Anthropology, Practicing

Historical Context

In 1941, Margaret Mead, Eliot Chapple, and others founded the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) in response to the growth of applied anthropology, which the SfAA defines as the application of anthropological perspectives through interdisciplinary scientific investigation of human relationships for solving practical problems. Originally a part of American Anthropological Association (AAA),SfAA became a separate entity to avoid traditional anthropology's undercurrent of bias against applied or practicing anthropology. By the 1950s, applied anthropology was generally regarded as an academic, research-based subfield of cultural anthropology intended to inform policy, program administration, intervention, and development. Practicing anthropology, conversely, did not burgeon until the 1970s, spurred by an extreme shortage in academic positions in the United States, and by recognition of the potential for anthropologists beyond basic research in applying anthropological knowledge to help solve humans' critical problems as practitioners of anthropology.

The National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) was created in 1983 as a section of the AAA in acknowledgement of the growth of the practicing field. NAPA membership currently exceeds700, and NAPA supports practicing anthropologists in public and private sectors, as well as those affiliated with academic institutions, whether or not in anthropology departments. It also promotes practice-oriented work by publishing the NAPA Bulletin and practitioner directories, sponsoring professional mentoring, networking opportunities, workshops, and interest groups around common themes, and assisting in the establishment of local practitioner organizations (LPOs) across the United States. Current LPOs include the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists (founded in 1976), the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology (founded in 1980), the Mid-South Association of Professional Anthropologists (founded in 1983), and the Southern California Applied Anthropology Network (founded in1984). These associations have successfully advanced the position of nonacademic practitioners within the discipline and professionally as witnessed in the AAA's moving toward creating a new category for those members employed by organizations that would be similar to accommodations granted academic departments.

The actual term practicing anthropologist was not in common use until the appearance of the SfAA's journalPracticing Anthropology (PA) in 1978, a publication originally intended for individuals with nonacademic employment. Eventually PA sought to establish practicing as part of the anthropology discipline and to bridge the gap between practicing in nonacademic and academic settings. It is still debatable as to whether there is a difference between applied and practicing anthropology, since both employ anthropological means to study societal, organizational, or programmatic issues, and to help facilitate change by influencing policy and practice. Shirley Fiske considers practicing as virtually interchangeable with applied in that both serve as testing grounds for theory of traditional anthropology subfields. Others contend that practicing is broader than applied because it incorporates all nonacademic anthropological work, not only the policy research of applied significance. Still others make a distinction between the two by describing the applied work of those employed in business and agencies as practicing and similar work of academically employed asapplied. Robert Hinshaw views practicing as primarily separated from applied by being collaborative, while Erve Chambers relegates practicing to an element of applied, distinct only in its explicit intent to make anthropology useful through collaborative inquiry, knowledge transfer, and decision making.

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