Action Anthropology

Action anthropology is a scholarly enterprise based in field research, data collection, and theory building, during which the anthropologist is also committed to assisting local communities in achieving their goals and meeting specific felt needs. Rather than pursuing pure science or perusing their own agendas, action anthropologists see themselves more as tentative coexplorers who help the host community to identify challenges and seek ways to meet them. In the process, action anthropologists contribute to the community while learning from their experiences. While applied anthropology generally focuses on programmatic concerns of nonlocal funders, both public and private, action anthropology discovers local concerns in the course of ethnographic work and engages local resources in addressing them. Though related to applied anthropology, which began in Great Britain in the1920s and the United States in the 1930s and which shares the goal of being a useful rather than purely scholarly field, action anthropology takes a more populist approach. The anthropologist must be committed to assisting the host community by serving as an educator and a resource, not as a source of money or expertise. Mutually agreed-upon plans for action arise from knowledge gained by fieldwork and the reception of knowledge by the host group.

Primarily derived from research with Native American communities, action anthropology was a product of and sustained by the personal dynamism of anthropologist Sol Tax (1907–1995). Anthropology has, from its inception, been more than disinterested research and data collection. E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) described anthropology as a reformer's science. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881)advocated against Iroquois removal. Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) publicly excoriated British colonial policy, and James Mooney of the Bureau of American Ethnology critiqued the federal government as part of the cause of Plains Indians' social and economic problems in the 1880s. Nevertheless, it was many decades before anthropologists came to the idea that host individuals in the field were colleagues rather than “informants” or to the belief that the relationship between fieldworker and host community was one of mutual help and reciprocity rather than simply scholar and subject population. Also, action anthropologists are participants as well as participant observers, both objectively learning from outside and eventually entering the fray when and where appropriate. Though not without good intentions, early anthropology simply suggested solutions for Native peoples, anathema to action anthropologists. Action anthropology facilitates what is now referred to as community-based needs assessment.

Tax articulated his own understanding of action anthropology in 1975. He stressed professional tolerance for ambiguity in action anthropology, as its methodology was tentative and contextual, much like the clinical situation of a physician interacting with a patient. He cautioned that this process was not social work; theory building and understanding remained paramount but should never be separated from assisting communities with their specific difficulties. Local people must make their own decisions and identify their own problems and target the specific situations they wish to address. Tax stressed three values in carrying out action anthropology: the value of truth couched in science and scholarship, the value of freedom of communities to make their own decisions, and the value of focusing on only the specific task at hand rather than attempting to change total situations.

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