3 Applying Anthropology

Anthropology:Appreciating Human Diversity

14th Edition

Conrad Phillip Kottak

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Applying Anthropology

• The Role of the Applied Anthropologist• Development Anthropology• Strategies of Innovation• Anthropology and Education• Urban Anthropology• Medical Anthropology• Anthropology and Business• Careers and Anthropology

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Anthropology

• How can anthropology be applied to medicine, education, and business?

• How can the study of anthropology fit into a career path?

• How can change be bad?

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• How can change be bad? The Coca Cola example.

• What changes do the people and which people want?

• How can conflicting wishes and needs be accommodated?

• Applied anthropologists help determine whether change sis needed and how it will work.

• Innovation succeeds best when it is culturally appropriate. McDonald’s, Starbucks and Ford have learned that fitting is more profitable than trying to Americanize local habits.

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• Applied anthropology: One of two dimensions of anthropology; use of anthropological data, perspectives, theory, and techniques to identify, assess, and solve contemporary social problems involving human behavior and social and cultural forces, conditions, and contexts.

The Role of the Applied Anthropologist

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Recap 3.1.: The Four Subfields and Two Dimensions of Anthropology

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Early Applications

– Academic anthropology grew most after World War II.

– During the 1970s, some anthropologists found jobs with international organizations, government, business, hospitals, and schools.

• Application was central concern of early anthropology in Great Britain (colonialism) and U.S.(Native American policy).

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Anthropology and colonialism

• Malinowski’s practical anthropology was colonial applied anthropology with the aim to westernize tribal societies through diffusion of European culture. He did not question the legitimacy of colonialism or his role in making it work.

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• During World War II, American anthropologists studied German and Japanese culture (at a distance) to predict the behavior of their enemies.

• After the war, they worked on Pacific Islands to promote local-level cooperation with American policies.

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• During the Vietnam War, anthropology became popular in American colleges with students wanting to learn more about other cultures.

• Anthropologists protested the superpowers’ disregard for non-Western lives, values, customs and social systems.

• The new trend forced anthropologists to question the wider social value and implications of their research.

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Applied Anthropology Today

– Speak up for disenfranchised– Solve problems for clients– Entire field combats ethnocentrism– Highly qualified to suggest, plan, and implement policies

affecting people– World Bank, USAID, Environmental Protection Agency.– Cultural resource management and historic preservation

(remember Hasankeyf and Zeugma)

• Modern anthropology is usually seen as a helping profession. Removed from the colonial perspective.

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• Garbology – environmental protection• Forensic anthropology – police, medical

examiners, courts to identify victims of crimes

• Biological anthropology – public health, nutrition, genetic counseling, substance abuse, aging, mental illness

• Linguistic anthropology – physician-patient interactions, dialect differences in classroom learning

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• The goal is to find humane and effective ways of helping local people.

• Applied anthropologists use ethnographic techniques in both foreign and domestic settings while living with and learning from local people.

• Anthropology’s holistic perspective (biology, society, culture and language) permits evaluation of many issues that affect people.

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Roles for applied anthropologists

• Identifying needs for change that local people perceive.

• Working with those people to design culturally appropriate and socially sensitive change.

• Protecting local people from harmful policies and projects that may threaten them.

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Development Anthropology

– Ethical dilemmas often confront development anthropologists. Foreign aid usually doesn’t go where it’s most needed but is spent on political, economic and strategic priorities based on maximizing interest.

• Development anthropology: Branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues in, and the cultural dimension of, economic development. It also plans and guides policy.

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Development Anthropology

– Increasing equity: results in reduced poverty and a more even distribution of wealth.

– However, wealthy and powerful people often resist projects that threaten their vested interest.

– Negative equity impact is generated when wealth disparities are widened. (irrigation, fisheries)

• Commonly stated goal of recent development policy is to promote equity

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Culturally compatible projects

• To maximize social and economic benefits, projects should– 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,– Be flexible.

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Strategies for Innovation

– Avoid overinnovation: trying to achieve too much change

• Projects that fail are usually ones that areeconomically and culturally incompatible.

• South Asia:Enforcing cultivation of cash-crops instead of traditional labor-intensive rice growing.

• Ethiopia:Trying to onvert nomadic herders to sedentary cultivators.

• Development anthropology can help sort the needs of people and fit projects accordingly.

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• Avoid underdifferentiation: the tendency to view the so-called less-developed countries as being more alike than they are.

• Neglecting cultural diversity and adopting a uniform approach to deal with deifferent sets of people.

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• Faulty social design that imposed incompatible property notions and social units assuming either• individualistic productive units that are privately

owned by ind/couple/nuclear family, or• cooperatives that are based on models from former

socialist countries.

Whereas in West Africa, the basic social unit is the extended family and neither of the above. Project still worked because local people applied their traditional extended family networks .

Hence, greater use of indigeneous social models is needed for indigeneous social development.

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Indigenous Models

– Madagascar and Malagasy– “Descent groups” organized

before the origin of the state– Descent group is a kin group

composed of people whose social solidarity is based on their belief that they share common ancestry. It proved preadapted to equitable national development.

• In some nations, governments acts as an agent of the people.

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– Realistic development promotes change but not overinnovation

– Respect, or at least don’t attack, local cultural patterns

– Effective development draws on indigeneous cultural practices and social structures.

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Anthropology and Education

– View children as total cultural creatures whose enculturation and attitudes toward education belong to a context that includes family and peers

– Sociolinguists and cultural anthropologists work side by side

– Education in mother-tongue.

• Research that extends from classrooms into homes and neighborhoods

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Urban Anthropology

– Proportion of world’s population living in cities has increased since the Industrial Revolution

– UN estimates that about one-sixth of the earth’s population live in urban slums

• Urban anthropology: the cross-cultural and ethnographic and biocultural study of global urbanization and life in cities

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• As industrialization and urbanization spread globally, anthropologists study these processes and the social problems they create.

• Immigration, ethnicity, ppoverty, class, urban violence, crime, urban transformation, ghettos.

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Urban Anthropology

– Robert Redfield: focused on contrasts between rural and urban contexts in 1940s

• Urban (impersonality) and rural (face-to-face relations) represent different social systems.

• Applying anthropology to urban planning starts by identifying the key social groups in the urban context.

• Urban Versus Rural

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• Cities are centers through which cultural innovations spread to rural and tribal areas.

• Migrants bring rural practices and beliefs to cities and take urban patterns back home.

• One role for urban anthropology is to help relevant social groups deal with urban institutions, such as legal and social services that they might be unfamiliar with.

• Traffic lights and crossing the streets (Diyarbakır)

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Medical Anthropology

– Examines which diseases and health conditions affect aparticular population, and why

– Determines how illness is socially constructed, diagnosed, managed, and treated in various societies

• Medical anthropology: comparative, biocultural study of disease, health problems, and health care systems

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• Disease: a scientifically identified health threat caused by a bacterium, virus, fungus, parasite, or other pathogen

Medical Anthropology

• Illness: a condition of poor health perceived or felt by an individual– Various ethnic groups and cultures

recognize different illnesses, symptoms, and causes and have developed different health care systems and treatment strategies for them.

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Medical Anthropology

– Personalistic disease theories: illness caused by sorcerers, witches, ghosts, or ancestral spirits

– Naturalistic disease theories: illness explained in impersonal terms

– Emotionalistic disease theories: assume that emotional experiences cause illness (e.g., susto)

• Health care systems: beliefs, customs, and specialists concerned with preventing and curing illness

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Medical Anthropology

• Scientific medicine: a health care system based on scientific knowledge and procedures

• Curer: one who diagnoses and treats illness; often a shaman

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Western Medicine

– In U.S., good health is becoming an ethical imperative.

– More personal treatment of illness that emulates non-Western curer-patient-community relations could benefit Western systems.

• Industrialization and globalization spawned their own health problems

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• Health problems in industrial nations are caused as much by economic, social, political and cultural factors as pathogens.

• Modern stressors such as pollution, poor nutrition, dangerous machinery, isolation, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse.

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• Changing notions of health and sanitization.

• People acting out of the norm (smokers, overeaters, those who avoid doctors) are stigmatized as unsanitary.

• Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, varying conceptualization of health and weight.

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• Medical anthropologists serve 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 be forced on communities.

• IUD implementation in South East Turkey.

• Abortion, stem sell research, in-vitro fertilization, contraception, euthanasia.

• How boundaries of life and death are being questioned and negotiated.

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Anthropology and Business

– Ethnography and observation– Cross-cultural expertise– Focus on cultural diversity

• Anthropologists may acquire a unique perspective on organizational conditions and problems.

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Careers in Anthropology

– Knowledge about the traditions and beliefs of many social groups within a modern nation is important in planning and carrying out programs that affect those groups.

• Anthropology’s breadth provides knowledge and an outlook on the world that are useful in many kinds of work.