Anthropology and Advocacy

If you aren't already following the Anthropological Association of America's articles on Huffington Post, you should. After some of the claims made by people like Florida's governor Rick Scott that anthropology is a useless major, the AAA realized we as a discipline had an image problem. Too often people think of anthropology as just a discipline of naval gazing or experts on obscure rites and tiny villages. At most people think anthropology is interesting, but they don't see the relevance to our everyday lives or why they shouldn't sigh when their child decides to major in it. So the AAA began recruiting anthropologists to write straight forward accessible pieces about anthropology or about other topics from the perspective of anthropologists.

The most recent piece is about the role of anthropology and advocacy. Periodically, on blogs, forums, and in news articles the debate about whether anthropologists can be both scientific and advocates arises. It always struck me as an odd debate since there are advocates in many other disciplines that do not seem to draw the same kinds of questions to their legitimacy as scientists. Economists write books about how to fix the economy, biologists raise money and awareness for the protection of endangered species, and nutritionists give suggestions for how to fix school lunches. So why are anthropologists vilified when they also use their expertise to suggest improvements and changes? I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that anthropology is a hybrid discipline with no clear foot in any arena since in our quest to answer why humans do the things they do we have to draw upon almost every other discipline. That ambiguity leads to methods and arguments that do not always fall squarely in the obviously science realm. And I think our unfortunate past as advocates for racism and colonialism still haunts the discipline. If we stay safely tucked away inside the ivory tower no one can accuse us of slipping back into that.

However, as the piece points out, anthropologists have been advocates for a long time. A great example they use is that of race. Biological and cultural anthropologists have shown that race is not a biological reality but merely a cultural construct (but it is still a serious cultural reality). Realizing what a heated and problematic issue race still is in our society, the AAA has created some really great and accessible resources to teach the public about it. This doesn't lessen the scientific validity of work anthropologists do. Rather, using genetics, history, and great ethnographic examples they use science to prove a point. I think it powerfully reveals what anthropology is capable of as well. We do not approach issues from just one perspective, but instead employ a range of methods and viewpoints to get a holistic understanding. And if all those viewpoints - genetics, cross-cultural examples, and historical accounts - point to the same thing your argument is much stronger.