Category:Engaged Anthropology

This is the practice of anthropology that is engaged with political problems without necessarily putting itself at the service of other projects, like an “applied” anthropologist might. Here too the project is usually to be socially transformative in some way, but often with a broader agenda than policy-makers or activists might have.

Although there are many forms of engaged anthropology, perhaps the most obvious is that which aims to critique one’s own society in order to change it. Studies of American policy and poverty are a big part of this, but so are critiques of international development as a kind of new imperialism, and attempts to think about other relationships between North and South that aren’t so exploitative.