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1. Soc 111
INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY
APPLYING
ANTHROPOLOGY

2. 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?

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

4. • 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.

5. 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.

6. 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

7. Applied Anthropology Today
• Modern anthropology is usually seen as a
helping profession. Removed from the
colonial perspective.
• Applied anthropologists use ethnographic
techniques in both foreign and domestic
settings while living with and learning from
local people.
• Anthropology’s holistic perspective (biology,
society, culture and language) permits
evaluation of many issues that affect people.

8. 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.

9. Development Anthropology
• Development anthropology: Branch of
applied anthropology that focuses on
social issues in, and the cultural dimension
of, economic development. It also plans
and guides policy.
Ethical dilemmas often confront development
anthropologists. Foreign aid usually doesn’t go
where it’s most needed but is spent on political,
economic and strategic priorities based on
maximizing interest.

10. 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 often
resist projects that threaten their vested
interest.
– Negative equity impact is generated when
wealth disparities are widened. (irrigation,
fisheries)

11. 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.

12. Strategies for Innovation
• Avoid overinnovation: trying to achieve too
much 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.

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

14. 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

15. 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

16. Urban Anthropology
• Cities are centers through which cultural
innovations spread to rural and tribal areas.
• Migrants bring rural practices and beliefs to
cities and take urban patterns back home.
• One role for urban anthropology is to help
relevant social groups deal with urban
institutions, such as legal and social services
that they might be unfamiliar with.
• Traffic lights and crossing the streets
(Diyarbakır)

17. 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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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)

21. • Health problems in industrial nations
are caused as much by economic,
social, political and cultural factors as
pathogens.
• Modern stressors such as pollution,
poor nutrition, dangerous machinery,
isolation, poverty, homelessness,
substance abuse.

22. Anthropology and Business
• Anthropologists may acquire a unique
perspective on organizational conditions
and problems.
– Ethnography and observation
– Cross-cultural expertise
– Focus on cultural diversity

23. 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.