Applied anthropology is the practical application of anthropological theories, methods, and knowledge to solve real-world problems and address contemporary social issues. Unlike academic or theoretical anthropology, which focuses primarily on research and building knowledge about human cultures and societies, applied anthropology actively works to create change and improve conditions in communities, organizations, and policy settings.
Applied anthropologists work in diverse settings outside of traditional academia, including:
Public health and medicine designing culturally appropriate health interventions, understanding health beliefs, ethics, and practices in different communities.
International development assessing the cultural impact of development projects, ensuring programs are sustainable and culturally sensitive.
Business and marketing conducting ethnographic research on consumer behavior, workplace culture, or product design.
Environmental conservation working with local communities on resource management and conservation efforts.
Education developing culturally responsive teaching methods and curriculum.
Urban planning understanding how communities use and experience public spaces.
Government, policy, and advocacy providing cultural expertise to inform government policies on immigration, indigenous rights, etc.
And many more.
This area of anthropology emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century as anthropologists increasingly recognized the value of their insights for addressing social problems. Applied anthropologists typically emphasize collaborative, participatory approaches that involve the communities they work with, aiming to ensure that interventions are ethical, culturally appropriate, and beneficial to the people affected.
What is it Applied Anthropology Applies?
Looking back at some key concepts in anthropology can help us to make more sense of what applied anthropology is.
Applied anthropology depends greatly on understanding the culture concept. Primarily, it relies on culture as learned, shared patterns of behavior, beliefs, and values that shape how people experience the world. When applied anthropologists design health interventions, development projects, or business strategies, they recognize that people interpret and respond to these initiatives through their cultural lenses. For example, a public health campaign that ignores local beliefs about illness causation or an architectural project that mistakes deep-seeded metaphysical beliefs with superstition or pure practicality will likely fail. Applied work requires moving beyond superficial cultural knowledge to understand the deep logic and meaning systems that guide people's decisions.
Applied anthropology is also concerned with the debate whether anthropology is a science. This debate directly impacts how applied anthropologists justify and conduct their work. Those favoring a scientific approach emphasize systematic data collection, measurable outcomes, and evidence-based interventions—which appeals to funding agencies and policymakers who want "proof" that programs work. Others argue that applied anthropology is more interpretive, focused on understanding meaning and context rather than prediction and control. In practice, most applied anthropologists blend both approaches using rigorous qualitative methods while recognizing that human behavior isn't as predictable as some natural phenomena. The tension plays out in questions like: Can we measure cultural change? Should we?
Understanding human biological and cultural variation is essential for applied work that doesn't impose one-size-fits-all solutions. This concept reminds applied anthropologists that humans are diverse—genetically, culturally, linguistically—and that this diversity is normal and valuable, not a deviation from some standard. In medical anthropology, this means recognizing that drug metabolism varies across populations, pain expression is culturally shaped, and healing practices differ validly across cultures. In development work, it means understanding that there are multiple viable ways to organize economies, families, and societies. Applied anthropology at its best celebrates and works with this variation rather than trying to erase it.
Holism is perhaps the most critical concept for applied work. It means understanding that any aspect of human life is interconnected with all others—economics, politics, religion, kinship, environment, and history all shape each other. Applied anthropologists who ignore this interconnectedness create failed interventions. A classic example is agricultural development projects that introduced new crops without considering their impact on gender roles, religious calendars, land tenure systems, and nutritional practices. Effective applied anthropology requires seeing the whole system, understanding that changing one element ripples through everything else. This is why anthropologists often identify unintended consequences that narrow specialists miss.
Applied anthropologists are also deeply familiar with a process-based approach to culture. Anthropologists like Sally Falk Moore emphasized that culture isn't a static blueprint but an ongoing process of negotiation, contestation, and change. People actively interpret, debate, and transform cultural meanings rather than passively following rules. This is crucial for applied anthropology (Falk Moore was herself a legal anthropologists) because it means communities aren't frozen in tradition—they're constantly adapting. Applied anthropologists must recognize people as agents who strategically navigate multiple, sometimes contradictory cultural frameworks. For example, refugees don't simply "lose" their culture or "adopt" a new one. They actively create hybrid practices while negotiating power dynamics. This process view also highlights Falk Moore's concept of indeterminacy (sometimes called 'contingency')—the reality that cultural outcomes are unpredictable. Applied anthropologists must therefore remain flexible, recognize that communities will adapt interventions in unexpected ways, and avoid assuming they can fully control or predict how change will unfold. This is another knock against a purely "scientific" approach.
Applied Anthropology and the Four Fields
Applied anthropology benefits enormously from anthropology's integration of cultural, archaeological, biological, and linguistic subfields. For example, an applied project addressing indigenous land rights might draw on archaeological evidence of historical occupation, linguistic analysis of place names and oral traditions, cultural understanding of contemporary communities, and biological anthropology's insights into health disparities or population genetics. As another example, forensic anthropologists apply biological anthropology to human rights investigations. This type of holistic training helps applied anthropologists see connections others miss—like how language barriers affect healthcare access, or how environmental changes impact both cultural practices and physical health.
While most applied anthropology is more holistically integrated, each subfield also has its own flavor of applied anthropology.
Cultural anthropology is the most directly connected subfield to applied work. Cultural anthropologists work in community development, public health, business, education, and policy settings. They conduct ethnographic research to understand how communities experience problems and design culturally appropriate solutions. Examples include designing refugee resettlement programs, improving patient-provider communication in hospitals, conducting market research for product development, and advising on culturally sensitive conflict resolution strategies.
Applied linguistic anthropologists address language-related social problems. They work on language preservation and revitalization projects with indigenous communities whose languages are endangered. They develop bilingual education programs, analyze how language barriers create healthcare disparities, and consult on legal cases involving linguistic discrimination or miscommunication. They also study institutional language use—like how medical terminology affects patient understanding or how language shapes courtroom outcomes. Applied linguists might help design interpretation services or analyze how workplace communication patterns create exclusion.
Biological anthropologists apply their expertise most often to forensic contexts, public health, and human rights work. Forensic anthropologists assist law enforcement in identifying human remains and documenting trauma in criminal and human rights investigations. They work on skeletal biology projects that inform public health interventions, study how environmental stressors affect human biology, and analyze health disparities across populations. Some conduct nutritional anthropology research to improve food security programs or study the biological impacts of poverty, migration, and environmental change.
And applied archaeologists most commonly work in cultural resource management (CRM), assessing and protecting archaeological sites threatened by development projects. They also contribute to indigenous rights cases by documenting historical land use and occupation patterns. Some work in heritage management and museum curation, help communities preserve and interpret their material past, or collaborate on repatriation efforts. Archaeologists also apply their methods to contemporary issues—like studying modern landfills to understand waste management or analyzing material culture to understand homelessness and poverty.
Two Key U.S. Examples: Milk & Nuclear Waste
A negative example: where applied anthropology could have helped.
U.S. food assistance programs in South and Central America during the mid-20th century often failed because they ignored fundamental principles of human biological variation. Programs frequently distributed powdered milk and dairy products to malnourished populations, assuming these would be nutritious solutions applicable everywhere. However, many indigenous and mestizo populations in Latin America have high rates of lactose intolerance after early childhood—a normal biological variation found in populations without long histories of dairy pastoralism. The result was that well-intentioned food aid caused digestive distress, discomfort, and illness rather than improved nutrition. Without understanding that lactose tolerance is not universal but rather represents specific evolutionary adaptations in certain populations, planners designed interventions based on North American and European dietary norms that were biologically inappropriate for recipient communities.
These programs also failed due to a lack of holistic thinking about how food connects to broader cultural, economic, and social systems. Introducing surplus U.S. commodities like wheat and processed foods disrupted local agricultural economies by undercutting prices for traditional crops like maize, beans, and quinoa that were culturally valued and nutritionally appropriate. Food aid rarely considered local food preparation methods, taste preferences, religious dietary practices, or the social meanings of meals and specific foods. Moreover, the programs ignored how food production and distribution were embedded in kinship networks, gender roles, market systems, and land tenure patterns. By treating hunger as simply a caloric deficit rather than understanding it within the whole system of how communities produce, exchange, prepare, and consume food, these assistance efforts sometimes worsened food insecurity while creating dependency on foreign aid. An anthropological approach recognizing both human biological diversity and the interconnectedness of food with all aspects of social life could have designed more effective, culturally appropriate interventions.
If the four subfields of anthropology had been applied to these food assistance programs, outcomes could have been dramatically improved. Biological anthropologists could have conducted research on lactose tolerance patterns and nutritional requirements specific to Latin American populations, ensuring that food aid matched the biological characteristics and dietary needs of recipients rather than donors. Cultural anthropologists could have documented local food systems, understanding what foods held cultural significance, how meals were prepared and shared, and what barriers existed to food security beyond simple availability—preventing the imposition of culturally inappropriate foods and identifying solutions that aligned with existing practices. Linguistic anthropologists could have facilitated better communication between aid agencies and communities, analyzing how nutritional information was translated and understood, and ensuring that local knowledge about food and health was heard and valued rather than dismissed. Archaeologists could have contributed historical perspective on long-term subsistence patterns and agricultural practices in the region, demonstrating which crops had sustained populations for millennia and how traditional food systems were adapted to local environments—evidence that could have supported preservation and strengthening of indigenous agriculture rather than its replacement. Together, these four perspectives would have created food assistance programs grounded in biological reality, cultural appropriateness, effective communication, and historical understanding of proven subsistence strategies.
The positive example: where applied anthropology played an important role.
In the late 20th century, the United States was dealing with a problem: how to safely store radioactive waste. One solution was the development of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The WIPP is a deep underground repository designed to 'permanently' store transuranic radioactive waste that remains hazardous for over 10,000 years. Because this timespan far exceeds recorded human history, the U.S. Department of Energy faced an unprecedented challenge: how to warn future humans—who might speak different languages, use different symbols, or possess different knowledge systems—about the deadly dangers buried at the site. This seemingly impossible communication problem required thinking anthropologically about how human cultures, languages, and meaning systems change over vast stretches of time.
Initial planners realized they couldn't assume future societies would speak current languages, understand contemporary symbols, or even possess scientific knowledge about radiation. This led to one of the most remarkable applications of anthropology to public policy. In 1991, the Department of Energy convened the Futures Panel, which included anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other experts, to design warning systems that could communicate across vast time spans and potential civilizational changes. The panel had to think anthropologically about cultural change, symbol systems, and human behavior in ways that went far beyond typical engineering problems.
The anthropological insights that emerged were profound... and unsettling. The panel recognized that any symbol system—even seemingly universal ones like skulls or radiation trefoils—could lose meaning or be reinterpreted over millennia. They considered how future societies might view the site (and the implications of these mistaken assumptions) as a temple, a treasure repository, or a sacred place worthy of excavation rather than avoidance. Drawing on archaeological knowledge of how past monuments and warnings were misunderstood or ignored, they recommended multiple, redundant warning strategies including landscape modifications (enormous earthworks and stone monuments), buried warning messages in multiple languages and pictographs, an information center, and detailed records stored globally. The anthropological perspective pushed planners to imagine radical cultural difference and discontinuity rather than assuming "progress" or continuity. This represented applied anthropology at its most forward-thinking—using knowledge of human cultural diversity and change across time to solve a problem that wouldn't fully manifest for thousands of years.
Each anthropological subfield contributed essential insights to the WIPP project that improved its approach. Archaeologists provided critical evidence about how monuments, symbols, and warnings from past civilizations were preserved, altered, forgotten, or misinterpreted—showing, for example, how Egyptian tomb warnings didn't deter grave robbers and how religious prohibitions sometimes attracted rather than repelled curiosity. Linguistic anthropologists analyzed how languages change and die, how writing systems become unreadable, and how translation across radical linguistic difference might work, leading to recommendations for redundant communication through images, multiple languages, and potentially self-explanatory visual narratives that didn't depend on specific linguistic knowledge. Cultural anthropologists contributed understanding of how symbols acquire meaning in cultural contexts, how taboos and sacred sites function across societies, and how human curiosity and value systems might motivate future peoples to approach or avoid the site—recognizing that what seems obviously dangerous to us might not register that way to societies with different cosmologies or technological understandings. Biological anthropologists, while perhaps less central to this particular project, could have further contributed insights into human sensory perception and cognition—what visual or spatial arrangements humans instinctively avoid, or how embodied experience might communicate danger more effectively than abstract symbols. Together, these four-field perspectives created a uniquely comprehensive approach that acknowledged both the universality of human curiosity and cognition and the profound variability of human meaning-making across time and culture.
In our Confusion is our Strength
In “Waddling In,” a provocative essay published in 1985, interpretive anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed that among the various academic disciplines, anthropology was uniquely capable of leading into the future. He pointed out the fundamental changes anthropology faced as it headed into the 21st century—changes in its traditional subject focus, its traditional field sites, and its wide, holistic perspective, which Geertz referred to as “walking barefoot through the Whole of Culture” (1985, 623):
Pulled in opposed directions by technical advances in allied disciplines, divided within itself along accidental ill-drawn lines, besieged from one side by resurgent scientism and from the other by an advanced form of hand-wringing, and progressively deprived of its original subject matter, its research isolation, and its master-of-all-I-survey authority, [anthropology] seems not only to stay reasonably intact but . . . to extend the sway of the cast of mind that defines it over wider and wider areas of contemporary thought. We have turned out to be rather good at waddling in. In our confusion is our strength. (624)
In our confusion is our strength. For Geertz, this confusion reflects anthropology’s flexibility as a science and a humanity and its acknowledgment that we do not yet know everything about who we are as a species. Our ongoing mission is to be open to what comes next, open to the potential of what it means to be human. This is especially important at this moment in history when global challenges remind us of how much remains to be done for every person to have a life of dignity. Instead of predicting the end of anthropology, “Waddling In” challenges anthropologists to discover an ever-widening relevance and importance for the discipline, in a world of ongoing cultural change.
Anthropology is both an academic and an applied discipline. What anthropology reveals about human culture and human biology can be used to improve lives today. Anthropology is deeply relevant to contemporary lives in many ways. Museums are a common way in which anthropological knowledge is presented to the public, interpreting cultural and biological diversity and inspiring new generations of scholars and a broader public. But there are many other ways in which anthropologists interact with and influence our global community.
A Uniquely Relevant Discipline
As we have learned, anthropology is a unique discipline. Not only does it study all aspects of what it means to be human across time, with a focus on evolution and how changes occur in our bodies and cultures, but it also examines the ways in which we adapt to different social and physical environments. This process of adaptation is a primary source of cultural and biological diversity. Anthropology is also holistic, examining the context of and interconnections between many parts of our lives and weaving together our biology, our traditions, and the diverse social and physical environments in which we live. The anthropological approach views humans as part of a wider system of meaning, as actors and change-makers within a dynamic environment populated by others. Across cultures, those others can include other species (plant and animal) and spirits as well as other human beings. It is the human ability to imagine and construct the universe in which we live that most interests anthropologists.
In most four-field introductory classes, students are surprised at the breadth of anthropology, but this wide lens is the cornerstone of the discipline. Today, anthropologists increasingly approach the study of humans as a dynamic construct. We see humans as agents in motion, undergoing change as a normal state of being, rather than as objects in a petri dish, preserved and inert. This means that anthropological studies are by necessity messy and in flux, as our subject matter makes change. Because holism, adaptation, and adjustment are critical to anthropological studies, we bring an especially powerful lens to attempts to understand complex, large-scale global problems.
Few of our challenges today are simple. Solving the climate crisis requires changes not just to our use of fossil fuels but also to the ways in which we produce food, bathe, heat and cool our houses, and travel. Each culture and each community must be aware of its power and potential to enact positive change. Both a scientific and a humanistic approach are needed to solve our current global challenges.
Anthropological Values
The anthropological perspective is grounded by principles and standards of behavior considered important to understanding other people and their ways of life. These include the value of all cultures; the value of diversities, biological and cultural; the importance of change over time; and the importance of cultural relativism and acknowledging of the dignity of all human beings. These anthropological values undergird our discipline.
The study of culture intersects with each of the four subfields and highlights the importance of diversity. From the beginning, humans have used ingenuity to tackle problems and provide solutions to challenging circumstances. Anthropologists study and value this extraordinary process of human creativity, documenting it in living and past cultures, in our languages and symbol systems, and even in our bones, through cultural procedures such as elongating women’s necks (as is practiced by the Kayan people of Myanmar) or flattening/elongating people’s heads (practiced by the Chinookan peoples of North America). Even our diets, which are cultural artifacts of adaptation, are written on our bones. The consumption of corn, for example, is measurable as carbon isotopes in human bone. Anthropology celebrates this human uniqueness and diversity, understanding that different ways of being are humanity’s greatest legacy—a foundation embodied in the concept of the ethnosphere.
Kayan women use neck rings from an early age to make their necks appear longer. The rings actually push down the clavicle and compress the rib cage. This is a sign of beauty among the Kayan. (credit: “IMG_0547” by Brian Jeffery Beggerly/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
Anthropological studies produce documentation of immeasurable worth. Through anthropological research, we collect, preserve, and share the stories of living humans as well as human artifacts, sites, and bodies. Together, these documents form a valuable database. Field notes and artifacts from the earliest anthropologists document diversity that has since disappeared. Franz Boas taught his students how to make life masks of the people they were studying to document the physical diversity of different groups of people (A. Singer 1986). This vast collection of some 2,000 life masks is now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution as an archival resource for understanding environment, culture, and biological adaptations. Many masks document ethnic groups that are now extinct. Anthropology collections are of inestimable value for future research.
The Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records, or CoPAR, works with anthropologists, librarians, and archivists to obtain and preserve anthropological records and make them available both for the study of human diversity and as a record of the history of the discipline. The organization has two primary goals. The first is to educate anthropologists on the value and urgency of saving documents. The second is to help train archivists and information specialists in best practices for handling the sometimes very sensitive information within these documents while also facilitating them in making sure that the information is available to scholars anywhere (Silverman and Parezo 1995).
Diversity is a product of adaptation and change over time. As cultural groups encountered different challenges in their environments, they used ingenuity and innovation to address these challenges, sometimes borrowing other cultures’ solutions when applicable. In the high Andes of South America, the steep mountainous inclines mean that there is little flat ground for growing food. In response to this challenge, Inca farmers used terrace farming, building steplike terraces into the hillside to create areas of flatter surfaces for growing crops (see Figure below). Forms of terrace farming are found all over Asia and in parts of Africa, with cultures in each area adapting the use of terraces to meet specific climatic conditions and crop requirements (e.g., paddy rice cultivation requires small earthwork borders to allow for flooding). In short, there is no one way to do something; every solution is calibrated to particular needs. Today, with increasing urgency to minimize our carbon footprints, architects are designing homes to meet clients’ demands for net-positive houses—that is, houses that produce more energy than they consume through solar power and lower-energy appliances (Stamp 2020). As we work toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, the architectural and construction industries are beginning to adapt to these changing needs and demands.
Adaptations: (left) By cutting these steplike terraces into the mountain, Andean farmers created more arable land for farming. (right) In this net-positive house in Australia, the solar panels, increased insulation, and lower-energy appliances all contribute to a “net zero” energy design. (credit: (left) “Peru Terrace Farming” by J. Thompson/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain; (right) “The Zero-Emission House” by Keirissa Lawson, CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)
Besides culture and diversity, anthropology is also about the human power to change. Through adaption, evolution, and even acclimatization (short-term adaptation to environmental change), the human body has evolved alongside human cultures to make us a species uniquely capable of adapting to almost any environmental or social conditions. Humans can survive even in such inhospitable environments as outer space (thanks to the human-designed technology that makes up the International Space Station) and the polar regions (where human-built structures and protective gear make habitation possible at McMurdo Station in Antarctica). And humans have survived health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and historical tragedies such as slavery and warfare. The ability to change, redirect, reassess, reimagine, and innovate has sustained our species across time.
Diversity matters more today than ever. Where diversity is valued, there is greater potential for innovation and collaboration. A central value of anthropology, evident in both research and applied work across communities, is anthropologists’ focus not only on understanding other cultures and different ways of living but also on translating them—that is, communicating what is learned across cultures in order to share it more broadly.
The most important anthropological value, however, is cultural relativism, or suspending judgment about other cultures until one gains a clear understanding of the meaning and significance of what those cultures do and believe. Cultural relativism requires us to understand the rationale, purpose, and meaning of cultural traditions and knowledge before we decide on their validity. And it provides significant advantages in better understanding others:
It allows us to see the worth, dignity, and respect of all persons, allowing for initial exchange and collaboration between “us” and “them.”
It reminds us to approach the study of other cultures without automatically judging them as inferior, thus minimizing ethnocentrism.
It helps us keep an open mind about the potentials and possibilities inherent in our species.
First formally introduced by Franz Boas, cultural relativism laid the groundwork for the discipline of anthropology, a science that would study what it means to be human in all its diverse forms. Boas and his students worked to apply cultural relativism across racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic boundaries, documenting the rich cultural traditions of Indigenous peoples, minority communities, and immigrants. The concept, though, has undergone a great deal of debate since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. Is anything okay if a culture decides it is? Are there any boundaries to cultural relativism? Do we have to accept everything that a group does, or can an anthropologist ultimately judge that a practice is damaging, harmful, and not deserving of being respected and upheld?
While these debates remain, anthropologists still value cultural relativism (and the worthiness of other peoples and cultures), although perhaps in a modified form that anthropologist Michael Brown calls cultural relativism 2.0. As Brown states, cultural relativism 2.0 is “a call to pause before judging, to listen before speaking, and to widen one’s views before narrowing them” (2008, 380). In other words, first give people a chance.
Anthropology is important today, perhaps even more than when it formally began some 150 years ago. As French anthropologist Maurice Godelier says:
Anthropology—together with history—is one of the social science disciplines best able to help us understand the complexity of our now globalized world and the nature of the conflicts and crisis we are experiencing. In such a world, it would be irresponsible and indecent for anthropologists [to] stop trying to understand others. (2016, 75–76)
What Anthropologists Do Today
Anthropologists are at work now to make a difference in our lives. There are various ways in which anthropologists and those utilizing an anthropological lens or framework contribute critically needed skills and resources in the 21st century.
Research
Sometimes referred to as pure or theoretical research, fieldwork is conducted in all kinds of settings in order to answer practical and theoretical questions that form the basis of anthropology. How do cultures change? How do artifacts and technology evolve within a culture? How do trade and exchange affect the development of cultures? As above, each of the subfields engages in distinct types of field research as ways to test theories and advance our knowledge of human beings. Theoretical research is the backbone of academic anthropology.
Research and Development
Research and development are associated with practical applications, such as creating or redesigning products or services for governments or corporations. Anthropologists who work in research and development contribute what they know about human behavior and the world around us to projects that serve the interests of human organizations and the human community.
Cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell worked for 18 years in research and development for Intel Corporation, the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer. Her focus at Intel was on user experience, researching how people use technology and apply it in their lives with the goal of designing more relevant and user-friendly products. Intel valued the way Bell’s deep knowledge of human behavior and human culture helped the company better anticipate their clients’ needs. Bell’s insights helped make Intel a more competitive corporation. She has described her job as “mak[ing] sense of what makes people tick, what delights and frustrates them, and . . . us[ing] those insights to help shape next generation technology innovations. I sit happily at the intersection of cultural practices and technology adoption” (City Eye 2017).
Anthropologist Genevieve Bell works with tech and engineering industries, applying anthropological concepts to make technology more user-friendly and better adapted to our everyday lives. (credit: “Genevieve Bell” by Kevin Krejci/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
In a TED Salon talk titled “6 Big Ethical Questions about the Future of AI,” Bell explains that the technological revolution of artificial intelligence is already in progress, affecting many aspects of our lives. She says that the challenge now is to use artificial intelligence “safely, sustainably, and responsibly.” Bell advocates for human-scale technology. Using skills and knowledge gained through her training as an anthropologist, she looks at the ways in which technology, culture, and environment interact. In her work today, she continues to use an anthropological approach: “It’s about thinking differently, asking different kinds of questions, looking holistically at the world and the systems” (Bell 2020).
Bell left Intel in 2017 to serve as a distinguished professor at the Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science, where she serves as the director of the School of Cybernetics and continues to research the interface between culture and technology.
Public Policy
Anthropologists are involved in public policy making all over the world. Anthropological skills and outlooks are increasingly valuable to the development of principles and regulatory measures that increase public safety and resolve real-world problems. Applying a holistic approach to these issues allows government and nongovernment organizations to avoid some problems and better anticipate future challenges.
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has identified five public policy areas that would greatly benefit from an anthropological approach. In each of these areas, the AAA hopes to involve more anthropologists in public policy in the 21st century and to work collectively to message international, national, and local agencies about the importance of anthropological knowledge and involvement:
One of the challenges that anthropologists face is better educating governments and corporations about the skills they can bring to understanding and addressing contemporary problems. Working collaboratively within and beyond the discipline is important for advancing an awareness of the possibilities that anthropologists offer as public policy advocates.
Social and cultural aspects of health: identifying ways in which categories of race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and age hinder medical delivery.
Culture and diversity in education: understanding the diversities that affect educational delivery and the gaps that exist in current educational policies due to such things as changing demographics and new information technologies.
An interdisciplinary approach to the environment: focusing on the ways in which anthropological knowledge contributes to understanding the human dimensions of the environment and interfacing with federal agencies actively seeking to support this type of environmental research.
Economic, social, and cultural aspects of the information revolution: examining the human dimensions of the information revolution and the impact that it is having on our work and personal lives.
Globalization and its impact on public policy: specifically, focusing on issues of conflict and war and the effects of globalization on transnational communities.
Applied or practicing anthropology. Anthropologists are engaged in wide-ranging work on the ground in real-life situations, helping address numerous current and emerging needs in communities around the world. Many work within nongovernmental agencies. Some anthropologists are already engaged in efforts pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic, gathering preliminary data and working to streamline access to treatment and preventative measures.
In 2014, the WHO reached out to sociocultural anthropologists to help address an outbreak of the Ebola virus in Mali. They sought the help of these anthropologists as liaisons to connect with the local people and lessen their anxieties about the disease, help those recovering cope with the stigma of having had Ebola, and build a bridge between the community and the health system. They also sought anthropological direction on how best to interact with local people while respecting their culture and traditions. The WHO described some of the roles of the anthropologists who aided in this project:
The social anthropologists have also helped train teams searching for Ebola patients and monitoring Ebola contacts, teaching them to make allowances for local culture and the rules of hospitality and politeness when visiting families. These factors are key to getting the message across and being heard by members of the community. (World Health Organization 2015)
Medicine
The global emergency of COVID-19 mobilized a number of anthropologists, especially those in the applied field of medical anthropology. Medical anthropologist Mark Nichter (2020), who has studied emerging diseases and global health for much of his career, was returning from fieldwork in India and Indonesia when COVID-19 cases started being diagnosed in the United States. He traveled from Asian countries, where people were wearing masks and showing a high level of concern for the disease, into Europe and then the United States, where there seemed to be little concern. These different attitudes prompted him to think about other pandemics he had experienced as a medical anthropologist and about how complex these global events can be. Deeply aware of issues of social inequality, he worried about the poor infrastructure conditions in so many countries and the dense populations in refugee camps. What would happen in water-insecure areas where accessing any kind of water, especially clean water for handwashing, was difficult? He wondered just how bad this was going to be as a global event.
During lockdown in the United States, Nichter used his training as a medical anthropologist to create positive change within his community. He first developed a COVID-19 primer, explaining health concepts about COVID-19 and methods of slowing and preventing transmission in everyday terms to help professors and teachers educate themselves and their students. The primer quickly began circulating on campuses in the United States and around the world. Nichter also worked with fellow anthropologists in a special working group supported by the American Anthropological Association to identify research areas of critical need. Many of these research areas concerned structural threats and areas where mortality data were revealing disparities, indicating that certain populations were more vulnerable than others. Third, Nichter began advocating and working for COVID-19 testing resources, the development of contact tracing, and symptom monitoring to better contain outbreaks within communities. Lastly, he helped develop a health care worker support network with both online and grassroots resources, knowing that frontline workers would be those most taxed by the pandemic. Nichter advocates for what he calls anticipatory anthropology. In the context of medical anthropology, anticipatory anthropology acts to shore up the fault lines that have emerged in the global health system, working toward creating stronger resistance to the next health care emergency. “COVID-19 provides an opportunity to build alliances and momentum for significant health care reform” (Nichter 2020).
Anthropological skills are increasingly vital to developing and communicating culturally relevant messages. While global health initiatives are very prominent within the field of applied and practicing anthropology, the range of interventions is wide. Applied anthropology projects might involve improved farming techniques and heirloom seed banks, better educational services, and even work on the front lines with persons displaced by war, migration, or climate emergencies.
Economics
Economic anthropology is the study of how humans produce, exchange, distribute, and consume goods and services across different cultural contexts. (We scratched the surface of this earlier.) Rather than assuming all economies work like modern capitalist markets, economic anthropologists examine the diverse ways societies organize economic life—including gift exchange, reciprocity networks, redistribution systems, subsistence economies, and informal markets. The field explores how economic activities are embedded in social relationships, cultural values, kinship systems, religious beliefs, and political structures. Economic anthropologists study questions like: How do people make decisions about work and exchange? What motivates economic behavior beyond profit? How do different societies define value, wealth, and property?
Economic anthropology serves as an important example of applied anthropology because its insights are directly used to address real-world development, business, and policy challenges. Applied economic anthropologists work in international development, assessing why microfinance programs succeed or fail by understanding local systems of trust, debt, and obligation. They consult for businesses entering new markets, explaining how consumer behavior and preferences are culturally shaped rather than universal. They advise on poverty alleviation programs, revealing how informal economies and social safety nets actually function in communities—knowledge that helps design more effective interventions. Applied economic anthropologists have documented how imposing market-based models on communities with gift economies or collective land tenure can destroy existing economic security rather than improve it. They work in fair trade certification, labor rights advocacy, and analyzing the impacts of globalization on local livelihoods. By revealing that there are multiple rational ways to organize economic life, economic anthropology provides practical tools for creating policies and programs that work with rather than against existing economic systems and cultural logics.
The Environment
Similarly, environmental anthropology examines the complex relationships between human societies and their natural environments. It explores how different cultures understand, use, and manage natural resources; how environmental knowledge is created and transmitted; and how environmental changes affect human communities. Environmental anthropologists study topics like traditional ecological knowledge, human adaptations to different ecosystems, cultural dimensions of conservation, environmental justice, and how people experience and respond to climate change, pollution, and resource scarcity. The field rejects the nature/culture divide common in Western thought, recognizing that what counts as "natural" or "environmental" is itself culturally constructed, and that humans and environments mutually shape each other over time.
Environmental anthropology is a prime example of applied anthropology because its practitioners actively work on pressing environmental problems alongside communities, policymakers, and conservation organizations. Applied environmental anthropologists collaborate on designing conservation programs that respect indigenous land rights and incorporate local ecological knowledge rather than imposing top-down protected areas that displace communities. They work on climate change adaptation projects, helping vulnerable populations develop strategies that align with their cultural practices and local conditions. They assess the social and cultural impacts of environmental policies, revealing how regulations affect different groups unequally—for instance, how conservation restrictions might harm subsistence farmers while benefiting ecotourism companies. Applied environmental anthropologists contribute to environmental justice movements by documenting how marginalized communities disproportionately bear pollution and environmental hazards. They facilitate co-management arrangements where indigenous communities and government agencies share responsibility for natural resource management, recognizing that local communities often have sophisticated, time-tested environmental knowledge. They also work in corporate and governmental settings, conducting environmental impact assessments that go beyond measuring physical changes to understand how projects affect livelihoods, cultural practices, spiritual connections to land, and social organization. By bringing holistic, culturally informed perspectives to environmental challenges, applied environmental anthropologists help create solutions that are both ecologically sound and socially just.
Media
Media anthropology studies how people create, circulate, consume, and make meaning through various forms of media—from traditional forms like radio and television to digital platforms, social media, film, and emerging technologies. Media anthropologists examine how media shapes identity, community, and culture; how people use media to communicate, resist power, and build social movements; and how media technologies transform social relationships, political participation, and everyday life. The field explores questions like: How do different communities interpret the same media text differently? How does media consumption fit into daily routines and social practices? How do people navigate multiple media environments and create hybrid cultural forms? Media anthropologists also study media production, examining how journalists, filmmakers, content creators, and platform developers make decisions and how power dynamics shape what gets represented and how.
Media anthropology serves as applied anthropology in several important ways. Applied media anthropologists work in the technology industry conducting user experience research, helping companies understand how people from diverse cultural backgrounds actually use apps, platforms, and devices—often revealing that designers' assumptions don't match users' practices and needs. They consult on international media campaigns, ensuring that public health messages, educational content, or development communications are culturally appropriate and effectively reach target audiences. Applied media anthropologists collaborate with journalists and documentary filmmakers to improve cross-cultural representation and avoid stereotyping, and they work with museums and cultural heritage organizations on digital exhibits and community media projects. They contribute to media literacy programs, helping communities critically analyze media messages and create their own counter-narratives. Some applied media anthropologists work on digital rights and platform governance issues, documenting how content moderation policies affect marginalized communities differently or how algorithmic systems reproduce inequality. Others partner with activists and NGOs to develop effective social media strategies for advocacy campaigns. During crises like pandemics, applied media anthropologists study how misinformation spreads and how trusted communication channels vary across communities—insights critical for effective public health communication. By understanding media as culturally embedded practice rather than neutral technology, applied media anthropologists help create more inclusive, effective, and ethical media systems and interventions.
Media anthropologists are critically relevant right now because they bring essential perspectives to understanding how social media and AI are transforming human social life in unprecedented ways. As platforms continuously evolve and AI becomes embedded in everyday communication, media anthropologists conduct ethnographic and other research on how people actually adapt to and repurpose these technologies, often in ways designers never anticipated. They document how platform changes and AI systems affect different communities unequally—what seems minor to engineers might fundamentally alter how activists organize, how marginalized groups find community, or how diasporic families maintain connections. Media anthropologists counter technological determinism by demonstrating through comparative research that the same technology produces radically different effects depending on local social structures, political conditions, and cultural values—facial recognition raises different concerns in societies with different surveillance histories, and social media norms around privacy vary dramatically across cultures. They identify whose voices are marginalized by AI training data biases and algorithmic systems, document creative resistance and workarounds people develop, and reveal unintended consequences of rapid technological change. Their holistic approach is crucial for ensuring that AI and social media development doesn't steamroll cultural diversity or deepen inequalities, making anthropological understanding of human variation and cultural meaning-making more vital than ever in an era where tech companies make decisions affecting billions across vastly different cultural contexts.
Corporate or Organizational Anthropology
Corporate anthropology, also called business anthropology or organizational anthropology, applies anthropological methods and theories to understand and solve problems within business and organizational settings. Corporate anthropologists work inside companies or as consultants or embedded in human resources, information technology, or other departments, using ethnographic research to study workplace cultures, consumer behavior, organizational dynamics, and product design. They examine questions like: How do employees actually use workplace technologies versus how managers assume they're used? What unspoken cultural norms shape decision-making in organizations? How do different departments or global offices develop distinct subcultures? Why do consumers interact with products in unexpected ways? Corporate anthropologists bring the discipline's core insights—particularly about culture, meaning-making, and holism—into profit-driven contexts, revealing the cultural dimensions of business problems that quantitative market research or management theory alone might miss.
Corporate anthropology represents applied anthropology with anthropologists working on diverse business challenges across industries. They conduct user research for technology companies, observing how people interact with devices and software in real-world contexts to inform design improvements—leading to more intuitive, culturally appropriate products. They help companies expand into new markets by researching local consumer practices, values, and preferences, preventing costly missteps based on assumed universality of Western consumer behavior. (If you are familiar with "Kohl's Cash" at Kohl's department stores, that incentive structure was developed in collaboration with an anthropologists. The same is true of many similar marketing incentive structures.)
Corporate anthropologists study organizational change, analyzing why workplace initiatives succeed or fail by understanding existing cultural dynamics and employee perspectives. They work on diversity and inclusion efforts, examining how organizational culture perpetuates inequality and recommending structural changes. Some focus on supply chains and labor practices, documenting working conditions and cultural contexts in global production networks. While corporate anthropology raises ethical questions about serving profit motives versus community interests, practitioners argue they can actually humanize business practices, advocate for workers and consumers within systems, and ensure that anthropological insights about cultural difference and human needs shape how companies operate in an increasingly globalized economy.
Anthropological Skills and Resources
In common across all of these examples, anthropologists are trained to look at the larger context and understand how smaller, local environments fit into overarching forces. They aim to hold a multicultural perspective that represents various constituencies and to interact with people around them with the goal of better understanding where they are coming from and what things mean to them. Anthropologists gather and analyze data that reflects real life on the ground and in the streets. The central anthropological specialty is an unfettered interest in human beings.
In 2020, career research and employment website Zippia interviewed a group of teaching and practicing anthropologists about the anthropological skills they believe are most valuable in today’s job market. The two quotes below illustrate the breadth of career preparation that anthropology provides:
Organizations are looking for people who can articulate the value of their experiences. Anthropology provides a broad array of skills. Some [are] more general, such as critical thinking and written and oral communication and teamwork. Some skills are more specific, such as survey and excavation for archaeology positions, research design, data analysis skills (qualitative and quantitative), and familiarity with research ethics. —John Ziker
And
Young graduates need to think quickly and with skepticism, read situations from multiple angles, and have openness to variable solutions. This means that they need skills in understanding pluralistic vantage points, judging where information comes from and who it benefits and who it hurts, and being gifted at recognizing and acknowledging their own biases. Anthropology teaches these skills as it prepares graduates for work in a wide array of fields. —Suzanne Morrissey (Stark et al. 2020)
Anthropologists and anthropology students, undergraduate and graduate, fit into a wide array of careers and contribute valuable skills and resources to their communities everywhere. As people specialists, anthropologists understand how to approach diverse peoples, elicit information about and from them, and work with that information to understand broader situations. Some of the broadly applicable skills that different anthropologists have include interviewing; excavating; mapping; analyzing data using various types of methodologies, including mixed methods (combining qualitative and quantitative methods); applying ethics in difficult, emerging situations; and engaging with new technologies in the sciences. All of these are 21st-century skills and resources. However, the most advantageous of an anthropologist’s skills is an attitude of respect and dignity toward diverse peoples everywhere. In our global world, this may be the most important asset of all. As anthropologist Tim Ingold says, anthropologists “study ... with people” and “learn from them, not just about them” (2018, 32).
How Anthropology Can Lead in the Future
Career and employment trends today align with what anthropologists do, whether or not one is a full-time practicing anthropologist. Students heading into any fields that address the human condition, past or present, will benefit from studies in anthropology. Within colleges and universities across the world, there is a reemergence of transdisciplinary approaches that utilize methods and perspectives from multiple disciplines to study and propose solutions to complex problems. This educational model, sometimes called the matrix model (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineers, and Institute of Medicine 2005), has resulted in the development of new interdisciplinary degree programs such as the biomedical informatics program at Stanford University; the Indigenous food, energy, and water systems program at the University of Arizona; and the science, medicine, and technology in culture program at Union College. Training in anthropological holism is the ideal foundation for working in teams with multiple interests and a shared focus on the larger context. Specifically, the four-field approach in anthropology prepares researchers to apply a keen perception of the ways in which biology and culture interact and influence each other.
With the increasing prominence of social media and grassroots communication across cultures, it is important that emerging leaders have the ability to interview people, elicit relevant information from them, and analyze what they think, do, and desire. Anthropologists are trained to interact with others, seek connections and patterns in what they observe, and analyze the symbolic significance of what they find.
Anthropologists are also trained to work in the field, wherever and whatever the field may be, taking their offices and research labs into the communities in which they work and live. Accustomed to being flexible and adaptable to the needs of the situation and letting the field dictate how best to accomplish their work, anthropologists have the skills, technology, and experience to work well in a global community.
In the 20th century, academia sought to become ever more specialized, constructing departments, specialties, and subspecialties to home in on very particular subjects such as a disease, a genre of literature, or a type of religion. This approach was an advance over the more generalist approach that was common in the 19th century, in which academics were trained in very broad fields such as medicine, ancient history, or culture. Now, in the 21st century, the shift is toward a more complex and multifaceted understanding of how we live and the challenges we face. Many anthropology programs today provide vocational skills and workplace training. There is a growing awareness that we need to develop the ability to think both generally and systematically (such as in an ecosystemic approach) while also seeking to understand the particularities of specific challenges. Anthropology, with its holistic approach, mixed methodology analyses, and deep, abiding appreciation of diversity and the dignity of all people, is situated at the crossroads of what comes next. This is how anthropology can guide us as we move into the future.
As Geertz said, “We have turned out to be rather good at waddling in” (1985, 624). Anthropological skills are based on flexibility and adaptation to a changing world, open-mindedness and openness to new ideas, and a willingness to engage with complex issues in order to find solutions to problems facing our world today. The anthropological skillset is critical in the 21st century.
