Anthropology For The People

Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.

Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? In this timely and remarkable book, Stuart Kirsch shows how anthropology can—and why it should—become more engaged with the problems of the world. Engaged Anthropology draws on the author’s experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Including both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawyers and courts, nongovernmental organizations, scientific experts, and transnational corporations. This unflinchingly honest account addresses the unexamined “backstage” of engaged anthropology. Coming at a time when some question the viability of the discipline, the message of this powerful and original work is especially welcome, as it not only promotes a new way of doing anthropology, but also compellingly articulates a new rationale for why anthropology matters.

Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices.

Anthropology and the Public Interest: Field work and Theory provides an understanding of how culture affects human lives, and uses this understanding in formulating and implementing domestic social policy. This book defines basic research as contributing to theory, knowledge, and method that contributes to the advancement of social science. Organized into four parts encompassing 19 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the greatest potential payoff for the advancement of social science and for enlightened social programming. This text then presents an insightful discussion of why cultural differences among people have gone so largely unrecognized. Other chapters consider the cultural or language processes of contemporary U.S. populations. This book discusses as well the changing environment that gave rise to the tremendous growth in academic anthropology. The final chapter deals with social indicators research and discusses the potential role of anthropology in such work. This book is a valuable resource for anthropologists.

The essays in Anthropology, Public Policy, and Native Peoples in Canada provide a comprehensive evaluation of past, present, and future forms of anthropological involvement in public policy issues that affect Native peoples in Canada. The contributing authors, who include social scientists and politicians from both Native and non-Native backgrounds, use their experience to assess the theory and practice of anthropological participation in and observation of relations between aboriginal peoples and governments in Canada. They trace the strengths and weaknesses of traditional forms of anthropological fieldwork and writing, as well as offering innovative solutions to some of the challenges confronting anthropologists working in this domain. In addition to Noel Dyck and James Waldram, the contributing authors are Peggy Martin Brizinski, Julie Cruikshank, Peter Douglas Elias, Julia D. Harrison, Ron Ignace, Joseph M. Kaufert, Patricia Leyland Kaufert, William W. Koolage, John O'Neil, Joe Sawchuk, Colin H. Scott, Derek G. Smith, George Speck, Renee Taylor, Peter J. Usher, and Sally M. Weaver.

This engagingly written, jargon-free challenge to the misguided and dangerous global obsession with cultural difference critiques the popular notion that world affairs are determined by civilizations with immutable and conflicting cultures. Culture is too often understood as a straightjacket of values that make people act in a certain way. A more accurate and constructive approach is to see culture as a changing system of meaning, which individuals deploy selectively to make sense of the world.

The book uses anthropological methods and insights to study the practice of anthropology. It calls for a paradigm shift, away from the publication treadmill, toward a more profile-raising paradigm that focuses on addressing a broad array of social concerns in meaningful ways.

Many serious public health problems confront the world in the new millennium. Anthropology and Public Health examines the critical role of anthropology in four crucial public health domains: (1) anthropological understandings of public health problems such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, and diabetes; (2) anthropological design of public health interventions in areas such as tobacco control and elder care; (3) anthropological evaluations of public health initiatives such as Safe Motherhood and polio eradication; and (4) anthropological critiques of public health policies, including neoliberal health care reforms. As the volume demonstrates, anthropologists provide crucial understandings of public health problems from the perspectives of the populations in which the problems occur. On the basis of such understandings, anthropologists may develop and implement interventions to address particular public health problems, often working in collaboration with local participants. Anthropologists also work as evaluators, examining the activities of public health institutions and the successes and failures of public health programs. Anthropological critiques may focus on major international public health agencies and their workings, as well as public health responses to the threats of infectious disease and other disasters. Through twenty-four compelling case studies from around the world, the volume provides a powerful argument for the imperative of anthropological perspectives, methods, information, and collaboration in the understanding and practice of public health. Written in plain English, with significant attention to anthropological methodology, the book should be required reading for public health practitioners, medical anthropologists, and health policy makers. It should also be of interest to those in the behavioral and allied health sciences, as well as programs of public health administration, planning, and management. As the single most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of anthropology's role in public health, this volume will inform debates about how to solve the world's most pressing public health problems at a critical moment in human history.