What Anthropologists Do

Veronica Strang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000182385
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Why should you study anthropology? How will it enable you to understand human behaviour? And what will you learn that will equip you to enter working life?

This book describes what studying anthropology actually means in practice, and explores the many career options available to those trained in anthropology. Anthropology gets under the surface of social and cultural diversity to understand people's beliefs and values, and how these guide the different lifeways that these create. This accessible book presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and conceptual frameworks can be employed in a very wide range of fields, from environmental concerns to human rights, through business, social policy, museums and marketing. This updated edition includes an additional chapter on anthropology and interdisciplinarity.

This is an essential primer for undergraduates studying introductory courses to anthropology, and any reader who wants to know what anthropology is about.

1 Anthropology and Advocacy

Balancing acts

A lot of the work that anthropologists do involves acting as cultural translators: creating bridges between societies or social groups who have different worldviews. Being able to understand various points of view, and translate ideas in a non-judgemental way, is a key aspect of the training that they receive, and this rests on a combination of rigorous in-depth research and a theoretical framework that enables them to step back and consider situations analytically. In many situations, having a ‘neutral’ but empathetic outsider, who has taken the trouble to gain insights into the complexities of people’s lives, can greatly assist cross-cultural interactions. Scientific neutrality can be particularly important in legal contexts, where courts or tribunals depend on the testimony of ‘disinterested’ expert witnesses to present evidence, but there are many situations in which cultural beliefs, values and practices clash, and tensions arise. For example, the translatory skills of anthropologists may be used in conflicts between religious groups; in quarrels between managers and workforces; in defusing racial or ethnic hostilities; in mediating between organisations competing for the control of heritage sites and national parks; or in facilitating communication between local groups and government agencies.

For some practitioners, advocacy is a logical extension of long-term working relationships with host communities. It is, after all, virtually impossible to work closely with people and not develop some sympathy for their concerns. Even in the early 1900s, when Bronislaw Malinowski first established in-depth fieldwork as a core anthropological method, he suggested that ‘as a scientific moralist fully in sympathy with races hereto oppressed or at least underprivileged, the anthropologist would demand equal treatment for all, full cultural independence for every differential group or nation’ (Hedican 2008: 60). Malinowski presented evidence to the Australian government about the labour conditions people were experiencing in the western Pacific, and criticised colonial administrations for appropriating the land of indigenous people and disregarding their customary practices. ‘Malinowski thereby laid the foundation for an advocacy role in anthropology very early on in the history of the discipline’ (Hedican 2008: 60).

It is almost inevitable that sustained contact with a given people will involve the ethnographer in disputes emerging from the contradictions between ethnic, regional, national and international interests … The profession’s commitment to the non-academic world, is especially evident in the context of indigenous human rights … Countries such as Australia, Canada, Brazil, and most of Hispanic America have conferred a great deal of weight on the work of ethnographers. Both the State and the public at large, credit these professionals for their anthropological knowledge but, perhaps more explicitly, for the kind of complicity bred between researchers and research subjects, a complicity that comes from sharing the vicissitudes met by indigenous people in their interethnic lives.

(Ramos 2004: 57–8)

Anthropologists have always had to make delicate judgements about where to position themselves on a continuum between striving for as much scientific ‘impartiality’ as can be achieved (recognising that all scientific activity contains value choices), and taking up a more partisan role as ‘active agents of change’ (Kellett 2009: 23). There has been much debate in the discipline about how relationships with host communities and other research users should be constructed, and about the potential for direct advocacy to undermine perceptually objective scientific ‘authority’, which is, in its own way, highly effective in assisting people.

The ethics of working with people, whoever and wherever they are, require researchers at the very least to ‘do no harm’ to them. As noted in the introduction, many anthropologists think this ought to go further, believing that research should not be a one-way street that merely benefits the funding agency or the social scientist, but should entail a reciprocal relationship also beneficial to the group concerned. This ‘benefit’ may lie in the usefulness of the research, rather than in direct advocacy, but the principle of reciprocity is now well-embedded in the ethical codes that guide the discipline and much contemporary anthropological research is based on principles of partnership with host communities.

Meeting modern Maya

Richard Wilk

I really wanted to be an archaeologist, to dig up ancient Mayan cities and find out why their civilisation fell apart, and I was lucky enough to get a volunteer position on an archaeological project in northern Belize (then called British Honduras) while I was still an undergraduate. I got to live my dream, but over time I realised that the Maya had never gone away – I was meeting them every day, since our project employed many of them. Eventually they convinced me that I could do a lot more good in the world by helping them out of poverty, than I ever could by digging up their ancestors. I switched to cultural anthropology and went to southern Belize to do my dissertation research in the small Mayan villages scattered through the rain forest in the southern part of the country. I spent a year living in different villages, learning the language and getting to understand how they made a living from a fragile environment, and how they were coping with the growing pressures of modern life, consumer culture and economic change.

One thing anthropologists don’t always talk about is that we usually disrupt people’s lives. We are constantly asking questions, sticking our noses into private business and taking people’s time and energy, and when we try to help with chores and tasks we are usually pretty worthless. Using a machete, I was usually more danger to the people around me than to the trees and brush we were trying to cut. So we ring up a lot of debt, and this leaves us feeling obligated to give something back, to help in any way we can. The more you get to know people, the more you share their problems and hopes, and you feel the same way towards them that you do towards any other friends in need.

I wrote a long dissertation and later a book about how village life was changing and their culture was adapting and I thought my work could help the government and development organisations who were planning projects to bring better healthcare, water, sanitation and education to what was the poorest and most isolated part of the country. A few years later I was hired by some of those development organisations to go back to Belize, and I was able to use what I had learned to pay back some debts. I was able to get USAID to fix their roads and put up new bridges so people could get in and out of the villages during the rainy season. I worked on scholarship programmes and projects that drilled wells to bring clean water to villages, and I helped start a project to get Maya farmers to grow more cacao – which turned out to be a big success. Today you can buy organic Fairtrade chocolate bars all over the USA and Europe made from their beans.

But sometimes things that seemed like small issues at one time turn out to be really important much later. When I was doing my dissertation research most of the villages had no legal titles or claims to the land they lived on and farmed. Working in the archives, I found that in the early 1900s the British authorities had set up ‘reservations’ for most villages, but they had never marked the boundaries, and the land legally remained government property. At the time the government was pretty much leaving people alone, so the question of land rights just took a few pages of my book. But by the end of the 20th century, oil prospectors and loggers were driving roads right through the villages and cutting down huge swaths of forest which the villages depended on to feed their families. The government started to sell big tracts of land to foreign companies that wanted to grow bananas, farm shrimp or set up jungle resorts for ecotourists. Some land was even taken a way to set up nature preserves and parks. The Maya people started to see their way of life slipping away and in 1995 they asked the Belize government to give them legal title to their lands, so they could make their own decisions about how it could be used and the forest could be sustained. They hired lawyers with help from the Indigenous Peoples Law & Policy Program at the University of Arizona. The government refused, claiming that these Maya people were immigrants from neighbouring Guatemala, and were not truly indigenous people, so they had no right to the land. I joined a team of archaeologists and anthropologists writing affidavits in support of the Mayan position that they were indigenous people, and explaining how they used the forest in a sustainable way that maintained their traditions and culture. More than 30 villages eventually joined the lawsuit.

Figure 1.1 The late Santiago Pop, who was then eight years old, in 1979. Photograph: Richard Wilk.

Figure 1.2 The late Ma’ Teul, a resident of Aguacate village in Belize. Photograph: Richard Wilk.

This story is not over. It took years to move the case through the court system and I testified twice before the Belize Supreme Court and the Belize court of appeals. We won each case, but the government kept fighting as the dispute went to the Organization of American States and the Caribbean court of appeals, which finally ordered the government to start granting land titles in 2014, but as of this writing, no villages have received legal titles and new disputes over the location and control of roads, dams, boundaries and archaeological sites keep coming up. The process continues and I continue to work with other anthropologists and Maya communities to find ways to improve their way of life without losing the language and culture they value so highly.

In reality, every anthropologist has to decide how best to do rigorous and useful research, while also meeting ethical and moral imperatives. Anthropologists are not just social scientists – they are also individuals with their own values and political beliefs, and they have often chosen to do this kind of work because they feel that it can make a difference. ‘Advocacy, in its choice of an issue, is often highly charged and personal’ (Ervin 2005: 151). Anthropology therefore enables its practitioners not only to follow their intellectual curiosity about why people do what they do, and produce research that reveals this in scientific terms, but also to act upon issues that they care about, and to help the communities in which they work.

In becoming involved in people’s lives, anthropologists perform many kinds of community service, and this can be very informal. For example, Mitzi Goheen, who has worked with the Nso’ community in western Cameroon so extensively that they gave her a local title, not only directs a local lending organisation, providing small loans to women to enable them to become players in the local economy, she

often puts her topical and geographical expertise to practical use in serving the people among whom she lives and works … She is godmother to a Cameroonian child, helps young men of the community negotiate bridewealth payments, and maintains a fund at the local Baptist mission hospital to pay her friends’ medical bills … She also helps villagers make hospital care decisions – and often transports them to the hospital as well.

(Gwynne 2003: 144)

These kinds of activities are common: anthropologists in the field typically try to make themselves useful in whatever way seems to fit. In this sense, the concept of anthropology as ‘community service’ underpins a lot of the work described in this book.

Human rights

Ethnographic methods lend themselves to understanding the complex dynamics of human rights issues (Merry 2017), and anthropologists have long been active as researchers and advocates in such areas, including the most fundamental rights to safety, and to sufficient food and water (Nagengast and Vélez-Ibáñez 2004) and issues such as informed consent, cultural heritage and civil rights (Fariña 2012).

Attention to human rights also focuses on the safety of women and children. Anthropologists have done important work, for example, on controversies about dowries in India (Basu 2015, Kellett 2016), sex trafficking (Merry 2016), and violence against women (Østebø 2010). Penny Van Esterik has long been active in the controversy surrounding corporations selling baby formula as a substitute for breast milk in ‘Third World’ countries (Van Esterik and O’Connor 2017). This controversy flared up in the 1970s and 1980s, when Nestlé found its market share in Western nations diminishing alongside research indicating the capacity for breast-feeding to improve immunity. There were major protests when it tried to open new markets in countries where the lack of clean water and facilities for boiling water sufficiently, as well as a lack of funds, made it a significant health risk. Penny Van Esterik became a passionate advocate against this exploitation of poorer communities, and she argues that there are compelling reasons to participate in advocacy causes. The breast-or-bottle controversy that she dealt with had a lot at stake: children’s health and levels of infant mortality; the relationships between mother and child; processes of social change; people’s capacities to adapt; and a critical issue concerned with the power of nation-states and international corporations. The matter has now been further complicated by issues surrounding HIV transmission (Van Esterik 2020). As Ervin points out:

Scientific knowledge, as provided by anthropologists and others, is valuable for these battles. A series of expert testimonies can be provided, sometimes for court cases, sometimes as part of public relations campaigns through the media or as preparation for public debates.

(2005: 153)

Controversies about the selling of unsuitable or substandard goods in poorer countries have grown since the Nestlé issue, as have concerns about the commercial exploitation of disempowered groups. In the last decade, there has been growing disquiet about the social and ecological costs of globalisation, and anthropologists are interested in it both as analysts of social movements, and as advocates for g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Anthropology and Advocacy
• 2. Anthropology and Aid
• 3. Anthropology and Development
• 4. Anthropology and the Environment
• 5. Anthropology and Governance
• 6. Anthropology, Business and Industry
• 7. Anthropology and Health
• 8. Anthropology and Identity
• 9. Anthropology and the Arts
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Appendix 1: Studying Anthropology
• Appendix 2: Suggestions for Further Reading
• Appendix 3
• Bibliography
• Index