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Book Reviews

Review of fertility, health and reproductive politics: re‐imagining rights in india by maya unnithan, london: routledge. 2019. pp. 233..

Holly Donahue Singh

Review of The Western Disease: Contesting Autism in the Somali Diaspora By Claire Laurier Decoteau, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021. pp. 277.

M. Ariel Cascio

Review of Elder Care in Crisis: How the Social Safety Net Fails Families By Emily K. Abel, New York: NYU Press. 2022. pp. 232.

Review of managing chronicity in unequal states: ethnographic perspectives on caring, edited by laura montesi, melania calestani, london: university college london press. 2021. pp. 247..

Khadija Muhaisen

Review of Eating Beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies By Heather Paxson, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2023. pp. 248.

Jessica Hardin

Review of Collective Care: Indigenous Motherhood, Family, and HIV/AIDS By Pamela J. Downe, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2021. pp. 157.

Heather Howard‐Bobiwash

Review of Queering Family Trees: Race, Reproductive Justice, and Lesbian Motherhood By Sandra Patton‐Imani, New York: NYU Press, 2020. pp. 336.

Chloe Dunston

Review of Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma By Harris Solomon, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2022. pp. 304.

Ieva Jusionyte

Review of Viral Frictions: Global Health and the Persistence of HIV Stigma in Kenya By Elizabeth Pfeiffer, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2022. pp. 215.

Kristin Hedges

Review of Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt By Rania Kassab Sweis, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2021. pp. 208.

Jess Marie Newman

Review of On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief By Tom Scott‐Smith, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2020. pp. 288.

Karen Díaz Serrano

Review of Cancer and the Politics of Care: Inequalities and Interventions in Global Perspective By Linda Rae Bennett, Lenore Manderson, Belinda Spagnoletti, London: University College London Press. 2023. pp. 272.

Elspeth Davies

Review of The Political Economy of Organ Transplantation: Where Do Organs Come From? By Hagai Boas, New York: Routledge. 2022. pp. 214.

Angela Leocata

Review of Glyphosate & the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move By Vincanne Adams, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2023. pp. 184.

Nicholas Shapiro

Review of Chinese Medicine in East Africa: An Intimacy with Strangers By Elisabeth Hsu, New York: Berghahn, 2022. pp. 440.

Yidong Gong

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Medical Anthropology

medical anthropology research paper

Medical anthropology is the study of how health and illness are shaped, experienced, and understood in the context of cultural, historical, and political forces. It is one of the most exciting subfields of anthropology and has increasingly clear relevance for students and professionals interested in the complexity of disease states, diagnostic categories, and what comes to count as pathology or health.

At Stanford some of our principal areas of inquiry include cultures of medicine, the social nature of emergent biotechnology, the economics of bodily injury, psychic expressions of disorder, the formation of social networks on health, the lived experience of disability and inequality, caregiving, and ever-changing concepts of human biological difference and race. We work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in addition to the United States and its borderlands. We engage with patients, health scientists, and larger publics at home and abroad in order to contribute to a more robust understanding of the way  poverty, social status, war, racism, and nationalism produce illness and disease. We look both at the broad forces of structural violence and the microphenomenology of pain and suffering. Our program seeks students who creatively imagine interdisciplinary approaches to health questions, wish to increase dialogue with medical professionals, and aim to rethink operative principles within science and medicine.

medical anthropology research paper

Our core group of faculty includes:

Angela Garcia: Professor Garcia’s work explores political, economic and psychic processes through which illness and suffering is produced and lived. Through long-term ethnographic research with poor families and communities struggling with multigenerational experiences of addiction, depression, and incarceration, she draws attention to emerging forms of care and kinship, accounts of cultural history and subjectivities, and relations of affect and intimacy, that are essential to understanding health and life. Working in the United States and Mexico, her work also demonstrates the urgent need for drug law reform and new approaches to ethics and therapeutics as they concern suffering in shared and transgressive formations.

Duana Fullwiley: Professor Fullwiley explores how global and historical notions of health, disease, race, and power yield biological consequences that bear on scientific definitions of human difference. Through an ethnographic engagement with geneticists and the populations they study, she underscores the importance of expanding the conceptual terrain of genetic causation to include poverty and on-going racial stratification. She explicitly writes in the long histories of inequality and dispossession suffered by global minorities that often go missing from medical narratives of genetic disease and ideas of “population-based” severity. Working in France, West Africa and the United States, she details the legacy effects of postcolonial, post-Reconstruction, and Progressive Era science policies on present-day health outcomes. She also chronicles the remnants of racial thinking in new population genetic research and works with scientists to redress them.

Lochlann Jain: Professor Jain's research is primarily concerned with the ways in which stories get told about injuries, how they are thought to be caused, and how that matters. Figuring out the political and social significance of these stories has led to the study of law, product design, medical error, and histories of engineering, regulation, corporations, and advertising.

Matthew Kohrman: Professor Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.

Tanya Luhrmann: Professor Luhrmann has long standing interests in schizophrenia, with work on homeless, poverty, and social defeat. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people with psychosis who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and persons, the relationship between the voices of madness and the voices of spirit, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help those whose voices are distressing.

What sets this program apart?

An engaged orientation

Our group at Stanford believes that anthropological analysis is not just for anthropologists and not just for the classroom. It matters elsewhere. Whether it is cancer, psychiatric disease, drug addiction, injury and disability, racialized health disparities, genetic disorders or the leading cause of premature death, tobacco, we tackle issues of great importance for people the world over. In addressing the societal and bodily aspects of these problems, we encourage our students to work with affected communities, medical professionals, basic scientists, patient advocates, and health NGOs while aiming to reach even larger publics.

The goal of our work is to advance the field of anthropology, which is the disciplinary home of medical anthropology, but to do so in ways that also advance thinking within broader intellectual communities. The field of medical anthropology addresses afflictions of increasing importance that are seldom sufficiently understood by biomedicine alone. Much of our work focuses on how health problems arise from larger social issues, which must also be addressed. As we strive to dissolve the stark divides between the life and the social sciences, we work in the spirit that cross-disciplinary conversations are possible and necessary to achieve effective medicine, humane healing, and ethical science. In this vein, we encourage our students to publish in the flagship journals of anthropology but also in relevant health science and more popular mainstream venues.

Theory and Methods

We are steadfast in our commitment to ethnography, affirming its empirical merits and value for theory building. We also realize that some research questions benefit from other methods, including statistical reporting, demographic observations, and survey techniques. In its specifics, training in our program includes courses in anthropological theory, the anthropology of science and technology, psychiatric anthropology, and various area foci where specific health problems are more prevalent for geo-political reasons. We expose students to these diverse approaches to allow them to contribute innovatively to anthropology as well as to a broader set of audiences. To facilitate this work, we also collaborate with Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), the Center for International Studies (FSI), the Departments of Medicine and Psychiatry, the Department of Psychology, and the program on Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Duana Fullwiley

Duana Fullwiley

Angela Garcia

Angela Garcia

Lochlann Jain

Lochlann Jain

medical anthropology research paper

Matthew Kohrman

Tanya Luhrmann

Tanya Marie Luhrmann

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  • BMJ Glob Health
  • v.3(2); 2018

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Anthropology in public health emergencies: what is anthropology good for?

Darryl stellmach.

1 Médecins Sans Frontières, London, UK

2 Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, Charles Perkins Centre and School of Life and Environmental Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Isabel Beshar

3 Stanford Medical School, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

Juliet Bedford

4 Anthrologica, Oxford, UK

Philipp du Cros

Beverley stringer.

Recent outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (2013–2016) and Zika virus (2015–2016) bring renewed recognition of the need to understand social pathways of disease transmission and barriers to care. Social scientists, anthropologists in particular, have been recognised as important players in disease outbreak response because of their ability to assess social, economic and political factors in local contexts. However, in emergency public health response, as with any interdisciplinary setting, different professions may disagree over methods, ethics and the nature of evidence itself. A disease outbreak is no place to begin to negotiate disciplinary differences. Given increasing demand for anthropologists to work alongside epidemiologists, clinicians and public health professionals in health crises, this paper gives a basic introduction to anthropological methods and seeks to bridge the gap in disciplinary expectations within emergencies. It asks: ‘What can anthropologists do in a public health crisis and how do they do it?’ It argues for an interdisciplinary conception of emergency and the recognition that social, psychological and institutional factors influence all aspects of care.

Key questions

What is already known about this topic.

  • Anthropologists are potentially important players in emergency public health response, providing insight on the social dynamics of health, illness and disease transmission.
  • Anthropological methods are quite distinct from and may be in tension with, other public health techniques.

What are the new findings?

  • The recent large-scale outbreak of Ebola virus (2013–2016) saw anthropologists working in different capacities of the response. These interactions led to new insight on how anthropologists can function within public health emergencies.
  • This paper outlines the methods and disciplinary abilities of anthropology and suggests how it may best be employed in the context of emergency public health response.

Recommendations for policy

  • Public health responders must understand the nature and value of anthropological evidence and the roles anthropologists can and cannot play in emergency settings.

Introduction

Social scientists, anthropologists in particular, have for some time been recognised as potentially important players in emergency public health efforts, particularly in outbreak response. 1 2 In 1996, Paul Farmer called for a ‘critical anthropology of emerging infections’ 3 —a new field that could identify the social, economic and political factors underpinning health emergencies and thus positively shape the course of health interventions. In the years that followed, Farmer’s call was met by a contingent of researchers eager to use anthropological skills to support outbreak response. 2 4–8

Recent large-scale outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (EVD) (2013–2016; Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone), Zika virus (2015–2016; North, Central and South America, Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia) and cholera (2017; Yemen) have brought renewed urgency to Farmer’s call, highlighting the need to understand the social pathways of disease transmission and barriers to care. In the last 5 years, anthropologists have been particularly valued for their ability to assess these factors in local contexts. While anthropologists have been involved in disease outbreaks for many years, their role in emergencies seems likely to increase, given growing calls for greater integration of sociocultural approaches to health crises. 2 9–11

Successful responses to public health emergencies often require collaboration between specialists such as clinicians, epidemiologists and social scientists. Yet different professions approach the same subject with different disciplinary expectations, ethical codes, methodologies and vocabulary. Anthropological methods are quite distinct from, and may be in tension with, other public health approaches (see Bourgois 12 for an exploration of some policy consequences). Technical words do not hold the same meaning across disciplines and jargon may be confusing to outsiders. Divergence between approaches can be problematic, as distinctive values and assumptions may prompt disagreements over research and programmatic methods. 6

A public health crisis is no place to begin to negotiate disciplinary differences. 6 13 As such, the emergency response community must be proactive in formulating a multidisciplinary approach to public health emergencies. This article is a primer on anthropological methods and how they can be applied in emergency. The paper summarises the methods and disciplinary strengths of anthropology. It outlines how anthropologists can be incorporated into public health emergency response and how, when properly integrated, they can significantly improve health outcomes and social conditions for populations in crisis.

Anthropology explained

What is anthropology.

‘Anthropology is the study of what makes us human.’ 14 Anthropology studies differences in humans (and other primates) through space and time. All humans share the same fundamentals of genetics, physiology and neurology. Similarly, they share the same basic needs for food, shelter, security, reproduction and social expression. However, the environments, mechanisms and interactions that humans use to meet their needs vary widely and manifest in surprisingly diverse social, ecological and epigenetic differences among and between individuals and populations. Anthropology starts from these shared fundamentals to examine diversity and variation. Anthropology encompasses many different subfields, from primatology to museum anthropology. What they have in common is the emphasis on understanding human social and biological variation through a holistic, that is to say multifactorial, perspective: accounting for the influences of history and people’s natural, social and built environments. 14 Because of this holistic approach, anthropologists’ subject matter (if not their methods) may overlap with history, economics, sociology, psychology and, increasingly, the health professions. Given the central importance of social practices in public health emergency (eg, health and hygiene behaviours), emergency responders will most frequently encounter sociocultural anthropologists , who study human social variation: differences in human behaviours, customs, values and outlooks. A subset of this group are applied anthropologists , who apply anthropological methods and knowledge to practical problem-solving in institutional or public settings. 15 They may be university based, work as professional consultants or be full-time members of emergency response teams.

Anthropological methods

Most anthropologists share the same basic convictions regarding methods and the nature of evidence. Anthropology is fundamentally holistic and empirical; it is based on observed reality and insists human behaviour cannot be considered in isolation from institutional relations, biology or the environment. 14 Individuals, communities, institutions and environmental circumstances are coinfluential; thus, social phenomena can only be understood as a relation between individual attitudes and behaviour, mediated through institutional and material culture. This holistic understanding is best achieved through field studies. Anthropologists excel at field-based research; the discipline is predicated on it. 16

Participant observation is sociocultural anthropology’s principal field research method. As the term implies, the anthropologist plays two roles simultaneously, as both a member and observer of a subject group. This position is similar to that of a documentary journalist; both are embedded within a community, both strive to give an impartial, professional and faithful account of events. Participant observation entails the researcher’s ‘close acquaintance’ and integration with everyday community activities over an extended period—days, weeks, months or even years. 16 The researcher’s role is transparently acknowledged and their presence contingent on community acceptance. Over the course of participant observation, the anthropologist will generally conduct formal and informal interviews and may also undertake surveys, questionnaires or other activities depending on the questions being explored. Observation and description are central activities; the anthropologist will make highly detailed notes and normally keep a log of activities. Immersive observation permits understanding of daily and seasonal rhythms of life. It also permits the anthropologist to cultivate long-term engagements with study subjects. This allows interviews to be more in-depth, and enables the researcher to address follow-up questions and cross-reference information. In this way, anthropological practice is an iterative process; as research findings are assessed and analysed in the field, research questions can be refined and subjects approached anew. This process gives insight into beliefs and practices that cannot be obtained through short interview or survey methods. 16 17

The material product of anthropological fieldwork is called an ethnography . Characterised by long passages of narrative description, ethnographies present evidence in a manner similar to documentary reporting. As such, anthropological writing follows an empirical logic: evidence is presented (often through narrative), arguments are made from the evidence and assertions must be supported by reference to ethnographic evidence or other research. 18 Well-reasoned, rational conclusions drawn from disciplined observation and comparison contribute to the evidence base that informs clinical and public health interventions. 19 20 Some examples of how this can be achieved in public health emergencies are explored in section What is anthropology good for?

Obviously, a long-term participant observation approach may not be feasible in periods of acute public health crisis, but the anthropological method is flexible and adaptable. Anthropology’s pen and notebook approach means the study focus can expand or contract as access, security or other external factors permit. Meanwhile, by maintaining contacts with individual key informants, the anthropologist can stay in touch with and study populations on the move. For an example of how this adaptive participant observation approach can be integrated into an emergency setting, see the protocol by Stellmach. 21

In other circumstances requiring fast action, anthropologists may deploy existing assessment tools, such as Rapid Assessment Procedures, and Knowledge, Attitude and Practices surveys. 22 23 These tools are well used within the emergency community and their strengths and weaknesses are generally acknowledged. They are valuable for their ability to quickly produce baseline data but are not meant to replace primary research. They cannot account for the interlinked influence of biological, social and environmental factors in the way that in-depth anthropological approaches can. 22 Rapid assessment tools are frequently refined using insight gained from past interventions and anthropological perspectives contribute to these efforts. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for example, have developed rapid assessment tools using qualitative methods to assess household, community and structural aspects in order to ensure a more comprehensive approach to understanding potential vulnerabilities for people in crisis. 24

Like all disciplines dealing with human subjects, the practice of anthropology is governed by a complex set of human research ethics. These concern issues such as safety, access, consent, intellectual property, confidentiality and anticipation of harm and benefit. Community trust and acceptance are key to an anthropologist’s work, thus ethical guidelines place central emphasis on transparency, negotiated access and voluntary informed consent. In addition to gaining clearance from review boards, informed consent in the field is an ongoing process, daily reaffirmed in the researcher’s actions and interactions. 25 26 While anthropologists will normally follow formal consenting procedures, the intimate nature of the research, where the researcher comes to be a feature of people’s daily lives, means consent cannot be effectively granted by a one-time signature on a form. Rather, whether implicit or explicit, consent comes in the form of ongoing engagement, cooperation and collaboration from the community. Consent takes the form of a social relationship, rather than the bureaucratic one implied by formal procedure. Given this deep engagement, anthropologists will usually go to lengths to honour the trust of their research subjects and protect them from potential harm, disruption or interference. Research subjects are generally assured of confidentiality, although some research subjects prefer to go ‘on record’ and request attribution; research findings may also be coattributed, with authorship shared between the researcher and the community. 25 27 28

Because they spend so long with their subject community and owe a primary research debt to that community, anthropologists may find themselves in a difficult ethical position when the vision of the research sponsor differs substantially from that of the community. 29 Such disagreements are bound to occur in public health crises, where dramatic action, such as quarantine and isolation, may be necessary but negatively perceived by the community. Thus, anthropologists may have to mediate or otherwise navigate between the separate interests of the community and the intervention. Faced with a conflict of interest, most anthropologists would assert their paramount moral obligation is to ensure the welfare of their research participants, 29 although how that welfare is best realised may be open to question.

What is anthropology good for?

The previous sections outline some distinctive features of anthropology and give some intimation of why anthropological perspectives might be useful in public health crises. This section explores how to realise that potential in practice—how anthropologists can be incorporated into a public health emergency response and where they can fill specific roles.

Broadly speaking, anthropologists fit into three different intervention categories, depending on the needs at the time and the character and specialisation of the individual anthropologist: (1) programme design and formative research; (2) interpretation, investigation and response; (3) event analysis and post hoc assessment.

Programme design and formative research

To paraphrase Jaffré, where epidemiology can describe priorities , anthropology can define possibilities for action on population health. 18 That is to say, anthropology can provide insight on why public health interventions succeed or fail: the gap between what is planned and what is realised on the ground and the unintended consequences that may result. People do not suffer from pathologies alone, but from a combination of pathology and the social and economic structures that predicate, enable or emerge from pathology. These can include, for example, social and economic conditions that place certain groups at greater risk and the deleterious impact of illness on family education and livelihoods. 30 Ethnography can reveal these structures in a manner that is practical and actionable. 18 So, for example, Jaffré investigated qualitative variables underlying maternal mortality in West Africa, Farmer 31 explored structural determinants of HIV infection in Haiti and Stevenson 32 examined frustrated public health approaches to suicide prevention in the Canadian arctic. Each of these anthropological studies of health crises reveals the difference between what authorities planned and what was achieved; more to the point, they demonstrate how well-intentioned but uninformed professional intervention can have unintended consequences that result in avoidable morbidity or mortality.

These insights are vital at the programme design phase and have a specific contribution to make in regard to formative research. Formative research is targeted research directed at achieving specific outcomes to inform planning and design of health programmes. Generally making use of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, it aims to shape programme strategies and communications. 33 Working together in research teams to ensure concept, design and analysis takes into account the value of both forms of evidence is essential. MSF, for example, have demonstrated this during the EVD outbreak in a practical way when combining the results of various studies to define health zones, review quality of surveillance and communicate better to follow-up families in the communities. 34

In the absence of vital public health infrastructure, such as functioning civil or public health registries, anthropologists have collaborated with epidemiologists and others in the tracking of morbidity and mortality. 35 One innovative example of such a collaboration used qualitative and quantitative methods to triangulate informal and official reports to produce a historical study of violent mortality for Darfur, Sudan—an ‘epidemiology of violence’—that tracked temporal and geographical trends in lethal force throughout the region. 36 37 Multidisciplinary teams in the field can access multiple information streams, both qualitative and quantitative. Ideally, the end result incorporates indigenous knowledge into effective local emergency strategy.

Thus, anthropologists can assist with accelerated planning and design of a public health response. Their expertise lends itself to designing strategies that are cognisant of the local context, socially relevant and therefore likely to be adopted by affected communities in a timely manner. Anthropological insight can contribute to risk assessment activities, community engagement, communications and health messaging, as well as understanding local perceptions and acceptance of the response. 4 6 The latter is important to ensure that a response is agile, responds to community needs and perceptions and supports accountability towards affected communities. It should be noted that, while these investigations are critical at the programme design phase, they need not end there, but can happen in an iterative manner, allowing programmes to be adapted and refocused midstream.

The incorporation of anthropology in the planning and design phase plays to the pre-eminent strengths that anthropologists bring to emergency response: a high-resolution focus on the local and an appreciation for a bottom-up approach to analytical evaluation. 16

Interpretation, investigation and response

‘Interpretation’ is perhaps the role that first comes to mind for anthropology in emergencies: making sense of local norms in the context of international emergency response. However, many anthropologists would see this characterisation as problematic. This is because ‘culture’, invoked in the context of public health intervention, often carries negative connotations (culture as an obstacle, rarely an enabler). To frame anthropologists as ‘cultural interpreters’, ‘translators’ or ‘brokers’ characterises them as scouts employed to lead teams around the obstacle of culture. 38

This is problematic for a number of reasons. Public health intervention generally plays out along the lines of existing power relationships. Many public health emergencies unfold among people who suffer acute disparities in wealth, power and social status—both internally (in relation to members of their own society) and in relation to the broader world. 39 40 These disparities are normally the product of historical, asymmetrical—even exploitative—social, economic and governmental relationships. 41 Such conditions are simultaneously precursors to and enablers of present-day crises. 31 Against this background, seemingly irrational behaviours often attributed to culture, superstition and ignorance can perhaps better be understood as an animated response to historical and contemporary inequalities.

Acute power differentials, historical and social complexity make cultural interpretation an inadequate concept. The notion is ultimately flawed because the process—coming to understand how others think and value—is not one of transliteration. The benefits of medicine are not always obvious and universally accepted, 6 nor do indigenous ideas always have equivalent concepts in English.

In the early months of EVD in West Africa, responders devalued community understandings of the disease and customary funerary rites. Response strategies centred on what was scientifically proven about viral transmission and control. 42 43 The ‘politics of knowledge’ surrounding EVD recognised a hierarchy of expertise: medical knowledge was promoted without attempts to understand local perspectives and histories. In other words, action based on accurate medical knowledge was considered to be all that was needed to combat EVD; meaning quarantine and rapid, contagion-free burial. The forceful implementation of these practices, and the stigmatisation of community practices, had substantial consequences. People were unable to care for dying relatives. Individuals fearing quarantine fled to their home villages. Communities, already mistrustful of government intervention, hid patients and burials. As a result, the epidemic, already unprecedented in scale, was further exacerbated. It was effectively combatted when community perspectives were integrated into safe care and burial practices. 42–44

Anthropologists played a pivotal role in this process. Many could act as networkers to bring health officials into contact with key individuals at the community or national level. 35 45 But more importantly, anthropologists drew attention to the role of history, the pervasiveness of narratives and the use of mismatched assumptions that influenced both local people and the responders. Community engagement that accounted for complex social and political realities on the ground was key. 43 (For an overview of anthropological approaches to EVD, see Moran and Hoffman. 46 For specific case examples, see Abramowitz and Bedford, 47 recent special editions of Anthropology in Action 48 and Anthropological Quarterly. 44 )

Since riots, rumours, refusal of services, non-compliance and other ‘irrational’ reactions often have their roots in relationships predicated on racialism, marginalisation or exploitation 4 31 46 49 anthropology in emergency can help field response teams to more readily ingest knowledge about communities’ understanding of disease, their priorities and potential behaviours (of both community and responders) that might impact response. The heterogeneity of beliefs in the community and the changes in beliefs that might occur may become more apparent. This enables a conceptual and methodological shift: teams will work within participating populations rather than upon them. 13 Documenting and understanding phenomena from the patient or community perspective shifts the sociopolitical dimension of health in humanitarian settings beyond traditional public health approaches. 18 Anthropological knowledge, generated and disbursed locally alongside that of public health experts and epidemiologists, helps bridge gaps in social understanding.

Event analysis and post hoc assessment

During the international EVD outbreak, anthropologists and related disciplines built international research collaborations, including the Ebola Emergency Anthropology Initiative (a message board and Listserv: https://lists.capalon.com/lists/listinfo/ebola-anthropology-initiative ) and the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform (a weblog and information clearinghouse: http://www.ebola-anthropology.net/ ). By making use of online technology, these collaborations took place in real time. This made for forums that were engaged, interactive and iterative, permitting the real-time ‘mobilization of local research’ and knowledge, including analysis, recommendations and technical advice. 47 Similarly, the online environment allowed a leading anthropology blog to carry ongoing analysis of the epidemic as it spread and developed ( Somatosphere ’s ‘Ebola fieldnotes’ series: http://somatosphere.net/series/ebola-fieldnotes ), while online social research journals fast-tracked publishing of social analysis. 50

These real-time, transnational research collaborations—that follow the progress of a public health emergency as it happens—illustrate the potential power of rapid collective social science analysis: where academic methods, data and theory might be put into service to direct action, policy formulation or advocacy.

This converts anthropology into a resource in and of itself. Rather than an instrument of public health, it can also be a mirror on the practice of public health. Anthropological analysis can help reveal assumptions inherent in public health practice and programme design; it can similarly assess outcomes (eg, why do we count lives saved, when at best they are lives temporarily prolonged?). 17 50 It also helps us understand emergency response as part of a global practice and through its local particularities. 51 This analysis, whether part of a formal evaluation or not, is a potential source of strategic insight for practitioners and institutions.

What is anthropology not good for?

While professional anthropologists can add value and improve the response to public health emergencies, there are instances when an anthropological presence might not be useful or a priority. These might include situations of immediate and extreme crisis—for example, the first hours after a mass casualty disaster, when patient recovery, triage and surgical care are of the highest priority. 52 It also includes situations of very high insecurity; despite their connections with local communities, if a circumstance is deemed unsafe for health personnel it is likely not substantially safer for anthropologists. 53 In a similar vein, just as health campaigns have been poorly managed, misused or abused, 54 55 so the clumsy or unethical use of anthropology can poison perceptions and cause psychological or physical harm. 38 The misuse or misrepresentation of anthropology, in ignorance of professional codes of conduct, can have real consequences for individuals and health interventions. As such, the potential benefits of anthropology in public health emergencies can only be realised through appropriate expectations, realistic terms of reference and professionalism.

Recent high-profile public health crises have led to greater integration of sociocultural understanding into emergency response. With their specialist focus on everyday life, regional knowledge and ethnographic methods, it is logical that anthropologists undertake this effort. Additionally, while this paper has focused specifically on emergency, many of the anthropological resources discussed here can also serve in non-emergency, or postemergency, health interventions (see, for example, the work of Briggs and Nichter following 2009’s H1N1 outbreak, 5 or Farmer in Haiti 31 41 ).

This paper gives a basic introduction to anthropological methods and mindset. It hopes to harmonise disciplinary expectations by illustrating what anthropologists can do in public health crisis and how they do it. It attempts to summarise ways in which anthropology has been applied to public health crises in the past and imagines possible future roles for anthropology. By demonstrating how anthropologists are employed in emergency operations—contributing to a variety of apparatuses and structures—it highlights how hidden social aspects of clinical and public health intervention can be brought to the fore and acted upon for the benefit of all.

Acknowledgments

We thank Sarah Venis (MSF, London, UK) for editing assistance. We thank our anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this submission. We thank Médecins Sans Frontières-UK and The Marie Bashir Institute at the University of Sydney for covering the cost of Open Access publication.

Handling editor: Seye Abimbola

Contributors: Concept: DS, IB, JB, PdC, BS. Literature search: IB. Writing first draft: DS, IB. Writing subsequent drafts: DS, IB, JB, PdC, BS. Administration: DS, IB. Supervision/coordination: DS, BS.

Funding: The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests: JB is director of a consultancy specialised in the applied anthropology of global health.

Patient consent: Not required.

Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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Ethnomedicine and Tribal Healing Practices in India pp 35–44 Cite as

Practice and Praxis: A Critical Look at Medical Anthropology in India

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Part of the People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities book series (PCSEDD)

Medical anthropology in India has been parallel with world medical anthropology . The publication and research work in Indian medical anthropology started early; research papers and full-length monographs meticulously cover ethnomedicinal details. It has been inspired primarily by the American medical anthropological traditions. Indian medical anthropology has catered principally to the India-specific problems, as is evident in the researches coming out of India from time to time. Indian medical anthropology is keen on initiating studies on the clinical aspects of Indian spiritualism and mysticism besides subjecting Yoga to medical anthropological experimentations. Indian medical anthropology is facing the daunting task of protecting and promoting traditional medical systems. In the Indian context, while the hegemony of biomedicine remains, more recently, the hegemony of AYUSH, an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, and recently added Sowa-Rigpa over the traditional healing system persist. Indian medical anthropology now has newer vistas to understand the challenges posed by Ayushisation besides the increasing threat of media corruption. The AYUSH, in the process of documenting and preserving the traditional knowledge, further patronises, and there are possibilities of not sharing the benefits with the healers’ looms large.

  • Ayushisation
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  • Medical hegemony

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Dr. S. C. Mitra, a teacher at Calcutta University, wrote the first paper on Cult of Godlings of East Bengal, read first in the Indian Science Congress and later published in the journal of Man in India’s inaugural volume. Incidentally, S. C. Mitra also wrote the first paper of the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay on Indian Children’s Games in 1913.

Medical corruption is defined as the profit-making tendency of the clinical agency to subject the patient to unwanted and often unnecessary medical procedures, including surgery, diagnostic tests, medication and other actions.

Cut refers to a fixed percentage of the profit given to the doctor making a referral. It is a well-established practice generally with the private providers but quite often with the public providers. This phenomenon has been extensively reported in the media (see Nagarajan, 2014 ).

Aribam, B. S., Joshi, P. C., & Sharma, S. (2015). Perception and management of acute respiratory tract infections in a slum cluster of Delhi. International Journal of Scientific Research., 4 (6), 642–644.

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Kar, R. K. (2004). Ethnomedicine and tribal health: An illustrative appraisal. In A. K. Kalla & P. C. Joshi (Eds.), Tribal health and medicine (pp. 376–390). Concept Publishing Company.

Khundongbam, G., Joshi, P. C., & Singh, M. M. (2012). Perception of childhood diarrhea in Langmeidong Village, Manipur. South Asian Anthropologist, 12 (2), 135–140.

Krishnakumari, P., Joshi, P. C., Arun Kumar, M. C., & Singh, M. M. (2014). Women’s perception of reproductive illness in Manipur, India. Journal of Anthropology . https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/321480

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Nagarajan, R. (2014). Open secret: Doctors take cuts for referrals. Times of India . 28th June. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Open-secret-Doctors-take-cuts-for-referrals/articleshow/37350397.cms . Accessed March 22, 2019.

Paliwal, M. (2004). Risk factors for HIV/AIDS among tribes of India. In A. K. Kalla & P. C. Joshi (Eds.), Tribal health and medicine (pp. 104–114). Concept Publishing Company.

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Joshi, P.C. (2023). Practice and Praxis: A Critical Look at Medical Anthropology in India. In: Reddy, S., Guite, N., Subedi, B. (eds) Ethnomedicine and Tribal Healing Practices in India. People, Cultures and Societies: Exploring and Documenting Diversities . Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4286-0_2

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79 Medical Anthropology Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best medical anthropology topic ideas & essay examples, 📃 interesting topics to write about medical anthropology, 🔍 simple & easy medical anthropology essay titles, ❓ medical anthropology research questions.

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  • Is Medical Anthropology a Humanities?
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Human Relations Area Files

Cultural information for education and research, topics in medical anthropology.

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Christiane cunnar, human relations area files.

Cultural views on medicine and medicinal systems vary widely. For example, a Western doctor may diagnose an illness as being caused by germs and prescribe penicillin as cure, a traditional healer may interpret an illness as being caused by evil spirits and perform elaborate rituals and animal sacrifices to cure the illness of the patient.

Medical centers that are treating patients from diverse ethnic backgrounds are now paying more attention to medical beliefs and practices that are outside the biomedical paradigm. They are starting to incorporate social and cultural differences into the medical learning curriculum.

The eHRAF World Cultures ( http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu ) database can be used for a cross-cultural study of medical systems. The following exercises are designed to find illness causation and medicinal treatments across cultures. As you answer the various assignments and compare and contrast the cultural particulars, think about the following aspects. How does a culture classify causes of disease? What illnesses have similar causes? Who are the healers and medical practitioners and what are their names? What is the indigenous name of the disease? Who is being affected (e.g., ethnicity, age, sex)? What is the type of treatment? What is the indigenous name of the treatment? To what extent may the family or the community get involved in the cure of the disease? How does the diagnosis and treatment of the disease compare your own cultural beliefs?

Please note that eHRAF may contain documents over a wide range of time periods. If you encounter documents written more than 50 years ago, discuss how political-economic (e.g., globalization, introduction of market economy and democracy) and other forces may have affected the medical system (e.g., increased use of biomedical products).

You may use the eHRAF World Cultures ( http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu ) database to study the various topics in medical anthropology. The following exercises show how to find information ranging from theory of disease to medicinal cures to ethnobotany and ethnozoology.

eHRAF User Guide

The eHRAF User Guides contains very helpful tips and search examples on how to search in eHRAF.  If you have questions about searching in the databases, don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected], 1-203-764-9401 or 1-800-520-HRAF.

1. Theory of Disease

Using the eHRAF World Cultures database, compare and contast disease causation for five cultures from different major regions. As you compare and contrast the cultural particulars, think about the following aspects. How does a culture classify causes of disease? What illnesses have similar causes? Who are the healers and medical practitioners and what are their names? What is the indigenous name of the disease? Who is being affected (e.g., ethnicity, age, sex)? What is the type of treatment? What is the indigenous name of the treatment? To what extent may the family or the community get involved in the cure of the disease? How does the diagnosis and treatment of the disease compare your own cultural beliefs?

2. Disease Causation as Defined by George P. Murdock

There are many different theories on illness causation. In his classification system George Peter Murdock defines illness causation as “natural” and “supernatural” as outlined in the list below (Moore 1988).

Exercise: Select one or more of the disease causation concepts from the chart above. Using the eHRAF World Cultures ( http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu ) database and other sources, find at least three cultures from different major regions (e.g., Asia, Africa, Europe, North America) with information relating to a type of disease causation selected. In an essay compare and contrast the cultural similarities and differences for the various concepts.

Hint: “Sorcery” and “theory of disease” are represented by OCM subjects and may used in an eHRAF Advanced Search  and selected using the “Add Subjects” function.

3. Specific Illnesses: Causes and Medicinal Remedies

Cultural views vary on the causes of certain illnesses. Consider the common cold. Gilliland (1986) notes that some Eastern European groups such as the Croats believe that chilling a part of the body causes a cold. Examples are sitting in a drafty room or on a cold surface such as stone or metal, washing one’s hair and then going outside into cold air, or getting wet in the rain. Describing Croatian medicinal remedies,  Bennett remarks on the value of rakija (a mild liquor) and how it “will cure everything from a cut to the common cold (Bennett 1974).” According to Laura Bohannan (1953), the Tiv of Nigeria believe that the common cold is associated with the phases of the moon and Paul Bohannan (1969) notes that “eating raw onions” can be used to treat the cold. Gould-Martin (1975) states that the Taiwan-Hokkien believe that cold is caused by “fright or offense.” Levine reports that the Amhara of Ethopia the believe “that smelling the urine of another will give one a cold (Levine 1965).” In the United States, health professionals warn that the common cold is usually caused by viral infections and that a person should frequently wash one’s hands with soap to prevent a cold. Once the cold is caught then nasal decongestants and cold medications are usually taken.

Exercise: Select three or more of the illnesses and conditions from the list below. Perform an Advanced Search in the eHRAF World Cultures ( http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu ) to find at five (or more) cultures from different major regions. Compare and contrast the cultural views regarding the following: 1. illness causation and 2. medicinal remedies for the illnesses that you have selected. This exercise involves two separate searches.  Hint: Keywords such as measles or influenza can be used in association with OCM subjects such as “medicinal remedies” and “theory of disease” (“Add Subjects”) in an Advanced Search.

4. Literate Medical Systems

The four “literate” medical systems include: 1. Chinese, 2. Ayurvedic, 3. Greek, and 4.Unani (Rebhun 2001). The Chinese medical system finds its roots in the first century B.C. and manifests itself in bi-polar typology: Yin which includes the earth, moon, water, cold, female, etc. and Yang which includes the sky, sun, dry, hot, male, etc. Chinese healers believe in preventing illnesses through a balanced diet and regular exercise and they prefer the use of herbs, acupuncture, and acupressure when treating patients. The Ayurvedic medical system developed in India around two thousand years ago and include cures such as massages, cupping, sweat-baths, and meditation. The Greek medical system originated in the fourth century B.C. and became the basis of biomedicine. This medical system assumed that there were four “humors” namely blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile which must be kept in balance. The Greek medical system has been practiced in Southern Europe and Latin America and treatments include herbs, cupping, purging, and blood-letting.  The Unani medical system, prevalent in countries that practicing Islam, incorporates facets of the Ayurvedic and Chinese medical systems.

Exercise: Use the eHRAF World Cultures ( http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu ) to find supporting information for the literate medical systems. Select one or more of the terms from the list below. In the Advanced Search of the eHRAF World Cultures database perform various searches to find information on these medical practices in terms of causes of illnesses and medicinal remedies . Relate your findings to the different medical systems and changes over time.

Terms referring to practices or ideas in the four literate medical systems:

5. Ethnobotany and its Medical Uses

In many folk medicines and traditional healing practices plants and herbal medicines are believed to have healing properties. For example, the antiseptic properties of garlic are widely known. Garlic has been used to cure everything-from bites, colds, boils, furuncles, wounds, fevers. Ginger is not only used for treating eye inflammations,  stomach-aches, fevers and cold, but it is also used for childbirth.  Rosemary is a good “general” herbal medication and will cure everything from headaches to toothaches.

Exercise: Select three or more plant and herbal names from the list below. Perform searches in the eHRAF World Cultures ( http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu ) database to find at least five cultures from different major regions. Compare and contrast the cultural views regarding the medicinal properties. OCM subjects such as bodily injuries, mental and magical therapy, medical therapy, pharmaceuticals, child birth, post-natal care, etc can be used in the “Add Subjects” function of an eHRAF Advanced Search (see eHRAF Search Examples and Methodology  ).

List of Plant, Fruit and Herbal Names:

6. Ethnozoology and its Medical Uses

Some folk medicines and traditional healing practices believe in the healing power of animals. For example, in the United States and European countries eating chicken soup is often viewed as a good way to cure the common cold. The Eastern Toraja of Indonesia believe that the saliva of chicken can cure centipede bites and chicken droppings are applied to wounds. In other cultures chickens are often sacrificed to appease the spirits who have inflicted ailments.

Exercise: Select one or more animal names from the list below. Perform searches in the eHRAF World Cultures ( http://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu ) to find at least five cultures from different major regions. Compare and contrast the cultural views regarding the medicinal properties of animals. Please note that several OCM subjects can be used for this exercise.OCM subjects such as bodily injuries, mental and magical therapy, medical therapy, pharmaceuticals, etc can be used in the “Add Subjects” function of an eHRAF Advanced Search and combined with keywords (see  eHRAF Search Examples and Methodology  ).

List of Animal Names:

References Cited

Bennett, Brian Carey 1974   Sutivan: a Dalmatian village in social and economic transition. San Francisco: R and E Research Associates. As seen in the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web, 4/15/02.

Bohannan, Laura 1953   The Tiv of central Nigeria. London: International African Institute. As seen in the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web, 4/15/02.

Bohannan, Paul 1969   A source book on Tiv religion in 5 volumes. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files. As seen in the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web, 4/15/02.

Gilliland, Mary Katherine 1986  The maintenance of family values in a Yugoslav town. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International.  As seen in the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web, 4/15/02.

Gould-Martin, Katherine 1975  Medical systems in a Taiwan village: ONG-IA-KONG, the plague god as modern physician. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, National Institutes of Health. As seen in the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web, 4/15/02.

Levine, Donald Nathan 1965  Wax & gold: tradition and innovation in Ethiopian culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. As seen in the eHRAF Collection of Ethnography on the Web, 4/15/02.

Moore, Carmella Caracci 1988  An Optimal Scaling of Murdock’s Theories of Illness Data-An Approach to the Problem of Interdependence 22: 161-179.

Murdock, George P. 1980  Theories of Illness: A World Survey. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Rebhun, Linda-Anne 2001  Lecture Notes for Medical Anthropology (Spring Semester). Yale University, Department of Anthroplogy. Unpublished notes.

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The paper commences with a brief definition of applied anthropology in both its broader and more restrictive senses. What follows then is an examination of the origins of applied anthropology within the matrix of anthropology, generally, in the 19th century. The early history of the discipline through the post–World War II, or mid-20th century, era is explored in the next section. The mid-20th-century era was dominated by three subjects: the Fox Project, the Peru Vicos Project, and Project Camelot, which is treated separately. The section on the later 20th century leads into applied anthropology today, which is followed by a section on areas for future research.

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What Is Applied Anthropology?

Origins of applied anthropology, early history, the fox project, project camelot, late 20th century, programs in applied anthropology, anthropologists and the military, forensic anthropology, ethnic cleansing, and political dissidents, future directions.

  • Bibliography

Applied anthropology, in its broader sense, is distinguished primarily from academic anthropology as anthropological methods and data put to use outside of the classroom. This is not to say that all anthropological methods and data put to use outside of the classroom is applied anthropology; field research also is anthropological methods and data put to use outside of the classroom, but it can be used for academic purposes, as well as for practical application. Applied anthropology is used to solve practical problems outside of the academic world, and it has appeared under such names as action anthropology, development anthropology, practicing anthropology, and advocacy anthropology among others.

In its narrower sense, applied anthropology is distinguished from practicing anthropology. Practicing anthropology is the application of anthropology strictly outside of academia by nonacademics; applied anthropology can be practiced outside of academia or within academia by academics. To some, the differences are considered to be minimal, but to others they are of great importance.

Early in the 19th century, anthropology was a religious philosophy that examined how to view the place of humans in the cosmos. This began to change by the mid-19th century, and people who were to become the founders of what is called anthropology today began to look at the more earthly nature of humanity. One of these individuals was Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan, who was an attorney, began to work with the Iroquois in the 1840s on legal issues involving railroad right of ways. This may have been one of the first, if not the first, application of the nascent but as yet still inchoate discipline.

Across the Atlantic, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the “father of anthropology” who defined “culture,” considered anthropology to be a “policy science” that should be implemented to ameliorate the problems of humanity. James Hunt, who founded the Anthropological Society of London, began to use the term practical anthropology by the 1860s, and in 1869, the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (this was later to be titled the Royal Anthropological Institute) was formed.

In North America, the federal government formed the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) under John Wesley Powell in order to perform research that was intended to guide government policy toward Native Americans, and in 1879, Powell dispatched Frank Hamilton Cushing to the Zuñi pueblo to perform some of the first anthropological field research. By 1895, the BAE had hired anthropologist James Mooney to research a revitalization movement, the ghost dance. It also was in the 1890s that Franz Boas, the “father of American anthropology,” worked outside of academia with the Chicago Field Museum.

Boas developed a lifelong hatred of racism arising from anti-Semitic experiences he had had in school in Germany. This led him to attempt to dispel the prevailing racist notions of the day in anthropology. From 1910 to 1913, Boas applied anthropometry to disprove a basic racist assumption: Cranial shape was a factor of race. To accomplish this, he measured the heads of Jewish immigrants in New York City ghettos. Presumably, they were members of the dolichocephalic (longheaded) Mediterranean race, and indeed, the immigrants tended to fit that pattern. However, their children, born in America, were members of the brachicephalic (roundheaded) Alpine race. Apparently, they had changed race within one generation of having moved to America. Boas explained this anomaly as being the product of different diets between the parents and their children during their growth years and not the result of race at all.

Boas’s first PhD student, Alfred Louis Kroeber, and Kroeber’s students spent the first two decades of the 20th century conducting “salvage ethnology” to preserve cultures that were, or already had, become extinct. The most famous of these cases, both within and outside of anthropology, is the story of Ishi, the last member of the California Yahi tribe, whom Kroeber brought to Berkeley to serve as the key respondent from a vanished people. In 1919, Kroeber applied anthropological techniques to discover the rapprochement between fashion and economic cycles in his hem-length study. He demonstrated that one could determine (and perhaps predict) economic cycles by the rise or fall of women’s dress and skirt lengths. The 1920s also found Margaret Mead (1928/1973) making recommendations on sex education to the American educational establishment in the last two chapters of her doctoral dissertation, published as Coming of Age in Samoa.

In Europe, it was common during this time for anthropologists to seek employment in colonial governments: Anthropologists from the Netherlands were employed by their government to provide ethnographic data on its Indonesian colony; Northcote Thomas used anthropology to aid in administrating the British colony in Nigeria; and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown served as director of education on Tonga. Somewhat later, in the 1930s, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1969), in the employment of the government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, spent several research periods among the Nuer to determine why they did not consider it necessary to uphold their treaty with the British government, among other projects. Also in the 1930s, Radcliffe-Brown first used the term applied anthropology in the article “Anthropology as Public Service and Malinowski’s Contribution to It” (although the term already had appeared in 1906 in a degree program at Oxford). Bronislaw Malinowski himself, had coined the term practicing anthropology for nonacademic anthropology.

In 1932, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed the anthropologist John Collier to Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Collier then employed fellow anthropologists Julian Steward, Clyde Kluckhohn, and others in the applied anthropology office to investigate Native American cultures and to counsel the BIA in regard to the Indian Reorganization Act. The anthropologists served as intermediaries between the BIA and Native Americans during the drawing of tribal constitutions and charters. Also in the 1930s, Edward Sapir’s student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, applied anthropological linguists to the analysis of fire insurance investigations, and anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner was hired by the Western Electric Company to study worker productivity in its bank-wiring facility. Warner employed qualitative ethnographic techniques, such as participant observation and informal interviewing, that previously had been used in nonindustrial, non-Western societies in one of the first applications of “industrial anthropology.”

The 1940s brought about the efflorescence of the field with the founding of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) by Margaret Mead, Conrad Arensberg, and Eliot Chapple. They published the journal Applied Anthropology to counter what they saw as academic bias against practical, nontheoretical work. In 1949, the name of the journal was changed to Human Organization, and the SfAA code of ethics was created. Despite this, Melville Herskovits taught in the late 1940s that applied anthropology was racist and should not be practiced, according to one of his former students.

Today, a variety of organizations specialize in applied anthropology. The Consortium of Practicing and Applied Anthropology Programs (COPAA), chaired by Linda A. Bennett of the University of Memphis, lists and gives a brief description of some of these organizations on its Web site, including the COPAA, the SfAA, and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology within the American Anthropological Association.

The COPAA also lists regional organizations, which include the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists; the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology; the Chicago Association for Practicing Anthropologists; the Sun Coast Organization of Practicing Anthropologists; the California Alliance of Local Practitioner Organizations that embraces the Southern California Applied Anthropology Network, the Bay Area Association of Practicing Anthropologists, and the Central Valley Applied Anthropology Network; and the Mid-South Association of Professional Anthropologists. It was during World War II that Margaret Mead headed a group of anthropologists who served in the Office of Strategic Services. In addition to Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ralph Linton, Julian Steward, and Clyde Kluckhohn, among others (including such interdisciplinary notables as Erik Erikson), worked on the Committee on Food Habits, the Culture at a Distance national character project, the War Relocation Authority, and others, in order to aid in the U.S. war effort. A description of their work and methods was published (Mead & Rhoda, 1949) after the war as The Study of Culture at a Distance. Following the war, anthropologists also worked for the U.S. Pacific protectorates’ administrations.

Mid-20th Century

In the late 1940s, Sol Tax of the University of Chicago wanted to develop a program that would give field experience to anthropology students. To do this, he began the Fox Project in 1948 to look into social organization and leadership in the Fox/Tama settlement, which was facing acculturative pressures from the neighboring Euro-American community. Although they tried to become involved in the amelioration of the acculturative process, they had no authority to do so. Thus, they developed a theoretical agenda that became known as “action anthropology.” In 1953, the group consulted with the Fox project and developed a framework for action that was funded by a private foundation. University of Iowa students joined the University of Chicago group, and together they created the Fox Indian Educational Program and began the Tama Indian Crafts industry.

About the time that the Fox project was nearing its completion in 1952, Edward Spicer’s book, Human Problems in Technological Change, was published. That same year Allen Holmberg began Cornell University’s 14-year experiment: the “Peru Vicos Project.” Cornell University had rented Vicos, a feudal estate in Peru, as a living laboratory to study social engineering on the Quechua-speaking peasantry, to test theories of modernization, and to develop models for community advocacy and culture brokering.

Project Camelot had the potential to be a low point in the application of anthropology in the late 20th century. In December 1964, the Office of the Director of the Special Operations Research Office of the American University in Washington, D.C., announced a new program to be funded by the army and the Department of Defense. The program extensively would employ anthropological fieldworkers in government research for 3 to 4 years. In theory, it was a project that was intended to develop a systems model that would enable the prediction of social changes that in turn could develop into political movements in third world nations that might threaten the United States—specifically in Latin American countries (where a field office was planned) but with plans to expand globally. Its objectives were to formulate means to predict civil wars and revolutions; to identify means to prevent civil wars, insurgency, and counterinsurgency movements in particular societies; and to develop a system of field methods to collect the information to accomplish the two previous objectives. The budget was expected to be in the $1.5 million range annually.

Some anthropologists feared that applying anthropology to aid Latin American government’s repression of political movements was unethical and would hinder development of societies in those countries. A more horrific potential outcome to the field ethnographers was the possible executions of their field respondents. In response to the outcry from the social science community, Project Camelot was cancelled in July 1965.

Nonetheless, not all social scientists found Project Camelot to be totally objectionable. Beyond the satisfaction of the obvious and never-ending quest for research funding, which it would have provided, albeit from sources that are suspect to many in the academic community, there is the less obvious appeal of ethnography finally having some input into government international policy, something that had been called for over decades. Likewise, many anthropologists in that era had gotten their starts in the military by having had their first international experiences during the second World War and their educations financed by the government issue, or GI, Bill. Rather, it was the possible outcomes of their research that convinced the community to object to Project Camelot.

Also in the 1960s, medical anthropologists working with the Foré tribe of New Guinea traced the origins of a deadly neurological disease, kuru, to cannibalism by using traditional qualitative techniques, such as collecting life histories; Margaret Mead testified before Congress on birth control and marijuana, and she coined the term generation gap to describe a global phenomenon that had never occurred previously in human history; Jules Henry’s Culture Against Man described the Orwellian nature of popular advertising in American society; Jomo Kenyatta applied his PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics under Malinowski to running the government of Kenya, with its diverse ethnic makeup, as its first president under the slogan Harambe, or “let us pull together” in Kiswahili. Oscar Lewis conducted his “family life histories” in Mexico City ( The Children of Sanchez ) and New York ( La Vida ) and described the poor as living in a selfperpetuating “culture of poverty.” Although this was criticized widely as an attempt to blame the poor for their condition, it also could be said that Lewis was acknowledging the wisdom of people who lived on the edge and their ability to survive and fully exploit their economic niches.

James P. Spradley conducted a Herculean application of ethnoscience to “tramp” culture in Seattle in the 1960s to determine the emic structure of the society in order to make recommendations for improved treatments to social workers, police, psychiatrists, and alcohol treatment centers. It was published as You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads in 1970. In 1969, George Foster wrote the first textbook on development and change agency, Applied Anthropology, in which he cited changes in human behavior as a primary goal in order to solve social, economic, and technological problems. He followed this up in 1973 with Traditional Societies and Technological Change.

In 1974, the University of South Florida began the first master of arts degree program to focus specifically on training students for careers in applied anthropology. The options available to those students form a wide range of topics that define applied anthropology. Among them are archaeology, Cultural Resource Management, economic development, educational anthropology, immigration, medical anthropology, race, gender, ethnicity, and urban policy and community development. Among the reasons for such theoretical breadth is the realization that many master of arts students do not choose to pursue a doctor of philosophy degree, and this curriculum, then, qualifies them to work in specialized professions outside of academia. The reader will note that work outside of academia is known as practicing anthropology, and in 1978 the University of South Florida first published the journal Practicing Anthropology. Graduate programs in applied anthropology are becoming more widespread in the United States since that time; for example, the master’s program in applied anthropology at California State University, Long Beach, has three program options: communities/ organizations, health, and education. Northern Kentucky University’s anthropology program is long known for its award-winning Web site with information on where undergraduate anthropology majors, who cannot or do not choose to attend graduate programs, can find jobs outside of academia; currently, it is in the process of developing a master’s program in applied anthropology.

COPAA lists member programs on its Web site for those interested in pursuing a career in applied anthropology. The Web site notes that there are other programs that are not currently COPAA members. Among the universities in consortium are the University of Alaska, Anchorage; American University; University of Arizona; California State University, East Bay; California State University, Long Beach; University of Florida, Gainesville; The George Washington University; University of Georgia; Georgia State University; Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis; University of Kentucky; University of Maryland; University of Memphis; Mississippi State University; Montclair State University; University of North Carolina at Greensboro; University of North Texas; Northern Arizona University; Oregon State University; Santa Clara University; San Jose State University; the University of South Florida; the University of Texas at San Antonio; and Wayne State University.

The first doctoral program in applied anthropology was begun at the University of South Florida (USF) in 1984. Although the master of arts curriculum had been intended for nonacademic professions, the PhD curriculum trained students for university careers, as well as for practicing anthropology. USF’s Center for Applied Anthropology combines these two objectives in ventures such as the Human Services Information System database and the Alliance for Applied Research in Education and Anthropology.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel conducted genetics research for the American Atomic Energy Commission in an ethnographic setting. Chagnon was the ethnographer, and Neel was the geneticist. Their work was designed to determine the effects of the forces of evolution (such as the founder effect) on small populations in order to determine how genes might affect survival following a nuclear destruction of modern civilization. Their research took them to the Orinoco River basin in southeastern Venezuela where they established contact and conducted research among the Yanomamo, an isolated, horticultural, tribal society. Out of this research came Chagnon’s ethnography, The Yanomamo: The Fierce People. From its very early days, the project was heavily documented on film, and their classic documentary, The Yanomamo: A Multidisciplinary Study, became a standard in both cultural and physical anthropology classrooms. In the film, Chagnon and Neal become aware of a measles epidemic sweeping up the Orinoco Basin toward the Yanomamo. They acquire a vaccine that contains a weakened strain of the live virus and conduct mass inoculations of the Yanomamo against measles.

Although their work was met with criticism from the outset, none was quite as virulent as the later criticism contained in Patrick Tierney’s 2000 book, Darkness in El Dorado, and its aftermath. Tierney claimed that Chagnon and Neel had been conducting Josef Mengele-like genetics experiments on the Yanomamo by injecting them with the live measles virus to see who would live and who would die—not, as shown in the documentary, to protect them from an epidemic. The author of this chapter recalls sweeping condemnations of Chagnon and Neel from the anthropological community on several Internet electronic mailing lists originating throughout the United States at that time based on Darkness in El Dorado— although the book had not yet been released. By that time, Neel was dead, and although Chagnon was retired, he filed a lawsuit against Tierney in which he and Neel eventually were vindicated. Currently, calls are being made in anthropology to disband the “El Dorado Task Force” set up to investigate this case.

In the 1980s, Philippe Bourgois conducted field research among Hispanic crack (“rock” cocaine, which is smoked) dealers in the Harlem area of New York. This was not an update of Elliott Liebow’s Tally’s Corner nor of Oscar Lewis’s La Vida. Rather, it is what Bourgois refers to as a “culture of terror” that exploits an underground economy. Bourgois argues that this renders the crack dealers unexploitable by the larger, legal society as they pursue their interpretations of the “American dream.”

Across the Atlantic, anthropologists and other social scientists began to influence government policies in the Republic of Ireland in the late 1980s, according to Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan, via what are called the economic and social partnerships with government. This should not be confused with hegemony as may have been the case with the 1960s American “military-industrial complex.” Rather, in a country in which anthropology traditionally had been practiced by foreign scholars investigating semi-isolated rural communities, it was a remarkable innovation for anthropologists and other academics to have creative input, with their governmental partner, in the policies that led to the Celtic Tiger economy in what had been one of the poorest countries in Europe and the social structural transformations that allowed the “boom” to filter down to the public at large. Anthropologists also have been called on more recently in Ireland to assist the government with ethnic minority issues, especially those of the indigenous minority, the travelling community.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, nonacademic jobs for anthropologists have increased, and more anthropologists have found themselves involved in the business world, especially in marketing, although the irony of this may not be lost on those who were students when Jules Henry’s anti-Madison Avenue research, published as Culture Against Man, was a popular textbook in the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the new material centers around cultural miscues that corporations and individuals make in advertising— physical gestures, slang, and so on—when acting crossculturally (e.g., Chevrolet’s attempt to market the Nova automobile in Latin America where the homonym of the name means “does not go” or Gerber’s attempt to market baby food with an infant’s picture on the label in parts of Africa where labels routinely showed the containers’ contents for consumers who could not read). Other businessoriented approaches fall more along the lines of the Western Electric bank-wiring study (noted above) conducted by W. Lloyd Warner in the 1930s.

Nonetheless, some members of the anthropological community still consider business anthropology to be “colluding with the enemy,” according to Jason S. Parker of Youngstown State University in a recent article in the Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter. Parker points out that these same critics, who stigmatize those applied anthropologists that work in business, are not offering any jobs to their recently minted bachelor’s degree graduates, who must then look elsewhere. Parker argues that the anthropological perspective can benefit the employees, as well as the corporations, through the inclusion of their input in the manufacturing processes.

Ann T. Jordan has written a persuasive argument for the use of anthropology in the business world in her book Business Anthropology. Jordan cites a number of cases in which anthropologists have ameliorated conditions that had the potential to lead to labor disharmony through managerial insensitivity to working conditions. Likewise, she explains that cross-cultural conflicts and misunderstandings on the job could easily be avoided with anthropological input.

Applied Anthropology Today

Louise Lamphere suggested a convergence of applied, practicing, and public anthropology in 2004. Lamphere argues that anthropologists in the 21st century should collaborate with each other, as well as with the groups that they are investigating, on archaeological research, health, urban, and environmental topics to unify their work on critical social, educational, and political issues. The traditional research populations increasingly want greater degrees of jurisdiction over what is written about them, and applied anthropologists, especially those influenced by the feminist critique, have advocated more collaboration with their respondents on ethnographic publications and museum exhibits in order to express more emic perspectives. This joint participation in the research and presentation process (whether by publication or museum display) fosters skills and generates capacities for indigenous change within communities.

Charles Menzies erects a paradigm to foster these joint ventures based on his work with the Gitkxaala Nation in British Columbia, which consists of four stages. First, the anthropologist opens a dialogue with the community that may suggest modifications to the research protocol. Then, research continues to grow and change in consultation with the respondents—who now are becoming “coethnographers.” Next, the research is conducted jointly between academics and members of the society. Finally, the data and results are analyzed by the joint team and the reports are coauthored. Lamphire advocates training students to conduct collaborative research of this nature as anthropologists increasingly find themselves employed by nonacademic public and private organizations.

21st-century anthropologists increasingly find themselves involved in policy-making jobs in areas as diverse as libraries and the army. The University of Rochester library hired anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster, under a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to study undergraduates’ term paper research, to steer library renovations, and to make suggestions on the redesign of its Web site. Foster used traditional anthropological research methods to discover that not only are many students extremely uncomfortable with the increasing technological changes that universities are forcing on them but also that they use the libraries to escape from them.

A recent Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter reports that anthropologists increasingly may become involved in work with the military via a program called the Human Terrain System under the Department of Defense (DoD). According to Susan L. Andreatta, president of the SfAA, the DoD wants to employ graduate-level anthropologists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Opinions on this are divided, but one may note that the Society was founded by anthropologists who worked for the war effort in the 1940s.

The anthropologist and senior consultant to the Human Terrain Systems project is Montgomery McFate. William Roberts of St. Mary’s College, Maryland, describes her argument as one in which a military that has greater understanding of indigenous civilians in war zones will reduce loss of life and cultural destruction.

Also, archaeologists may be involved with the military on sensitive issues. As of this writing, archaeologist Laurie Rush serves as a cultural resources manager at the United States Army’s Fort Drum, where she works with the Integrated Training Area Management unit of the DoD’s Legacy Program to develop a consciousness for archaeological treasures. This project arose out of a British Museum report that detailed the construction of a helicopter pad by U.S. Marines on the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon, the destruction of a 2.5-millenniaold brick road, and the filling of sandbags with artifacts. Part of Rush’s program involves building models of archaeological sites, mosques, and cemeteries for soldiers to train to avoid.

Television programs such as Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, and Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) have sparked an international interest in forensics. This, in turn, has led to a student population interested in forensic anthropology. Cable television’s Discovery Health channel has created a true-life version of the CSI phenomenon with its Forensic Files program, which features cases solved by forensic anthropologists, such as Elizabeth Murray of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati who works regularly with law enforcement agencies across the country.

The ABC News and Christian Science Monitor Web sites occasionally report on the applications of forensic science. They describe forensic anthropologists and archaeologists who have been involved in the identification of the remains of the nearly 3,000 victims of the September 11, 2001, attack; Jon Stereberg, a forensic archaeologist, has tried to trace the evidence of 1992 gas attacks in the clothing of victims in the Balkans; and Clyde Collins Snow, a retired forensic archaeologist, has investigated grave sites in Guatemala, Bosnia, and Iraq. Currently, forensic specialists, such as Ariana Fernandez, are examining the bodies of Kurdish people who were found in mass graves and who are believed to have been massacred in a genocide attack during the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

The travel and tourism industry is in dire need of the services of anthropologists, and this is becoming an attractive employment option to anthropology graduates, according to Susan Banks, an anthropologist involved in the travel industry. Too often, tourists will go to exotic locales where they believe that they are seeing the actual types of lives lived in those places, unaware that they are being fed a fabricated culture designed, not to expose them to life in other places, but to screen them from the true ways of life found in those locations. Commonly, tourists are discouraged from visiting local towns and actually learning something about the countries that they have visited. Anthropology can offer a remedy to this problem and provide some much-needed income to the local economies. Exploitation and insensitivity to indigenous people by culturally uninformed tourists does little to change the image of the “ugly American.” Likewise, the international sex trade both exploits and victimizes indigenous peoples and furthers the spread of dangerous diseases, such as HIV/AIDS.

Environmental degradation of local ecologies is another problem of culturally ignorant tourism. For this reason, Susan Charnley, in an article in Human Organization in 2005, suggests a change from nature tourism to ecotourism. She cites the case of Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) in Tanzania. Nature tourism involves traveling to pristine locations where tourists can experience and enjoy nature; ecotourism involves traveling to natural areas that conserve the local ecology while respecting the rights of the local cultures and encouraging sustainable development. Charnley makes the case for the increasingly difficult position of the Massai people since the creation of the NCA and the negative effect it has had on their economy. Charnley argues for culturally appropriate involvement of local people in tourist destinations in ways that will provide actual benefits to their communities. These benefits would include social and political justice and involvement in decision-making processes that directly influence their lives.

A selection of articles from Human Organization from the first decade of the 21st century includes such topics as the administration of federally managed fisheries, including a discussion of the role of James A. Acheson who was the first applied anthropologist hired by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 1974 to conduct policy research and implementation through conservation and stewardship of marine ecosystems.

Another article described the importance of beer parties among Xhosa labor cooperatives on homesteads in South Africa. An article that has to do with changes in gender relations and commercial activities, as the global market expands to countries such as Mali, explores how the outside world can force local peoples to change the structure of their society by giving advantages to one gender over the other when that may not have been the case previously. Another article illustrates what the author of this chapter sees as a parallel between the popular use of family trusts in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and a move from individual land tenure to collective, kinbased ownership on Mokil Atoll in Micronesia, as the region’s political, economic, and demographic transformation has imperiled the rights of absentee owners. By placing the land ownership in the kin group, it is protected from individual alienation.

A 2007 article by Kathryn Forbes is especially topical in the current social, economic, and political climate of the United States today. Forbes’s article examines how the regional land use of ideologies and popular images of farm workers has contributed to a housing crisis for Mexican agricultural laborers in Fresno County, California. Stereotypic descriptions of Mexican farm workers have resulted in the formulation of zoning codes that exacerbate demographic segregation in Fresno County. Most farm workers live in rural areas, which are more economical and more convenient to their sources of income but where there are fewer retail outlets—including groceries. The arrival of seasonal laborers, combined with a lack of affordable housing thanks to local policymakers, has engendered a regional overcrowding crisis for Mexican farm workers. Forbes’s role in this discussion is similar to the review of the roles that anthropology can play in public policy cited by Wilson and Donnan (2006) in Ireland.

Forbes’s article is especially relevant to the United States today as the influx of immigrant labor, thanks in part to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has made the appearance of Hispanic laborers a topic of vituperative discussion on national radio talk shows and political campaigns. This is a point that falls clearly within the purview of social science rather than politics as anthropological demographers and gerontologists clearly can demonstrate that not only does the country require immigrant labor because of statistical “full employment,” but also it needs to save social security from the influx of baby boom retirees.

The bankruptcy of social security was predicted in university classes as long ago as the 1970s. The increase in life spans, coupled with the potentially disastrous demographic effect of a baby boom generation that will retire to be supported by a much smaller (thanks to the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s) birth dearth/baby bust cohort, has the potential to lead to economic disaster for the latter group as their increasing social security taxes erode their quality of life. The baby boom retirees’ social security taxes must be replaced from somewhere—if not by eroding the birth dearth/baby bust cohort’s quality of life, then by an influx of tax contributors, for example, immigrant laborers.

Anthropologists are in a unique position to act as the social partners of policymakers on this issue not only by means of their demographic and gerontological expertise but also by their ethnographic contributions to allay the concerns of the extant non-Hispanic population of the United States over its possible perception of cultural drowning by immersion in a neo-Hispanic society del Norte (“land of the north”).

Likewise, anthropological expertise in indigenous Latin American medical beliefs, such as hot and cold, wet and dry bodily conditions derived from the ancient Mediterranean medical concept of humors where illnesses were believed to be caused by an imbalance of humors; folk illnesses, such as susto (“fright”), a culture bound syndrome found in southern Mexico in which an individual who does not recover from an illness is believed to have had a terrible fright in the past that prevents recovery from the unrelated illness (Rubel, O’Nell, & Collado-Ardon, 1991); and cultural sensitivities to variations in conceptions of sexual modesty and familial responsibilities will form a necessary component in the rapprochement of the two larger cultures although this may be difficult in cases of smaller subcultures.

Other areas for future research in applied anthropology include human trafficking (briefly cited in the discussion of tourism); indigenous rights (e.g., salmon fishing among the native Northwest coast peoples in North America, cattle grazing in the Burren in County Clare, Ireland, or the effects of water control on the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq); anthropometry and gender (in the cultural sense, not the linguistic sense) stereotypes and gender rearing roles; cultural relativism versus cultural interference, including whether or not Muslim women need to be “saved” or if Western hegemonists even have the right to do so; genital mutilation (male as well as female); the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in distributing information and treatment of HIV/AIDS; food waste, diet and health, and body image; intelligent design, globalization and hightech industry; and the role of biology and culture in psychiatric illnesses, to name but a few of the possibilities open to applied research in anthropology.

In an article titled “Making Our Voices Heard—Ethical Dilemmas and Opportunities,” in the November 2007 Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter, Mark Schuller of Vassar College gives a good review of the future of applied research in anthropology. Schuller writes that many anthropologists believe that their contributions are considered marginal and irrelevant and are passed over in policy making based on a review of the leading anthropological journals and newsletters. He argues that applied anthropologists with a holistic viewpoint can inform policymakers regarding the integrated structural correlation among debt and poverty, education, health care, and local welfare via their engagement with local communities. Schuller calls for local, global, and ethical analysis of current concerns to make anthropology applicable in the “real” world. He suggests that a good way to apply anthropology is through teaching; his students investigate public policies and then send letters to the editors of newspapers in order to introduce anthropological viewpoints into current policy discussions.

Schuller has been keyword-searching “anthropology” on Google and reports that he has found at least two stories a day in which anthropologists are interviewed or have authored stories in media outlets. Among the included issues that his students or other anthropologists have written about in daily news publications is the part played by anthropologists in clandestine activities, inequalities of globalization, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) health care bill, the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, No Child Left Behind, prison reform, disclosure of hormone content in milk, Hurricane Katrina “fatigue,” and the cancellation of international debt in impoverished nations of South America.

In the same issue, Amanda Stronza of Texas A&M University describes a new program in applied biodiversity science, which also will tackle poverty and cultural inequality. The interdisciplinary research program integrates cooperation between social and biological sciences and conservation organizations at the applied level. Research topics are to incorporate biodiversity with local legislative policy in partnership among academia, governments, NGOs, and local societies in four regions of the Americas.

This research paper has explored the subject of applied anthropology. It was done from a historical perspective in order to gain a processual understanding of how it arrived at the state in which it is found in early 21st-century anthropology.

A brief definition of applied anthropology was followed by a review of the origins of applied anthropology in the 19th century and a history of the field through World War II, the Fox Project, the Peru Vicos Project, and Project Camelot. The section on the later 20th century led into applied anthropology today and topics for future research.

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