The Search for Relevance

A Brief History of Applied Anthropology1

Bibliographic Data

ID2155898
AuthorsPaul Sillitoe (Durham University, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume17
Issue1
Pages1-19
Publication date2006-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0275-7206 • E-ISSN: 1477-2612
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02757200500501066
OpenAlexW2093812667
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited47

There are increasing calls for reviewing the relevance of anthropology in the current political-economic climate with market-led changes occurring in higher education in the United Kingdom. In some regards, these changes represent a move back to previous funding arrangements, when anthropology was obliged to go through recurrent rounds of arguing its relevance to secure resources. Why, after several generations, does practicality remain a troublesome issue and anthropology not have a flourishing applied tradition? The discipline's history reveals that a concern for demonstrating its applicability has troubled it since its inception. This article asks what one may have to learn from how the discipline's ancestors went about demonstrating its usefulness on the grounds that a review of previous attempts to define a practical anthropology may help pinpoint some of the key issues that need to be addressed in order to establish a long-overdue thriving applied anthropology. Keywords: Applied AnthropologyColonialismDevelopmentAcademia Notes [1] A version of this article was presented at Eliot College, University of Kent as the 2005 Paul Stirling Memorial Lecture. [2] This article started out as a global review of applied anthropology, but this soon proved too ambitious. While anthropologists with interests in applied issues have taken longer to organize themselves in the United Kingdom than in the United States, the history of applied anthropology is similar in both countries, albeit involvement with First Nations' problems in the United States substituted for the early Colonial Empire experiences in Europe. Today's concerns with development issues are indistinguishable (see Foster, 1969 Foster, G. 1969. Applied Anthropology, Boston, MA: Little, Brown. [Google Scholar]: 196-212; Eddy & Partridge, 1978 Eddy, E.M. and Partridge, W.L., eds. 1978. Applied Anthropology in America, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]; Stewart, 1983 Stewart, O.C. 1983. "Historical notes about applied anthropology in the United States". Human Organization, 42(3): 189-194. [Google Scholar]; Van Willigen, 1986 Van Willigen, J. 1986. Applied Anthropology: An Introduction, South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. [Google Scholar]: 20-38; Ervin, 2000 Ervin, A.M. 2000. Applied Anthropology: Tools and Perspectives for Contemporary Practice, Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. [Google Scholar]: 14-26). [3] Goody (1995 Goody, J. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1919-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]: 43) notes Evans-Pritchard's ambivalent attitudes, although he comments that his advice to him was "keep right away from the administration", but further on he cites correspondence with Fortes during 1937 in which Evans-Pritchard claimed that he rated the work of government anthropologists above professional anthropologists, which Goody (1995 Goody, J. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1919-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]: 75) thinks typical hyperbole. [4] See Leach (1984 Leach, E.R. 1984. "Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British anthropology". Annual Review of Anthropology, 13: 1-23. [Crossref], [Web of Science (R)] , [Google Scholar]) who, towards the end of his life, further intimated at, rather than discussed, the issue of class in British social anthropology. [5] In the same paper, Evans-Pritchard (1946 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1946. "Applied anthropology". Africa, 16: 92-98. [Google Scholar]: 95) further comments on the issue of employability that: "It is unfair, unwise and unworkable to launch a student on research unless there is a reasonable chance that he will be able to make a living when he has completed it." And 25 years later, Cochrane (1971b Cochrane, G. 1971b. Development Anthropology, Oxford University Press: New York. [Google Scholar]: 31) notes that for those with anthropological training "virtually no avenues of employment are open to them which would utilize their specialist knowledge". Both are topical observations given the state of postgraduate employment. [6] See Goody (1995 Goody, J. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1919-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]) for a blow-by-blow account of the foundation of the International African Institute and the role of the Rockefeller Foundation. [7] Goody (1995 Goody, J. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1919-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]: 72-73) cites examples of Evans-Pritchard's antipathy to applied anthropology. In a letter to Fortes in 1944, Evans-Pritchard writes contemptuously of Malinowski leading "the pack on the bunny-scent of applied anthropology" and again in 1945 he comments that: "It is very amusing how all these people are engaged in competitive business, to wit, the sale of anthropologists to Governments. 'We have the best anthropologists, you want them'." He referred to it as an "amusing racket", but goes on that he thinks it "disastrous to anthropology. Everyone is advising governments. ... No one is doing any real anthropological work-all are clinging to the Colonial Office coach. ... It shows an attitude of mind and is I think fundamentally a moral deterioration. These people will not see that there is an unbridgeable chasm between serious anthropology and Administration Welfare work." [8] See Goody (1995 Goody, J. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1919-1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]: 195) for a challenge to the idea that anthropologists worked with colonial governments, arguing that many were left-leaning intellectuals who saw themselves supporting independence movements, especially after the Second World War

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