applying anthropology chp.3
TRANSCRIPT
Soc 111 INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY
APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY
APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY
• How can change be bad?
• How can anthropology be applied to
medicine, education, and business?
• How can the study of
anthropology fit into a career path?
• How can change be bad? The Coca Cola
example.
• Applied anthropologists help determine
whether change is needed and how it will
work.
• Innovation succeeds best when it is
culturally appropriate. McDonald’s,
Starbucks and Ford have learned that
fitting is more profitable than trying to
Americanize local habits.
The Role of the
Applied Anthropologist
• Applied anthropology: One
of two dimensions of anthropology;
use of anthropological data, perspectives,
theory, and techniques
to identify, assess, and solve
contemporary social problems
involving human behavior and
social and cultural forces,
conditions, and contexts.
Early Applications
• Application was central concern of early
anthropology in Great Britain (colonialism)
and U.S.(Native American policy).
– Academic anthropology
grew most after World War II.
– During the 1970s, some anthropologists found
jobs with international organizations, government, business, hospitals, and schools
Applied Anthropology Today
• Modern anthropology is usually seen as a helping profession. Removed from thecolonial perspective.
• Applied anthropologists use ethnographictechniques in both foreign and domesticsettings while living with and learning fromlocal people.
• Anthropology’s holistic perspective (biology, society, culture and language) permitsevaluation of many issues that affect people.
Roles for applied anthropologists
• Identifying needs for change that local people
perceive.
• Working with those people to design
culturally appropriate and socially sensitive
change.
• Protecting local people from harmful policies
and projects that may threaten them.
• Helping a community preserve its culture in
the face of threat and disaster.
Development Anthropology
• Development anthropology: Branch of applied anthropology that focuses on social issues in, and the cultural dimension of, economic development. It also plansand guides policy.
Ethical dilemmas often confront development anthropologists. Foreign aid usually doesn’t gowhere it’s most needed but is spent on political,
economic and strategic priorities based on maximizing interest.
Development Anthropology
• Commonly stated goal of recent development policy is to promote equity
– Increasing equity: results in reduced poverty and a more even distribution of wealth.
– However, wealthy and powerful people oftenresist projects that threaten their vestedinterest.
– Negative equity impact is generated whenwealth disparities are widened. (irrigation, fisheries)
Strategies for Innovation
• Development anthropology can help sort the needs of people and fit projects accordingly.
• To maximize social and economic benefits, projects must: 1.be culturally compatible
2.Respond to locally perceived needs
3.İnvolve men and women in planning
4.Harness traditional organizations.
5.Be flexible.
Strategies for Innovation
• Avoid overinnovation: trying to achieve toomuch change• Projects that fail are usually ones that are
economically and culturally incompatible.
• Avoid underdifferentiation: the tendency
to view the so-called less-developed countries
as being more alike than they are.
• Neglecting cultural diversity and adopting a
uniform approach to deal with deifferent sets of
people.
Indigenous Models
• In some nations, governments acts as an agent of the people.
– Madagascar and Malagasy
– “Descent groups” organized before the origin of the state
– Descent group is a kin group composed of peoplewhose social solidarity is based on their belief thatthey share common ancestry. It proved preadapted toequitable national development.
Urban Anthropology
• Urban anthropology: the cross-cultural
and ethnographic and biocultural study of
global urbanization and life in cities
– Proportion of world’s population
living in cities has increased
since the Industrial Revolution
– UN estimates that about one-
sixth of the earth’s population
live in urban slums
Urban Anthropology
• Urban Versus Rural
– Robert Redfield: focused on
contrasts between rural
and urban contexts in 1940s
• Urban (impersonality) and rural (face-
to-face relations) represent different
social systems.
• Applying anthropology to urban
planning starts by identifying the key
social groups in the urban context
Urban Anthropology
• Cities are centers through which culturalinnovations spread to rural and tribal areas.
• Migrants bring rural practices and beliefs tocities and take urban patterns back home.
• One role for urban anthropology is to helprelevant social groups deal with urban institutions, such as legal and social servicesthat they might be unfamiliar with.
• Traffic lights and crossing the streets(Diyarbakır)
Medical Anthropology
• Medical anthropology: comparative,
biocultural study of disease, health
problems, and health care systems
– Examines which diseases and
health conditions affect a
particular population, and why
– Determines how illness is socially
constructed, diagnosed, managed,
and treated in various societies
Medical Anthropology
• Disease: a scientifically identified health
threat caused by a bacterium, virus,
fungus, parasite, or other pathogen
• Illness: a condition of poor health perceived or felt by an individual
– Various ethnic groups and cultures recognize different illnesses, symptoms, and causes and have developed different health care systems and treatment strategies for them.
How can applied anthropologists help to improve the large health disparity between indigenous people and
other populations?
1. Identifying the most pressing health problems that indigenous communities face
2. Gather information on solutions to those problems
3. Implement solutions in partnership with the agencies and organizations that are in charge of public health programmes for indigenous populations.
Medical Anthropology
• Health care systems: beliefs,
customs, and specialists concerned
with preventing and curing illness– Personalistic disease theories:
illness caused by sorcerers, witches, ghosts, or ancestral spirits
– Naturalistic disease theories: illness explained in impersonal terms
– Emotionalistic disease theories: assume that emotional experiences cause illness (e.g., susto)
• Health problems in industrial nationsare caused as much by economic, social, political and cultural factors as pathogens.
• Modern stressors such as pollution, poor nutrition, dangerous machinery, isolation, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse.
Anthropology and Business
• Anthropologists may acquire a unique
perspective on organizational conditions
and problems.
–Ethnography and observation
–Cross-cultural expertise
–Focus on cultural diversity
APPLYING ANTHROPOLOGY
• Anthropology’s breadth provides knowledge and an outlook on the world that are useful in many kinds of work
• Knowledge about the traditions and beliefs of many social groups within a modern nation is important in planning and carrying out programs that affect those groups.