Suchergebnisse

The application of anthropology is attracting increasing attention, where once it was thought at best a dubious enterprise. The resurgence of applied anthropology reflects the discipline's broad spread, with persons seeking applications in an array of areas. In this article I reflect on some contentious issues that I have encountered in trying to take up the challenge of applying anthropology, notably in the context of 'indigenous knowledge' in development inquiries, issues that demand attention to take this work forwards. A brief historical review suggests that a failure to deal with these arguably hindered previous attempts to establish an applied anthropology. They include definition of the subject we seek to apply, the implications of interdisciplinarity for the social sciences, and the matter of expert status. Other considerations concern giving ethnographic methods an applicable edge, engaging, for example, with the challenging demands of participatory research. I outline five ways to envisage applying anthropology: facilitating others' exploitation of exogenous know‐how; using knowledge of local understanding to further development; transferring people's learning and practices cross‐culturally; seeking ways to assist market use of knowledge; and finally radical ethno‐criticism of development. They all present us with challenges. And signal interesting times for anthropology.

Growing concerns about anthropology's impact in both academia and the broader social arena have led to calls for more "public" and more relevant anthropology. In this article, we expand on these exhortations, by calling for systematic joining of critical social theory with application and pragmatic engagement with contemporary problems. We argue for the repositioning of applied anthropology as a vital component of the broader discipline and suggest that it should serve as a framework for constructing a more engaged anthropology. In revisiting disciplinary history and critiques of applied anthropology, we demonstrate the central role that application has played throughout anthropology's evolution, address common misconceptions that serve as barriers to disciplinary integration, examine the role of advocacy in relation to greater engagement as well as the relationship of theory to practice, and conclude with an assessment of the diverse work that is subsumed under the inclusive rubric of "anthropology in use."

Through a detailed case study of investigations on beauty, I demonstrate that a thoughtful consideration of empirical evidence can lead to the disclosure of the fundamental assumptions entrenched in a philosophical discipline. I present a contrastive examination of two empirically oriented approaches to art and beauty, namely, the anthropology of art and the anthropology of aesthetics. To capture these two different ways of interpreting the available evidence, I draw upon a debate between Alfred Gell and Jeremy Coote on the understanding of beauty and art in the Dinka community. Following Gell, I reveal that the Western-centric predilection of Coote, who uses traditional aesthetic categories, leads to his failure to grasp the functional and causal roles of beauty in the social relations of the Dinka. In more general terms, my study reveals the inherent limitations of aesthetics as developed in the Western tradition and its Kantian legacy. Being steadily driven towards purely abstract and speculative concepts, such as 'work of art,' Western aesthetics has lost the ability to account for the causal role of beauty in social relations. By contrasting this approach with Gell's anthropological approach to art, I indicate those fundamental assumptions of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline that apparently confine it to a particular cultural context, compromising its ability to account for the universal human condition. As my study illustrates, this limitation could be overcome by a thoughtful and unprejudiced examination of empirical evidence.