What is the relationship between applied and academic anthropology?

Answer 1

~Books vs Field

Answer 2

Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος, "human" or "person") consists of the study of humanity (see genus Homo). It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times and with all dimensions of humanity. Anthropology is traditionally distinguished from other disciplines by its emphasis on cultural relativity, in-depth examination of context, and cross-cultural comparisons.

Anthropology has been characterized as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." Contemporary anthropologists claim a number of earlier thinkers as their forebears, and the discipline has several sources; Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, claimed Montaigne and Rousseau as important influences. Anthropology can best be understood as an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, a period when Europeans attempted systematically to study human behavior. The traditions of jurisprudence, history, philology, and sociology then evolved into something more closely resembling the modern views of these disciplines and informed the development of the social sciences, of which anthropology was a part. At the same time, the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment produced thinkers, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and later Wilhelm Dilthey, whose work formed the basis for the "culture concept," which is central to the discipline.
Institutionally, anthropology emerged from natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon). This was the study of human beings—typically, people living in European colonies. Studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was more or less equivalent to studying the flora and fauna of those places. It was for this reason, for instance, that Lewis Henry Morgan could write monographs on both The League of the Iroquois and The American Beaver and His Works. It is why the material culture of "civilized" nations such as China have historically been displayed in fine-art museums alongside European art, while artifacts from African and Native North American cultures were displayed in Natural History Museums, alongside dinosaur bones and nature dioramas. The British Museum or the Parisian Musée de l'Homme are fine examples of such museums—the Musée de l'Homme held the "Hottentot Venus" remains until the 1970s. Saartje Baartman, a Namaqua woman, was examined by anatomist Georges Cuvier. This being said, curatorial practice has changed dramatically in recent years, and it would be wrong to see anthropology as merely an extension of colonial rule and European chauvinism, since its relationship to imperialism was and is complex.

Museums weren't the only site of anthropological studies: with the New Imperialism period, starting in the 1870s, zoos became unattended "laboratories," especially the so-called "ethnological exhibitions" or "***** villages." Thus, "savages" from the colonies were displayed, often nudes, in cages, in what has been called "human zoos." For example, in 1906, anthropologist Madison Grant put a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga in a cage in the Bronx Zoo, and labelled him "the missing link" between an orangutan and the "white race" (Grant, a renowned eugenicist, was the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Such exhibitions were attempts to illustrate and prove in the same movement the validity of scientific racism, the first formulation of which may be found in Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-55). In 1931, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris still displayed Kanaks from New Caledonia in the "indigenous village"; it received 24 million visitors in six months, thus demonstrating the popularity of such "human zoos."

Anthropology grew increasingly distinct from natural history, and by the end of the nineteenth century, it had begun to crystallize into its modern form; by 1935, for example, it was possible for T. K. Penniman to write a history of the discipline entitled "A Hundred Years of Anthropology." Early anthropology was dominated by proponents of unilinealism, who argued that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced. Non-European societies were thus seen as evolutionary "living fossils," which could be studied in order to understand the European past. Scholars wrote histories of prehistoric migrations that were sometimes valuable but often also fanciful. It was during this time that Europeans, such as Paul Rivet, first accurately traced Polynesian migrations across the Pacific Ocean—though some of them believed those emigrations had originated in Egypt. Finally, the concept of race was actively discussed as a way to classify—and rank—human beings based on inherent biological difference, thus giving rise to pseudo-scientific racism. Anthropometry is an example of this class of pseudo-scientific theories.

In the twentieth century, academic disciplines began to organize around three main domains. The domain of the sciences seeks to derive natural laws through reproducible and falsifiable experiments; that of the humanities reflects an attempt to study different national traditions, in the form of history and the arts, as an attempt to provide people in emerging nation-states with a sense of coherence; the social sciences emerged at this time as an attempt to develop scientific methods to address social phenomena and provide a universal basis for social knowledge. Anthropology does not easily fit into one of these categories, and different branches of anthropology draw on one or more of these domains.

Drawing on the methods of the natural sciences and developing new techniques involving not only structured interviews, but unstructured participant observation, and drawing on the new theory of evolution through natural selection, the branches of anthropology proposed the scientific study of a new object: humankind, conceived of as a whole. Crucial to this study is the concept of culture, which anthropologists defined both as a universal capacity and a propensity for social learning, thinking, and acting (which they saw as a product of human evolution and something that distinguishes Homo sapiens—and perhaps all species of genus Homo—from other species), and as a particular adaptation to local conditions, which takes the form of highly variable beliefs and practices. Thus, culture not only transcends the opposition between nature and nurture, but absorbs the peculiarly European distinction among politics, religion, kinship, and the economy as autonomous domains. Anthropology thus transcends the divisions between the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to explore the biological, linguistic, material, and symbolic dimensions of humankind in all forms


Applied anthropology refers to the application of method and theory in anthropology to the analysis and solution of practical problems. Inasmuch as anthropology proper comprises four subdisciplines -- biological, cultural, linguistic, and archeological anthropology -- the practical application of any of these subdisciplines may properly be designated "applied anthropology. Indeed, some practical problems may invoke all subdisciplines. For example, a native American community development program may involve archeological research to determine legitimacy of water rights claims, ethnography may involve assessing the current and recent historical cultural characteristics of the community, linguistics may be applied to restoring language competetence, and biological, or more specifically "medical" anthropology may be applied to determine the factors contributing to dietary deficiency diseases, etc.

Some regard applied anthropology to be a fifth subdiscipline of anthropology that applies anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and methods to identify, assess and solve contemporary social problems.

Applied anthropologists often work for nonacademic clients such as governments, development agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), tribal and ethnic associations, interest groups, social-sever and educational agencies, and businesses. Ethnography and participant observation are the applied anthropologist's primary research tools. They also use textual analysis, survey research and other empirical methods to inform policy or to market products. An applied anthropologist is often likely to be employed in a non-academic setting.

This is a contrast to more academic sociocultural anthropology, which may be more concerned with creating theoretical models which correspond to its units of analysis, e.g. social inequality, performance, exchange, meaning, and so forth. Sometimes the research that falls within the applied field is referred to as "applied" in contrast to academic research, which is referred to as "basic."

Examples of questions that an applied anthropologist would attempt to solve might be:

If an American buys diapers at 2AM on a Saturday in a grocery store, what is likely to be his/her next purchase?
How can public health authorities promote condom use amongst members of a particular subculture?
What measures could be taken to make sponge diving safer for Greek sponge divers?
Why do people migrate to XYZ place or from PQR place?
The premiere journal in the US of applied anthropology is Human Organization published by the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Under the directorship of the RAI, Jonathan Benthall, author of The Best of Anthropology Today, created the annual The Lucy Mair Medal of Applied Anthropology. This recognizes excellence in using anthropology "for the relief of poverty or distress, or for the active recognition of human dignity."