efforts to limit the autonomy of local communities concerning commercial use of biological resources is tied to NGO opposition to any form of sustainable development which they believe contributes to globalization and exploitation of the developing countries of the South by the developed countries of the North. To achieve their goals, these groups have launched negative misinformation campaigns to discredit applied biodiversity research projects and the scientists who lead them. Although these NGOs have no legitimate authority to speak for local communities, their access to the press and the Internet provides them with a platform that allows them to be identified as the voice of the indigenous and local communities of the world. In this case study of the Maya ICBG project in Chiapas, Mexico we describe how local community autonomy was taken from indigenous communities that had agreed to participate in an international development project on drug discovery, biodiversity conservation, and sustained economic development. A major lesson to be drawn from the Maya ICBG case is that local indigenous community autonomy, as envisioned in the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity, is more myth than reality in the access-to-biological-resources debate, especially in the politically charged climate of Mexico and Latin America.
Key words: community autonomy, sustainable economic development, natural resources, bioprospecting, Maya, Chiapas, Mexico
The Anthropology of Power-Wielding Bureaucracies
Josiah McC. Heyman
Bureaucracies, from NGOs through government agencies to corporations, are crucial to applied and engaged anthropologists and are an important but neglected topic for anthropology as a whole. Central to their study is the topic of power and, in turn, a crucial step in inferring the marks of power is the ethnographic study of ordinary practices within organizations, beyond formal policy and administrative studies. For this reason, the article lays out a toolkit for “rapid organizational analyses” (Mascarenhas-Keyes 2001), the diagnosis of bureaucracies that face anthropologists, or even encompass them. The toolkit begins with broad brush approaches that attribute basic characteristics to all bureaucracies and then turns to particularistic angles meant to reveal the behaviors and ideas of specific organizations, branches, workers, and interfaces of bureaucrat and nonbureaucrat. Careful attention to how bureaucracies shape political agency leads us to ask how these entities affect applied and engaged anthropological practice. Doing what is “practical,” partly shaped by bureaucratic resources and regulations, is a key concept for exploring the political-ethical quandaries of engagement. The article concludes by looking at efforts to break with bureaucratic domination, including radical social movements. Though some degree of instrumental organization seems unavoidable, the specific balance of hierarchy and democracy matters, and anthropologists can contribute to documenting and understanding this.
Key words: bureaucracy, power, politics, applied anthropology
An Anthropological Take on Sustainable Development: A Comparative Study of Change
Conrad Phillip Kottak
Anthropologists can use longitudinal, comparative, and multiscale research to illuminate aspects of global change and development. Goals and procedures of the emerging field of sustainability science are examined here in relation to those of the linkages methodology and other multisited, historical, and transnational approaches in recent anthropology. Conclusions about the sustainability of development emerge from field studies in Arembepe, Brazil, and Ivato, Madagascar. The contrasts between Arembepe and Ivato, and the regions and nations that include them, are sharp and almost certainly irreversible. Madagascar suffers from an overdose of environmentalism, while Brazil has been dominated by developmentalism. Arembepe now has a sustainable diversified economy and cultural contacts linking its future with the dynamics of capitalist globalization. Ivato, by contrast, is in a region and nation with dramatically increasing population and diminishing natural resources but no investment stream to provide significant employment alternatives. In future years Ivato and similar farming communities may have little left of their past to sustain.
Key words: sustainability, longitudinal fieldwork, cross-cultural comparison, development, environmentalism, Brazil, Madagascar
