What Anthropologists Do
Veronica Strang
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1845203550
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What is Anthropology? Why should you study it? What will you learn? And what can you do with it? What Anthropologists Do answers all these questions. And more.
Anthropology is an astonishingly diverse and engaged subject that seeks to understand human social behaviour. What Anthropologists Do presents a lively introduction to the ways in which anthropology's unique research methods and cutting-edge thinking contribute to a very wide range of fields: environmental issues, aid and development, advocacy, human rights, social policy, the creative arts, museums, health, education, crime, communications technology, design, marketing, and business. In short, a training in Anthropology provides highly transferable skills of investigation and analysis.
The book will be ideal for any readers who want to know what Anthropology is all about and especially for students coming to the study of Anthropology for the first time.
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objectives: increasing potato production, protecting the environment, saving biodiversity, improving policies, and strengthening national research. Anthropologists have worked with the CIP’s interdisciplinary research teams in all of these areas, and have had a critical role in bringing local perspectives into the equation. Anthropologists helped a team of post-harvest technology scientists generate a new system of storing potatoes that was subsequently adopted by thousands of farmers in over 20
democracy, liberty, and justice for indigenas and all people in Mexico. (Gutmann 2006: 170) In Central and South America there have been many conflicts about land and resources. In the 1980s, attempts to privatize water in Mexico led to angry protests by women in low-income urban areas, who organized mass rallies and street blockades. Vivienne Bennett’s work looks at the political dynamics underlying these protests: Poor urban women are often the protagonists in these protests because
inside or outside the academe, anthropology can take you anywhere, into whatever area of research seizes your imagination and enables you to feel that you are doing something worthwhile. ‘Environmental anthropology’ has therefore come to the fore in recent years, but this is not really a new focus for the discipline. The localized ‘grassroots’ approach that generally characterizes anthropology has always involved paying close attention to the relationships between human groups and the places
approach itself: ‘since focus groups aren’t the real world, they’re working damn hard to make the real world a focus group’. Still, there is no doubt that consumer behaviour is an important area of activity, defining, in effect, how societies use and manage their resources. It could be argued that in a public place, such as a shopping mall, security cameras and store staff are already recording and observing behaviour, and it is not practical to ask everyone’s permission, or tell them that a
corporations selling baby formula as a substitute for breast milk in ‘Third World’ countries (in Ervin 2005: 151). This controversy flared up in the 1970s and 1980s, when Nestlé found its market share in Western nations diminishing. There were major protests when it tried to open new markets in countries where the lack of clean water and facilities for boiling water sufficiently, as well as a lack of funds, made it a significant health risk (quite apart from the fact that the formula had been
