Anthropology in Action

In Australia, research resourcing might come from parties dedicated to addressing issues in the public interest, such as smoking cessation and alcohol regulation. The associations researchers have with those parties are regarded in quite different terms than, say, a research relationship that is forged with the tobacco or alcohol industries themselves. Agreeing to work with the latter ‘bad’ players would indubitably raise the liveliest of suspicions among fellow researchers, while associations with the former ‘good’ players are often regarded as in the service of good academic citizenship that helps bring about positive changes to the world, something that is often a key moral, as well as funding and publications, driver for researchers. We argue that such polar classification bears anthropological inspection and a radical rethink. The consequences of not so doing risk shutting down areas in which anthropological enquiry is urgently needed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, two contrasting images quickly became representative of the crisis. On the one hand, there were heroic doctors working day and night with the novel virus, risking their lives and making sacrifices to save others. On the other, there were ‘anti-maskers’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’: people doubting if the virus is real, questioning the effectiveness of protective measures, suspicious that the crisis is nothing more than an elaborate plot, a scam aimed to redesign their world and to destroy the values they hold dear. Reflecting on research conducted in Ireland with people separated by the conspiratorial divide, this paper examines some methodological and analytical challenges of doing simultaneous research with opposing stakeholders. Analysing my own entanglements in the conflicts over vaccines and conspiracy theories in this paper I argue that the pandemic was not just a battle to secure the acceptability of specific medical technology (the COVID-19 vaccine) but was also about safeguarding respectability of science and maintaining the rule of experts. It was about preventing ontological turn, the end of the era of reason, a dawn of modernity.

In our contemporary era, anthropologists are increasingly tasked with studying crises of scale—that is, studying issues related to existential threats such as ecological degradation, inequality, and suffering amid landscapes of uncertainty. Such work takes an emotional toll that is rarely acknowledged in anthropological literature. In this article, using our work on plastics as a lens, we ask what anthropologists have to offer that is of real problem-solving value and how they can sustain their resilience during such engagement. We proffer a stance that we term ‘pragmatic melioration’, which focuses on harm reduction and problem solving (albeit imperfect) in the messiness of the here-and-now, and speak to how such a stance has helped us stay motivated despite reflexive distress.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), being values-based organisations pose a particular set of issues for academic researchers when working with them. NGOs often engage with universities to provide academic credibility to evaluate the effectiveness of their fieldwork. At the same time, they are nervous about two things: that the evaluation will shatter their belief, they are doing good work, rather than the outcome will always be lauded by some, loathed by others. The second fear is that the NGO being held accountable to donors for activities which are long term and slow in showing sustainable change. This article will draw on the literature as well as my own experiences to explore these issues. My key finding is that the farther away (geographically) from the work an NGO is, the greater in the self-belief of their work. The closer to the local communities NGOs are, they tend to have a tempered view of their work. The article will conclude with some reflections on how a more fruitful dialogue can occur between the two.

In recent years, anthropology has become a buzz word in the corporate world. Companies such as Google have hired anthropologists for research and product design while marketing consultancies such as Red Associates have built their brands around anthropological methods. Yet, corporate anthropologists such as myself occupy an uneasy space within anthropology. Despite the discipline's internal commitment to reflexivity of its complicity in broader hegemonies, on the ‘outside’ when communicating to the public, the pristine figure of a ‘noble anthropologist’—acting to make the world a better place, free from influence and self-interest—is often evoked. While some applied anthropologists conform to this image of the ‘noble anthropologist’, the corporate anthropologist often does not. In the context of decreasing student numbers and dissolving departments for anthropologists working in the academy, I consider how a pragmatic and entrepreneurial approach to securing corporate work, while not necessarily ‘noble’, might still be ‘good’.

H. Glenn Penny, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021, ISBN: 9780691211145, 234 pp., Hb. £25.00, $29.95

Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021, ISBN 978-0-6911-9927-6, 480 pp., Pb. £74.00, $95.00