This piece was first published on EPIC on February 18, 2020.

– How did you two meet again?
– Let’s head back to the yacht club for sunset.
– What happened to that bottle of champagne?
– Please don’t fall off the boat.
– Live music doesn’t have the same raw character here.
– Tahni, go deal with your friend.
– What happened to that bottle of champagne?
– Please stop touching me.
– Haven’t you been paying attention to the news?
– You really shouldn’t drink anymore.
– We would make a beautiful couple.
– She’s an influencer in Korea, I hate that shit.
– His job is so cool!
– What happened to that bottle of champagne?
– I used to be polyamorous.
– I’ll call you whatever I want to call you.
– They act so adventurous, they didn’t even sit in the sand.
– You need to get in a taxi, now.
– WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE?!

What did happen to that bottle of champagne, I wonder. In fact, I never knew of it in the first place. That bottle whose presence, or rather—whose absence—persists months later. That miserable hour, the one which was punctuated by an even more miserable half-of-an-hour, sways cold and creaky in the memory of my bones, brutal in its relentlessness. I sat next to him on top of the drink cooler, rife with anxiety over the way he was touching me and speaking to me, incessantly asking for that elusive bottle of champagne. I could no more escape the necessity of professionalism during fieldwork than I could flee the boat as it crawled through the water towards shore. Or that was the lie I told myself. I thought I was being brave, strong. And I’m not here to say that I wasn’t, or that someone else isn’t, brave and strong for enduring sexual harassment and assault in the name of protecting their work. I’m writing this, making a story public that I really don’t want to make public, being honest when I really don’t want to be honest, because even as I ignored my safety and my mental health in the name of the research, I didn’t want to be strong then and I don’t particularly want to be strong now.

I wanted to pretend that it didn’t happen, at least professionally, because I didn’t want the name of anthropology to be drug through the mud at the company I was doing this project for. I didn’t want to risk that the company would never again invest in ethnography because of the messiness that could ensue. Moreover, I did not want to risk the relationship with our other participants, and I certainly did not want the whole project to go bust. But I did not have the opportunity to contemplate the ethics of my silence for too long, as my story unwittingly made its way into the hands of both HR and senior employees at the company.

Silence, you see, does not make one a heroine. Silence is not generally considered a healthy coping strategy, as I was reminded by HR and the kind and gentle prodding of close friends who encouraged me to find healing by talking about what had happened. While I struggled with my own need for silence, the Kavanaugh trial raged on, and Christine Blasey Ford was rendered suspect because of her own choices regarding silence and vocalization. Between HR, well-meaning friends, and the entirety of the American media, #MeToo was too much. It exacerbated the anxiety.

A few years ago, I attended a conference at the University of Gent—The International Symposium on Gender and Sexuality—where I heard anthropologist Rachel Spronk speak about the desire for silence in the context of Ghanian same sex erotic practices (Spronk 2016). In her gentle yet authoritative way, Spronk contended that though silence is commonly understood in the West to connote suppression and destructiveness, silence could also be productive. Silence, she said, can be protective. She rightfully critiqued the Western tendency to construct the one-without-a-voice as the victim, in need of a hero (in her case, LGBTQI activists who sought to emancipate those they saw as “closeted” lesbians). But silence, Spronk reinforced, is productive, allowing her participants to have control of their knowledge and making space for them to occupy ambiguous and shifting positions in a way that made sense in the context of their lives.

I recognize the irony in the act of making public my desire for silence. As I debated whether or not to share about what I experienced, and if so, how I would communicate all that swirled within me, it came down to this: as much as I desired silence, very few anthropologists had written about sexual assault encountered in the field, and fewer still would have the audacity to suggest that sometimes what we need is to safeguard our silence. It basically goes against what anthropologists and activists alike stand for. However, I believe enough in the elasticity of our discipline to suggest that making voices heard is not always the answer.

The genesis of this reflection is exactly that: what is the answer? Between my attempts to block my aggressor’s advances, the moments of solitary emotional release in the lobby of the yacht club, and the contemplation I have done since, over and over I question what I should have done and how it is possible that I didn’t have a clue in the first place. While I had been excessively trained to recognize the constellations of power that explicitly or implicitly influence my research and the discipline of anthropology as a whole, I had never remotely considered what it might be like to be powerless in a tangible, bodily way, particularly during fieldwork. What’s more, I’m embarrassed to admit it.

I’m embarrassed about the whole thing actually.

My intention was to have the answers, spun brilliantly into a thought-provoking piece before EPIC2019, so that what I had to say could potentially make its way into conversations, if not into a salon discussion. I punished myself for not being able to get this piece written in time—another weird manifestation of the shame surrounding sexual assault—though others have been patient and kind towards me. This brings me to the first of my recent insights: there is permission to take time to process, and to process in the way that one needs to.

EPIC2019 did, in fact, end up being a turning point in my post-assault journey. I’m not sure if it was the wine that supported me in letting my guard down, or the striking sensation that I was in a safe space surrounded by other researchers and anthropologists who, by design, listen intently and treat others with gentle curiosity and empathy, but I was finally ready to invite others into my solitary dialogue. In doing so, I was able to dispel the self-myth that my choice of silence was somehow unhealthy or worse, selfish.

It started with a conversation about gender (because, of course) that led to my admittance that I don’t exactly feel female. I wasn’t trying to say that I feel male, but rather that I often don’t identify with feminine tropes like women’s empowerment, the glass ceiling, and #MeToo. This is not to say that I don’t find these concepts and experiences true or valuable, but only that they do not resonate with me personally. My listeners pressed graciously for more, and I felt the freedom that comes with knowing that when you speak, you will be understood.

Bringing up what happened to two new, yet trusted, friends began to give me space to settle into the silence I needed. I wasn’t pushed to talk; in fact, I was told that my response was a legitimate way to cope with and heal from what had happened. And there it was: legitimate. Legitimate was the sensation I hadn’t been able to allow myself. Was my experience of pain even legitimate? I hadn’t been through the true horrors that some women and men suffer at the hands of others. Was I legitimate in not wanting to tweet #MeToo, not wanting to pursue counseling via HR at the company, or not wanting to talk to all my close friends about it? I was, they said. One friend remarked that in our contemporary culture of outrage, we are expected to perform our outrage to our audiences—in person and online—in order to prove our alignment to a cause, a belief, a community. To have a cause, must it be shrouded in outrage? Do we have to publicly demonstrate our outrage for our experiences to be valid?

I no longer think so.

The morning following this conversation, I participated as an audience member in the panel discussion “Representation and Representative-ness.” We spent over an hour discussing who gets to represent whom and whether or not in practices of representation we are marginalizing others, even unintentionally. By the time we reached the Q&A, I started thinking about the practices of representation and the power dynamics present in my ongoing struggle to come to terms with my experience. By all observable standards, as a generally outspoken woman and an anthropologist perpetually concerned with reconfiguring existing arrangements of gender and power, it seems that it should be my role to speak up and speak out, willingly accepting a representation of myself as a victim of sexual assault. I wasn’t settled on this option, but my curiosity was piqued. This panel conversation put words to the question that existed within me, pre-symbolically, for a little over a year. I spoke it out loud.

“How do we think about the moments when voices do not want to be heard, when there seems to be an imperative to speak up and demand representation?”

Throughout the audience could be heard “hmms” and “huhs,” sounds that echoed a sense of realization and affirmation. My question was met with validation by a number of people during and after the session. The panelists interpreted the question in two ways: the first was to refer to victims of trauma for whom it may be difficult to speak to researchers, and the second concerned intersectional identities that one may not always want to represent. I found both interpretations to be insightful. One of the panelists in particular, spoke of the work of Audra Simpson on voice and refusal. In her work with indigenous communities in Canada, recognition and voice implicate the histories and legalities assigned to bodies, on which multiple sovereignties stake claims “to protect, to limit, to entrench” (Simpson 2007, 74). At stake for Simpson’s participants are matters of recognition tied to community membership, state citizenship, and the apportioning of subsequent rights—many of which are determined on the basis of bodies relating to other bodies—the ‘whiteness’ or ‘Indianness’ of mothers and fathers. Recognition requires a particular knowing of who one is or how one belongs, and articulating that knowing explicitly—structuring ‘voice’ according to a legal regime. According to Simpson, her participants’ refusal to speak is generative in that it accounts for the ways in which power delimits what counts as recognition. Refusal to speak is a critique on the relationship between ways of knowing, recognition, and power. Moreover, it both opens up and dignifies alternative forms of having ‘voice.’

In my case, power did not so much define recognition as it demanded it. Here again, legality mediates the relationship to voice in that I became legally obligated, vis-à-vis another colleague’s report, to make myself and my experience known to HR. As a person who had encountered danger, I was rendered a potentially dangerous person in the eyes of HR—the threat of a legal nightmare always looming. Voice, rather than being a conduit of agency, became a method of disempowerment. Physical violence had engendered symbolic violence. The sovereignty taken up by my employer assigned a particular form of recognition and voice based on the relation of my body to other bodies—that is, the other body that violated my own. Furthermore, such an act required a form of legal recognition and an undesired visibility and admittance into the community of those who had been assaulted in a work setting. Visibility was certainly the last thing I desired from the whole situation. In this way, my experience deviates from that of Simpson’s participants in that belonging and recognition was not my aim, yet refusal to establish voice on the matter is the means by which I sought to achieve my sense of security and path to healing.

This brings me to the heart of the matter and reason why I decided to publish my reflections and anxieties: I want to problematize the notion that agency always equals visibility (or recognition or voice), or that it always means representation. The work of Rachel Spronk and Audra Simpson endow my argument with a theoretical backbone while encouraging us to think about the ways in which we understand our participants and their potential desires for silence or refusal. What they do not touch upon is how we may also negotiate our representations as researchers who bring our bodies and our multitudinous identities with us into and out of the field. Reflexivity, speaking truth to power, and ethical representation remain core anthropological values and as those who have the privilege to engage with the human experience in such an intimate way, we must be committed to these values. But how can we productively think through the moments when the voices that don’t want to be heard, or the identities and narratives that don’t want to be taken up, belong to us?

References

Greene, Amber, Jordan Kraemer, Donna Lanclos, Ruchika Muchhala, & Autumn Sanders Foster. 2019. “Representation and Representative-ness.” Panel convened November 11 at EPIC2019, Providence, RI. https://www.epicpeople.org/panel-representation-representative-ness/

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ And Colonial Citizenship”. Junctures: The Journal For Thematic Dialogue 9: 67-80. https://junctures.org/index.php/junctures/article/view/66/60.

Spronk, Rachel. 2017. “Invisible Desires In Ghana And Kenya: Same-Sex Erotic Experiences In Cross-Sex Oriented Lives”. Sexualities 21 (5-6): 883-898. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716677284.

The post Do I Have to #MeToo? The Productivity of Silence in Instances of Sexual Harassment and Assault in Field Research appeared first on Tahni Candelaria.

It’s a process that I put off for months. Partially because I was working on some very intense projects, but mostly because I hate this shit. The contemporary practice of condensing complex human experience into 1-2 pages of buzzwords and trendy skillsets to be scanned by software for some arbitrary words that likely do not accurately represent the duties that will be performed or the reality of the job itself annoys me, and worse, makes me incredibly anxious. How can I know that I’ve chosen the words and phrases that hiring managers want to see? Can I be sure they will understand the diversity of the experiences that I’ve had and that I promise I’m actually an interesting person with a lot to bring to the team?! 

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to considering networking the most effective way to get work but nonetheless, CVs and portfolios have symbolic value and I have not yet worked up the courage to refuse to comply with a cultural practice I disdain. Earlier today, while having yet another modest nervous breakdown in trying to update my CV and build an online portfolio, I realized that if there is any skill I have mastered, it is taking a large amount of data and analyzing it to produce meaningful and actionable insight (take that industry buzzwords! ). 

I decided to turn the task into a mini cultural analysis, the kind I am used to doing as part of my work. For months years, I’ve been reading articles, blog posts, job postings and the like, trying to absorb all the knowledge on what my skills are as an anthropologist and how I can put them into practice. I have Evernotes filled with snippets from podcasts, books, and articles. But I have never systematically analyzed all this information, and I’m a little ashamed that it took this long for the idea to come to me. No matter. This is how I did it, but if you have other ideas or have tried other things, please feel free to add your thoughts below, or shoot me an email.

1. You will need a method for analyzing the data that you compile. In university, I was fortunate enough to have access to Nvivo, which I no longer have (don’t get me started on barriers to access, especially for the most vulnerable, like the unemployed) ((and no I’m not trying to imply I’m among the most disadvantaged populations)). Thankfully, there are affordable alternatives. I’ve done a little bit of research on options and so far, I’m most pleased with Dedoose. Otherwise, if you have a method using Word/Excel/Evernote/Numbers/Pages/whatever, go for it! 

2. Start gathering job postings from LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, EPIC, or any other source you use. They should be jobs that you would love to do, or at least think there is a possibility you would like. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you have all the skills yet that might be needed for the job. For me, the idea behind this is that the language that is used in creating job descriptions and postings is perhaps the same language I should use in the documents that I am presenting to companies. As anthropologists, we are attuned to the language and symbolic meanings that are present in the cultures we study, thus it can be valuable to extend this same practice to the culture(s) of the labor market.

3. I wanted to bring in data from sources other than job postings. Inspired by this job search post (again, thanks dev community!), I decided to pull in information from the LinkedIn profiles of those already doing the kind of work I want to do, as well as companies that I might like to work for. But it need not stop there. You could also import for analysis the portfolios of others, blog posts and articles about the work you want to do, transcripts from interviews and podcasts about the work. The list goes on. The extent to which you do this and the amount of data that you want to bring in is completely up to the time and energy you want to invest. 

4. Before really diving into the analysis phase, I created a few parent codes to stand in as the overall themes I was exploring for answers on how to represent myself linguistically in my CV, portfolio, and cover letters. These were the codes I created initially, knowing that others would likely emerge during analysis, and that the real meat of the analysis would be in the child codes that would fall under these parent codes/categories:

• Job Responsibilities
• Skills/Experience Needed
• Company Culture
• Describing the Work
• Phrases I LOVE

The idea behind creating these parent codes/categories is to help give me a framework for the types of language that I am looking to acquire. If I want to understand how I need to articulate the experiences I already have into compatible job responsibilities or experience descriptions, then it will be easier for me if I am looking for the trends in this language from the outset. They also match how most job postings are structured, and thus the overall themes of what I need to touch on in applying to a place (or in having a conversation while networking). I wanted to create a *starred* category so that I could make sure I would pull out that phrasing when writing letters or my CV, so I thought it would be fun to add a code called ‘Phrases I LOVE’.

5. At this point, I started pulling in my data and coding each source as I went along, adding child codes to the parent codes I already created. By the time I was coding through my second or third posting, I was already starting to see trends and gain an understanding of how I might frame the experience that I have. Some other parent codes that emerged for me while coding were:

• Personality Traits
• Interests
• About the Company

6. After pulling in the sources I wanted to analyze (I brought in only 16 because I’m working against a deadline — I have to bring my portfolio to a review session in a couple of days), I started coding. Generally I like to have at least 2 passes at coding because in the process of the first pass, you are discovering the codes and themes that are relevant and therefore need to return to the early coded sources after making your way through the data to the end. But because this is more of a quick and fun project to help jumpstart my portfolio and CV writing, I stuck to one pass through. Even with one pass it becomes very clear the cultural archetypes that job descriptions and LinkedIN profiles are complicit in producing. On a visceral level, it became difficult for me not to feel stressed about whether or not I could live up to the creative, multi-tasking, highly-experienced, entertainingly communicative, brilliant thinker that every single job seems to be seeking. There are definite language patterns and a clear cadence to the ways in which postings are generally written. 

7. My next step was to do a very simple analysis of the results, drawing out the most frequently used themes and concepts. There is no shortage of tools within Dedoose and other software to analyze for a variety of different factors and questions, but for my purposes, understanding which skills, responsibilities, and experiences were most prevalent would help me understand what to emphasize and the wording to use in writing my portfolio. I clicked over to the Analyze tab in Dedoose and under ‘Qualitative Charts’ I clicked ‘Code Application’ which allowed me to see total code counts as well as their distribution amongst the sources. 

8. Looking at the totals, it seemed that any code that was applied 5 or more times, would be relevant for my consideration. I ended up with a total of 95 codes, 14 (or about 15%) of which were applied 5 or more times. (Here you also must be careful to take a look at the distribution of the codes across the sources, if a code was applied 7 times, but it was only in one source, that does not actually demonstrate high saturation). Of course, 95 codes is far more than one would need for a different kind of analysis, but the reason I ended up with such a high code count was because I was very detailed. I made this decision because I am looking for really specific language and ways to articulate my skills, and I also wanted to account for multiple perspectives. For example, a job posting might require “an understanding of various research methods and when to apply each method for the best results” whereas a LinkedIN profile might state ” I structure and manage mixed methods research projects accounting for client needs.” Both statements could easily fall under a code named something like “Understanding of Research Methods”, but combining them in this way would not account for the recruiting perspective versus the experienced professional perspective. Additionally, the nuance that emerges from the professional’s perspective regarding applying knowledge to client needs or to the design and implementation of projects would be disregarded. 

For a relatively quick reference on coding FAQs, this article is very helpful!

9. Here are the codes that I identified to be the most relevant for the types of jobs or projects I would be interested in working on:

• Parent Code: Job Responsibilities 
  • Communicate with Clients
  • Cultural Analysis
  • Generate Insights
  • Qualitative Research
  • Reporting Findings
  • Research Design
  • Strategy
• Parent Code: LinkedIN Profile Job Responsibilities
  • Creating Insight
  • Identify Opportunities
• Parent Code: Skills/Experience Needed
  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Presentation
  • Creativity
  • Understanding of Research Methods

10. At this point, the analysis requires interpretation, followed by action. What I interpret from my results is that the job responsibilities/experiences that I need to emphasize are those that demonstrate my research design and execution experiences, my communication with and reporting to clients, my outputs phrased in terms of generating insight and developing strategy, and the ways in which I have leveraged cultural analysis in my work. I can see that professionals with jobs that I would love to have talk about their achievements with regards to creating insights and identifying opportunities. Lastly, making mention of my experiences in collaboration, communication, presenting, or showing my creativity and understanding of various methods, would strengthen my portfolio. 

Having identified what is potentially most important to talk about, I can then go back into Dedoose and read the excerpts I assigned to each of these codes to find language that will help get me started in articulating these experiences for myself. I also have the code “Phrases I LOVE” to return to for the phrases or explanations I found to be particularly powerful or clear. 

I hope this has helped! If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out or comment below. 

The post How I Used My Skills as a Researcher to Craft my Applied Anthropology CV + Portfolio appeared first on Tahni Candelaria.

Most of these communities, if not all, also have annual conferences.

EPIC – EPIC is a thriving global community of practitioners doing ethnography for impact in businesses and organizations.

EASA – EASA is a professional association open to all social anthropologists either qualified in, or else working in, Europe. The Association seeks to advance anthropology in Europe by organizing biennial conferences, by editing its academic journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, its Newsletter and the two publication series. 

SfAA – The Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) represents the interests of professionals in a wide range of work settings — academia, business, law, health and medicine, public and government, etc. Members come from a variety of disciplines — anthropology, sociology, economics, business, planning, medicine, nursing, law, and other related social/behavioral sciences. The unifying factor is a commitment to the mission of our association – professionals from a variety of backgrounds who are making an impact on the quality of life in the world today.

AAA – The American Anthropological Association is the world’s largest scholarly and professional organization of anthropologists. The Association is dedicated to advancing human understanding and applying this understanding to the world’s most pressing problems.

Business Anthropology Initiative – This is a venue for sharing knowledge and resources, making connections, and advancing careers and education in business anthropology.

NAPA – The National Association for the Practice of Anthropology is a membership organization for those who apply and practice anthropology in a range of contexts, whether as practitioners, academics, or students. NAPA was founded in 1983 to promote the interests of practicing anthropologists and further the practice of anthropology as a profession.

Anthrodesign – An online community that has formed to talk about anthropology and design.  Members are interested in the role of applied anthropology in the corporate, public sector, and medical contexts.  Not all participants are anthropologists, but all share the common interest of applying ethnographic techniques and social sciences theory to industrial, software, and other types of product and organizational design.

CONFERENCES

WWNA – Why The World Needs Anthropologists is a provocatively titled annual showdown, bursting out of the intersections of human-centred, critically oriented academia and innovative creative industries.

Anthropology + Technology Conference – The Anthropology + Technology conference exists to create dialogue around important topics. The conference has been curated to help leading technology companies understand the value of combining teams of technologists with social scientists, and to create a forum for leaders from both fields to network and share ideas.

BLOGS

The Ethnographic Mind – Exploring ethnographic thinking in all its forms.

Antropología 2.0 – Antropología 2.0 blog aims to be a reference space for the practical, ethical and methodological development of Business Anthropology worldwide. Our aim is to make corporate anthropology a fundamental part of people-centred innovation.

Living Anthropologically‘s Master List of Anthropology blogs – here.

Podcasts

This Anthro Life – This Anthro Life is a conversational and interview podcast exploring humanity’s creative potential through design, culture, design and technology. 

The Human Show – In the following podcasts we ask social scientists and practitioners from all over the world to consider the same question:

“What is the nature of people’s relationship to communicative and interactive technology? What is the role ethics, power, agency and trust play in the making and performance of that relationship?”

SfAA Podcast Project – The SfAA Podcast Project is a student-led initiative to provide audio records of sessions from the Annual Meetings to the public, free of charge. We strive to include a broad range of interests from diverse perspectives with the intent of extending conversations throughout the years. 

Anthropod – AnthroPod is the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. Our episodes explore conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical issues across the discipline, while striving to make anthropology more widely accessible to all publics.

Bookshelf

Coming soon. :)

The post Resources for Applied Anthropologists appeared first on Tahni Candelaria.

[image credit: www.google.com]

Two months ago I joined a group of some colleagues here in Brussels for an after work apéro on a trendy terrace in Place Fernand Cocq. Seated cozily around rustic wooden tables, colorful lights draped overhead while cigarette smoke floated lazily, exhaled in the breaths between conversation points. The four of them work for a campaign against corruption in Europe, and as an anthropologist I was somewhat of an outsider. On a normal day, this wouldn’t have bothered me. After all, most people are not aware of what exactly an anthropologist is, and if they are, they certainly aren’t used to having the anthropological perspective represented at the table, so to speak. In this situation however, I should not have been an outsider. Annika, who I met just that evening, responded with a high five and an exuberant “YES!” upon finding out that I am an anthropologist. As it turns out, she is also trained in anthropology and now works in the quote-unquote real world. Thinking myself to have found an ally, I excitedly inquired about her fieldwork and how she finds our field helpful in her job now. Her response was more-or-less the following:

“I did my fieldwork in Tanzania for the 50th anniversary of independence, all the celebrations and everything organized by the government.”

“Oh! That must have been so interesting. Looking at how the state reinforces its legitimacy and uses celebrations as a nation-building project,” I replied in earnest.

“Actually, it was a waste of time. No one cares about Tanzania, so it’s not useful to the world at all,” she said, while I could feel my heart sinking in my chest. She continued, “I used to think everything had something to do with culture, but now I realize that anthropology is only useful for academia. No one cares about anthropologists and what they have to say.”

Incensed, I calmed myself inwardly before responding. It is one thing for those outside of academia to doubt the impact that anthropology may have on the world, but it is an entirely different animal when anthropologists themselves do not believe we have anything to say or contribute. Clearly, the road ahead continues be fraught with difficulty. However, this should not prevent us from inching forward, forging an anthropology that is engaged in the world, not imprisoned in the ivory tower. While the future of the discipline has been debated nearly since its inception, we have always found a way to weather the storm, usually coming out stronger on the other side.

Anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, recognizing the general disorientation of scholars and the public when trying to define anthropology, attempted a rather persuasive explanation in his 2010 article Diversity Is Our Business.¹ Hannerz suggests that we identify our brand, to think about it in contemporary terms. That brand, he proposes, is diversity— past, present, and future. Hannerz makes the case that, regardless of the specific subject matter, our work chronicles the endless and ever-changing ways of thinking and experiencing the world.  This leads us to be concerned, he continues, with the entirety of humanity and the varying conditions in which people live and make their lives. The question then becomes, what are we to do with this knowledge? Hannerz concludes, and I argue alongside him, that anthropology must “reach circles in which there may be no strong curiosity about what we do but that can still affect the circumstances of our lives.”² It is a matter of human rights, he explains, to recognize and affirm the right for people to be, act, and think as they do (limited of course by justice for others).

As an anthropologist in the wild (read: outside of academia), I regularly inject a voice of dissent into conversations carried out over drinks, dinner, or at the proverbial water cooler in my Brussels work space.  This is of course one way to challenge the status quo and demand that alterity be taken seriously. Like my colleague Annika, I believe that an insulated anthropology is in fact a waste of time. Instead, and in the space of this blog, I opt for an anthropology that moves further beyond the avenues of communication usually traveled within academia. This requires engagement with the public, wherever the public is, about subjects with which the public is concerned.

[image credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/world/africa/election-in-tanzania-to-challenge-half-a-century-of-one-party-rule.html]

Where Annika and I will part ways is that I do think Tanzania matters. It certainly matters to its 55.6 million inhabitants, and if it doesn’t, perhaps we can ask why. At the very least, studying with Tanzanians as they celebrate 50 years of independence is part of the picture of human diversity I have just outlined. At most, we can learn something about what it means for people to have been colonized and then 50 years later celebrate the end of that colonization. We can ask: how is post-colonialism really experienced? What does it mean to celebrate it? Who are those involved in the celebrations, what are their roles, and what does it mean for them? And that is only the beginning.

This introductory post only scratches the surface of the discipline and what it can accomplish. In the posts that will follow, I will continue to sketch exactly what it is that anthropologists do and why they are indispensable if we aim to make the world a better place (as I suspect many of us do). I intend to explain anthropology as clearly as possible, but moreover will endeavor to demonstrate the anthropological perspective and potential contribution.

I do not claim to speak for all anthropologists, nor would all agree with my vision of anthropology as laid out and I do not see this as a problem. In fact, the opposite is true. The discipline garners strength from its diversity of theory, opinions, and practices.³ After all, to be an anthropologist is to defend the right to think, act, and be different.

 [image credit: https://www.facebook.com/wildthings/]

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