I spent Spring Break in the desert with anthropologists. Specifically, I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropologists (SfAA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and had a hell of a time. There was, a little-leaguer among giants, an undergrad with only a month to go before I'm cast out into the real world, and I was bullshitting with people whom I've only encountered before in citations and book reviews.
No one outside my field knows who Diane Austin is, or Michael Agar, but I met them both, and even stood in the security line in Albuquerque with the former, as we talked about research and policy-making. It's hard for me not to treat them as celebrities, because they are celebrities in the circles I go around in in academia, but the general public has no idea who or what they are.
This one week was a life-changing experience for me and the other undergrad from my university who went, whom I've started calling 'colleague'. She's gonna rock the discipline. She is thinking of writing a book on children of Vietnam veterans (since she is one; her father volunteered for two tours) and secondary PTSD, and I think this is the most brilliant idea ever. I stood awed in her intellectual shadow, even as I made some impressive feats of intellectualism myself. I look forward to seeing where her life leads her, because if anyone's gonna change a small part of the world for the better, it'll be her.
I look out at the current generation of undergrads and grad students, and feel that the discipline of anthropology is undergoing a massive shift from the old 'ivory tower and pith helmet' model to a newer 'on the ground with your hands dirty' model. This change has been underway for decades, ever since Nancy Scheper-Hughes and others started advocating for anthropologists to intervene and help in the lives of the people they study, all in the name of ethics.
Previously, anthropologists were instructed not to get too involved in the lives of the people on the ground, lest they violate some sort of Prime Directive and alter the very culture they were studying. I think this is a ridiculous idea; the mere presence of an anthropologist is going to change things. Might as well not study them at all, if you're afraid of changing them. But change is not a one-way street, and in ethnography, the ethnographer is changed just as much (if not even more) than the ethnographized.
But this new generation of anthropologists is even more open-minded and diverse than the last; all the older anthropologists were white men (and quite a few white women), but the budding anthropologists in attendance were a very heterogeneous mix of people from all backgrounds --- cultural, socioeconomic, political. There were sharp divisions among the generations, especially in the controversial intersection of anthropology and the military. The older anthropologists still had memories of the Vietnam War fresh in their minds, and many of them were peace activists and war protestors when they were our age. The younger ones have seen the mistakes of the older generations, and hope to redress them. Maybe my generation isn't so fucked after all.
Sol Tax, who advocated extensively for anthropologists to seek employment outside of universities and make differences in the real, local world, predicted this very same change about twenty or so years ago in an address given to the SfAA. He predicted fewer anthropologists as professors and academic researchers, and more and more anthropologists working in industry and business, applying their training and knowledge to solve real-world problems.
His prediction has come true. Now, anthropologists are working everywhere. In my fair home city of Tampa, one had recently run for state representative. Others have done similar dabblings in politics and policy-making. My advisor worked for several years in a local health policy think tank before getting his doctorate and later on, tenure. I, too, hope to hack away at the undergrowth in the real world, and hope never to work in academia if I can help it. This is the whole point of 'applied anthropology' --- it sure is fun to come up with theories of culture and society, but man can't survive on abstraction alone. For anthropology to continue to be a viable discipline, it has to have an impact on the community. We're doing that right now, even as I write this gushy daylog.
I attended a workshop on how an anthropologist might break into the very bureaucracy that has hindered them and make lasting policy changes, and I felt a little lump in my throat as I pondered the implications of a world where anthropology played a larger role than it does now --- most people still think of either archeology or ethnography when someone says 'anthropology'. People don't know what anthropologists do, and even their vague notions of anthropology are inaccurate gleanings from National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. I've been asked if I dug for dinosaur bones when I mentioned I study anthropology. Not many outside the field of anthropology really knows what anthropology is, and I hope our fair little discipline becomes more publically visible in the future.
Next year, the society will be meeting in Mérida, Mexico. I'm told it's a nice city, very close to the resorts of the Yucatán, but I think it's no coincidence that the society will be meeting in Mérida, and not, say, Mexico City. Recently, drug cartels in Mexico have stepped up their violence, both within Mexico and across the border, and many anthropologists have been working with local, state and federal agencies (on both sides of the Rio Grande) to try and mitigate the consequences of this uptick in violent incidents.
About a dozen people have been killed in that one week alone. The problem is partly in the hands of the Mexican government, and partly in the hands of the American government, and the people affected by this problem are better-informed than many of us would like to think, but no one listens to them. Anthropologists can play a role in this, by doing what they do best: talking to the very people affected by a problem.
Mérida is also the site of the signing of the 2008 Mérida Initiative, a joint effort by the American and Mexican governments, as well as several Central American governments, to cooperate on border security and combat the rising troubles with transnational crime. It's no coincidence that the SfAA has chosen Mérida as the site of next year's meeting. The Iniative itself is highly controversial, especially since it gives the Mexican Army powers formerly reserved for only the police (and human rights abuses have resulted on account of this), and many anthropologists (and the people they talk to on the streets) are very divided on this issue. We have our work cut out for us over the course of the next couple of decades.