Practical Applications of Anthropological Knowledge
Practical Applications of Anthropological Knowledge
Introduction
When I was studying anthropology -- it hardly seems possible it was over fifty years ago -- I heard the term applied anthropology but wasn’t really sure what it meant. But I have seen quite a lot of anthropology applied since then, mostly in other academic fields, and in business. This evening presents an opportunity to think some about how and where anthropological knowledge that you learn here can be applied in other fields of work.
I’ve been able to use what I learned back then quite extensively in jobs that I’ve had, and I’ve also appreciated the contributions of anthropologists to understanding of marketing and management phenomena, which were the focus of my academic career.
As an undergraduate, I double-majored in Anthropology and Latin American Studies. I was in a very talented peer group, many or most of whom later earned doctorates and went on to successful careers in anthropology. But I opted for, or maybe just happened onto, other fields after graduation. That undergraduate experience has conditioned my world view, interests, and the person I’ve become, mostly to the good. More to the point of the evening, with some considerable adaptation, it prepared me for professional work in multiple other fields and helped me perform well in them.
I’ll invite you here to put some focused thinking into what kinds of content knowledge you learn in studying anthropology, and then relate these to some practical applications in other fields, both academic and practical. Let me start by finding out where you’re coming from with respect to studying anthropology and pursuing your career interests. Then we can consider content domains of anthropological knowledge - and how understanding of these might translate into practical work opportunities.
Questions for you?
1. What attracts you to anthropology?
2. What do you find most interesting about it in your studies?
3. What career interests are you exploring?
Domains of Anthropological Knowledge
When Julian first suggested I do this, my first inclination was to consider how anthropological knowledge could reasonably be subdivided into distinct content domains. As a marketing professor, I’m an unlikely person to be entertaining this question in front of you, but my only purpose is to use it to identify meaningful work applications of what you’re learning in your studies here. I hope it helps you think about, plan for, and get on with your future.
Most of it relates in one way or another to my own experience, so I’ll draw on that for examples. The model consists of four content domains, which I’ll specify as: Local knowledge, Research methods, Theory, and Material culture. Besides my own examples, I’ll ask you to suggest some other practical applications of these. It’s not impossible that you might just find an interesting career (or two) in the exercise!
Local knowledge
By local knowledge, I mean some degree of understanding of a culture that isn’t your own. It’s closely related to the term “thick description,” meaning deep consideration of a specific culture or subculture. This is often, perhaps usually, descriptive of a distinct aboriginal culture, but it can apply equally to subcultural groups in modern society, such as brand communities, like the Harley-Davidson owners’ group, participants in a swap meet, sky-diving enthusiasts, or the culture among practitioners of any academic discipline. According to Clifford Geertz, “cultural anthropology…is mostly engaged in trying to determine what this people or that take to be the point of what they’re doing.” That statement would leave vast territory open for exploration. The focus could be on any meaningful theme that connects the inner world of the individual to the surrounding culture. But my examples relate to Latin American culture specifically. Local knowledge of a culture can be the basis for professional opportunity. Think of European travel guru Rick Steve’s media empire, based on his love of travel and deep knowledge of European countries and cultures.
Shortly after graduating with a B.A. in Anthropology and Latin American Studies, pure luck provided me an opportunity to serve on the editorial staff of a prominent quarterly scholarly journal in Latin American history, the Hispanic American Historical Review, at the University of Arizona. That was entirely because I answered the job posting possessing a reasonable amount of relevant local knowledge (i.e., I knew something about Latin America and spoke Spanish well). The Spanish has been highly useful over the years, both personally and professionally.
This was very good, interesting work but paid little, and I left after a couple of years to try to earn more money. But I returned to editorial work later in my academic career and consider that the most interesting and best kind of work that I’ve been privileged to do – and be paid for doing. And that’s saying a lot for all the fun things I’ve been blessed to do.
For something radically different then, I became a sales rep for a college textbook publisher and soon moved into an international position, as regional manager for South America and the Caribbean for Wadsworth International Publishing Group. Local knowledge and Spanish again were my calling card, along with an MBA in international business that I’d picked up, for managing sales reps and distributors, primarily in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Colombia. I was in over my head, and that’s a very good way to learn.
My first trip to Colombia saw me arriving at customs in Bogota toting a very large box of sample stock. I could see the customs agent eyeing me, like a spider to a fly. Well, before it was over, I ended up taking a full hazing from him before he finally let me and my big box of samples pass into the country.
As I was preparing for a subsequent visit, I happened to recall an anecdote from a Latin American ethnography class taught by Henry F. Dobyns, a great anthropologist who meant a lot to me and my classmates. He noted that something I had never heard of, something he called papel sellado, could open doors with Latin American gatekeepers. I’m talking about official documents replete with appropriate ribbons, seals, and signatures. Having more of them on your document is better, so the story went. I mean, really impressive pieces of paper. So, before leaving on the trip, I printed a paragraph about its purpose on vellum, took it to our company CEO for his seal and signature, then from there down to the head of the international department for his, and finally to the Colombian consulate in San Francisco for the coup de grace.
When I presented this letter to the customs agent attending me in Bogota, who seemed to be almost licking his lips over the big sample box, he reviewed the letter thoughtfully for longer than usual, then looked at my passport and back at me, and said, with clear respect, “muy impresionante, senor Brown, pasele, you can go right on through.
Then, returning from that same trip, the U.S. customs agent in New Orleans looked at my passport and said, “this is your fourth trip to Colombia this year, Mr. Brown, please come over here to this little room for a close-up inspection.” Fearing the worst was immediately at hand, I presented my letter on papel sellado, which had been intended for the Colombian customs, and that in fact was enough to save me from going to the little room. That one little tidbit of local knowledge from an anthropology class years before not only turned the usual customs nightmare into a breeze, it also saved me from the physical inspection at U.S. customs besides. Tell me, what’s that worth? Thank you, Dr. Dobyns!
Local knowledge means some level of understanding of a particular culture. It’s specific to that culture, not general, and the deeper it goes toward the native understanding, the better. It means being able to recognize and respond appropriately to signs and cues of all sorts in a culture not your own. First and foremost, you need to be yourself, because that’s who you are, but adapt your best self to the culture you’re visiting, using your local knowledge.
Research Methods
Ways of discovering and validating knowledge are central to any discipline. Each method has strengths and weaknesses, and types of research questions for which they work best. I’m going to focus here on qualitative methods common to ethnography, although there are many tools in the anthropologists’ kit. The strength of qualitative methods is that they enable deep understandings of limited scope, as in ethnography. Samples are necessarily small, but researchers use them to probe deeply for cultural insights, from interviews, participant observation, and so forth.
At the time I finally enrolled in a Ph.D. program, in marketing, in the 1980s, the focus of research effort was on questions of how consumers evaluate marketing stimuli and make buying choices. In the methods domain, this translated primarily to survey methods and experimentation, gathering relatively superficial bits of information from larger samples that may permit more generalizable conclusions. Quite the opposite of qualitative work.
At that time, however, a small coterie of qualitative researchers, anthropologists and sociologists, working in marketing, took up a whole new set of research questions using qualitative methods. Now forty-plus years later, they have enriched understanding of consumer behavior and markets tremendously by shining a light on the symbolism evoked by everyday products, how consumers mold personal and cultural identities and understandings using marketing stimuli, perform consumption rituals, and many other questions. The discipline overall is far greater for it. I might add that more than a few anthropologists have found a fine, highly paid career in making their part of that contribution, using just what you might learn here.
Commercial market research also needs qualified qualitative researchers, in considerable numbers. Envirosell Global, a highly successful research firm in New York built its business on simply analyzing consumer traffic patterns through retail stores and advising retailers how to lay out their stores to maximize sales of high-profit-margin displays. The market research industry thrives on focus groups and deep probing of consumer motivations, in the service of better products and promotions. Okay, not precisely anthropological research, but pretty close with regard to methods, and you can learn those here. The take-away is – learning how to practice anthropological research methods well has immediate and wide-ranging applications, both academic and applied. I really hope someone here will go for it!
Theory
Theories, I’ll propose, are general explanations of phenomena, derived and refined from empirical observations. This is big-picture thinking, abstracting across multiple studies and a lot of data. Maybe you can name me an anthropological theory you find meaningful and say a word about it?
Theorizing is abstract thinking – sorting through and making overall sense of complex patterns of empirical observations. This kind of thinking, toward seeing the simple, generalizable pattern underlying complexity, can be highly useful in any field. Organizations need someone capable of this kind of conceptualization for strategic planning based on their broad vision.
This can be a big talent for the select few who find it in them and develop it. It tends to develop with maturation, as experience and knowledge increase the ability to sort through surface complexity to see the underlying patterns. Theory should enable us to see how things work and sharpen our predictions of what will happen. It enables us to foresee future implications of action.
Theory and research methods are very closely related. Exploratory research methods, which includes the qualitative, are often used in theory development, whereas confirmatory methods for theory testing are generally quantitative.
As assistant professor of marketing at the University of Georgia, I became interested in the topic of psychological climate in organizations and how it affects motivation and job attitudes of frontline sales and service personnel. Psychological climate refers to how employees feel their experience of working in the organization affects their personal status and well-being.
Pursuing this, I found a relevant article by an ethnographer, William Kahn, working as an organizational behavior scholar (in a management department), asking what factors cue employees to become highly involved in their work. He concluded from his depth interviews that the essential elements of psychological climate boil down to two: psychological meaning and psychological safety. That is, to what extent do you find your work fulfilling, and do you feel free to invest yourself fully in your work without fear of repercussions.
Each of these two, he concluded further, is a composite of more specific perceptions. Employees find the organizational environment meaningful when they (1) believe that they make an important contribution through their work, (2) perceive it as an optimal challenge, and (3) receive due recognition for their contribution. He also determined that employees feel psychologically safe in their work when (1) roles are clearly defined and communicated, (2) they are able to express their true selves at work, and (3) management is supportive of their efforts.
I found that conceptualization relevant and appealing, and a colleague at Georgia and I set out to develop a valid survey measure of these dimensions of psychological climate. We tested the measure by sampling the sales forces of five organizations and found that the measure performed very well and reliably predicted salespeople’s job involvement and performance. That measure has since become the standard operational definition of psychological climate and, as of last week, the article has been cited 2,718 times by other researchers.
This is an example of exploratory anthropological methods laying the groundwork for confirmatory theory-testing by quantitatively oriented researchers. The exploratory work suggests the specific perceptions that quantitative measures need to tap into to capture the phenomenon of interest. This is also an example of theory formulation derived from anthropological work laying the groundwork for theory-based survey work of a psychological nature.
To see the relative impacts of these two studies on the field as a whole, I looked up citations to Kahn’s article on Google Scholar. It has been cited 18,358 times (almost seven times more than ours!). It seems somehow poetic justice that the formulation of a good theory has had so much more impact than its quantitative confirmation, Or maybe his was just a better, more interesting article, but we haven’t fared too badly with that piece.
Material culture
Every culture has its own distinctive kind of stuff, its signature in material culture. The museum here performs a very important function by analyzing, preserving, and displaying it for us. It seems likely that you all might have a good opportunity here to learn about material culture in the context of museum work yourselves. If so, what an opportunity!
As I’ve already suggested, anthropological analysis of material culture has played a very significant role in consumer behavior and marketing research. Consumers use products to establish desired identities, portray themselves to others in an attractive manner, fit in with a subculture or reference group they desire to join. Anthropological methods are key to addressing and understanding such phenomena. If you’re academically inclined and are unable to find a job in anthropology, this is something to seriously consider. Opportunity exists, and you can actually get the doctoral-level training you need from an anthropologist, in a marketing or management department.
Conclusion
We don’t think of anthropology as a very practical field to major in – am I right? But the questions asked and answered in it are interesting and important. They speak strongly to our fundamental humanity, coming to understand how others live and what they believe. This enriches our lives in and of itself. But the purpose here has been to suggest that going deeply into it may have practical benefits that are easily overlooked. We get into this field because of a passion for it, and that passion is a very good thing. When it’s invested in your work, it can take you far, take you where you want to go. So go with it, think about the applications you might put that passion into. It may require supplementary training, your title may or may not include the word “anthropologist,” but you’ll be involved in interesting, important work that can amount to a satisfying and prosperous career.
