Public Anthropology

Anthropology may not be what you think it is. The term "anthropology" often causes people to pause: what is it exactly that anthropologists do? Romantic views of anthropologists as studying "lost" civilizations, esoteric rituals, and tribal peoples inadequately describe the discipline and what it has to offer. Contemporary anthropology is about the whole of human life, society, and cultureabout stories and communities, problems and practices, the cultural logics and state structures that frame people's everyday lives, and the myriad and cultural means by which people make their way in the world. It is as much conducted in urban locales as in rural ones, as familiar with analyzing advertising agencies as village communities, and insistent on analyzing the esoteric alongside the everyday. Anthropology explains culture, meaning, and practice in the past and the present, including a reckoning with the discipline's own history. Our past connections to colonial projects and to state institutions implicate anthropology in creating and reifying the very cultural categories we now so humbly yet urgently work to understand and to implode. This special double issue of India Review is very much about that implosion-about how to use and think anthropology as a project for addressing inequity. Social inequities, economic inequities, educational, political, and categorical ones, and hierarchies of gender, nation, caste, and class all fall within the anthropological domain. What might anthropology bring to the communities within which and with whom we work? If anthropology is not to be a solely extractive enterprise, but an ethnographic one in the spirit of exchange, then we suggest it must be an engaged endeavor. 4 It must to some degree be a public project. Yet what happens when we preface anthropology with "public?" Why might public anthropology be worth pursuing now? And why worth pursuing in India? In this special issue, we try to capture the energy of current anthropological work in India. This is thus 256 India Review not a survey of all public anthropology in India (or applied or activist work more generally), 5 but a glimpse into how some archaeologists and cultural anthropologists are practicing and envisioning public anthropology.

Anthropology Today 29 (6), 2013

India Review, 2006

Sindre Bangstad, Irfan Ahmad, John R. Bowen, Ilana Feldmman, Angelique Haugerud, David H. Price, Richard Ashby Wilson, Mayanthi L. Fernando, discuss what it means to do public anthropology in different contexts.

Human Rights and Human Welfare, 2006

Extended review essay reviewing Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (Besteman and Gusterson); Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power (Gonzalez); and Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Price)

Guest editorial in the Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society, 2024

During the last two decades a group of anthropologists in USA and Great Britain have been trying to develop a kind of anthropology, which they designated as 'Public Anthropology', Public Anthropology is an important subject not only for the Europeans and Americans but also for the Indians and particularly for the ordinary citizens. Why this is so? Because, the subject is no less important than History and Geography and it should be taught from the high school level. Hence, there is an urgent need for making Anthropology visible in all spheres of public life. Apart from technical pieces, anthropologists have engaged themselves in popular writings on public issues in the form of books, newspaper articles, blogs, and social media posts, and they are reaching the public domain outside the academia. This is because of the fact that anthropology is a unique subject, which looks at human beings from a bio-cultural perspective. Unlike other social science subjects, for example, History, Economics, Geography and Political Science, Anthropology uses a special method to look at human societies and cultures, which anthropologists call fieldwork with participant observation. Put very simply, being humans, anthropologists are observers of human beings in groups but not under controlled situations as in the Physical and Biological Sciences.. The popular maxim, sometime used in anthropology textbooks: 'Field is the laboratory of anthropology' is not true. There is no laboratory for the anthropologists, only behaviour of human beings as it occurs in societies. A subject like anthropology, which I have described above, has immense public importance in India, which is full of biological and societal diversities interacting in both cooperative and conflicting manner throughout the centuries.

American Anthropologist, 2010

Public anthropology and public archaeology occurs in the rarified, challenging, rewarding place where the discipline of anthropology intersects with the real world. Public anthropology/public archaeology is the application of anthropological knowledge to solve challenging issues; it is interaction between practitioners and various stakeholders; it is interpretation; it is communication. After taking this course, students will have: 1. analyzed issues in public anthropology/public archaeology; 2. gained a working knowledge in fundamental concepts and tools; and 3. participated in guided, purposeful, structured, hands-on experiences that prepare them to interact successfully with the public.