Beyond Anthropology's Edges

Debunking the ‘Noble Anthropologist’, Practicing Pragmatism, and Embracing Entrepreneurialism

in Anthropology in Action
Author:
Cynthia Sear PhD candidate, University of Melbourne, Australia

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Abstract

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’.

In the height of Melbourne's fourth COVID-19 inspired lockdown of 2021, I received an unsolicited email from a Will Slater, CEO of 50 Crates, an Australian brand and strategy consultancy. The email began with Slater's admission that my name had appeared via an online search of anthropologists working in relation to advertising, business, and marketing and, further, that he had enjoyed an opinion piece I had written for the Sydney Morning Herald (Sear 2020). Slater had then explained that his agency had over 30 years of experience supporting business leaders to ‘connect and resonate’ with their customers and that, ‘As you are no doubt aware, business leaders are starting to recognise the importance of deep cultural understanding. We help them uncover it’. Given the importance of understanding culture and human behaviour for his business, he expressed his interest in finding an individual trained in anthropology to collaborate with.

Six months later, following several ‘virtual coffees’ in which Slater and I discussed over Zoom what such an engagement might look like, I joined the 50 Crates team in person to provide training for their staff on how to employ anthropological theories and methods in their work. In addition to this staff training, I have been working with Slater as regards specific clients, across industries such as construction and tourism, to support these organisations in incorporating anthropologically informed insights into their business strategies. Finally, the relationship has involved reviewing and augmenting the firm's existing intellectual property to ensure that their approach in ‘uncovering deep cultural understanding’ reflects and employs anthropological methods and theories.

As per Slater's email, such an engagement is by no means unique, and indeed, commentators of the discipline have enthusiastically reported the hiring of anthropologies at global companies such as Google, Nissan, and IBM, while anthropologists have reputedly conducted research for General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and Mars (Morais and Brody 2018 in Strang 2021: 117). My personal journey to the discipline, as I have written elsewhere (Sear 2021), came through my employment as a research consultant for the Melbourne- and New York-based research firm Forethought. Our client, Canon, had requested an ethnographic study concerning the new world of imagery ushered in by the increasing sophistication of smartphone cameras and the growing ubiquity of Instagram and other image-focused forms of social media. With a team of psychologists but no specialist in ethnography nor anthropology, I was inspired to learn more about this then-strange discipline, and I was supported by Forethought in my application for the master of science in anthropology at the University of Oxford. Seven years on and with the strange now feeling familiar, I have fortuitously found myself within the growing but undersupplied market of corporate anthropology whilst also working within the University of Melbourne as a researcher on both internally and externally funded projects.

Despite feeling fortunate to be able to work within and across these worlds, I confess that in translating my corporate work for anthropological audiences, I have often felt self-conscious and uncomfortable. In the writing of this chapter, for example, I have inwardly cringed at certain phrases and expressions which I suspect may evoke the ire and cynicism of the principally academic anthropologist reader (e.g. ‘engagement’, ‘insights’ and ‘capitalise’). My positionality, as an ‘amphibious’ anthropologist (see Hoffman 2011: 450; Powell and Sandholtz 2019)—working across the corporate and academic worlds and using my experience in either for gain in the other—has meant that my language is often unironically peppered with what Wright and Rabo (2010) would call ‘weasel words’: words which have been used to ‘label, motivate and coerce faculty…toward specific practices within the new rationality of governance [within universities] (Hoffman 2011: 447–448). Beyond language, other elements of my habitus within these fields (Bourdieu 1990) have inspired in me considerable contemplation and at times vexation. At university events and disciplinary conferences, for example, I have been careful to not appear ‘too corporate’ nor too bold in both dress and manner, in stark contrast to the forthright professional I endeavour to be in meetings with business executives. While this contrast is surely compounded by the relative social capital I enjoy in academia versus the corporate world—where I am a mere PhD candidate as opposed to a consultant with more than a decade of experience—I have long suspected that this discomfort evinces a broader truth about anthropology as a discipline and the positioning of the corporate researcher within it.

Supporting this suspicion, I am reputedly not alone in experiencing such unease. In Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life (2021), Gillian Tett recounts travelling to Davos for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum to meet danah boyd, an anthropologist who had been hired by Microsoft to conduct research amongst young social media users. Tett describes how ‘like other anthropologists I had once studied among, she looked defiantly scruffy…[boyd] insisted, I later learned, on writing her name in lowercase as a protest against unnecessary Western cultural norms; like many anthropologists, she was instinctively anti-establishment and countercultural. But her badge designated her as one of the Davos elite: a so-called Young Global Leader. She often fretted about that paradox’ (2021:142). A second anecdote offered by Tett somewhat validates this fretting. Kathi Kitner, an anthropologist working at Intel recounts sharing a cigarette with an anthropologist who had asked her, ‘How do you continue as an anthropologist and work at a place like Intel?’ (ibid.: 51). Kitner had explained that ‘I knew what she meant…don't you hate having to sell out people's lives for a corporate profit?’ (ibid.).

In this article, I address this discomfort and disgust to propose in Douglasian fashion (Douglas 1986) that the corporate anthropological researcher is often ‘matter out of place’ and that, relatedly, pragmatism and entrepreneurialism are typically ‘dirty’ words in relation to the public profile of anthropologists. I discuss this ‘system’ using the analogy of anthropology's edges to connote the differentiating factors of anthropology as well as its hang-ups and, further, its black-box-esque inscrutability to outsiders. I propose that anthropologists embrace movements beyond these edges, both through the pragmatic realisation that the discipline has been de-valued by the neoliberal university and because of the opportunistic understanding that there is increasingly outside interest for the discipline. To support this entrepreneurism and the traversing of boundaries entailed by such movements, I present my personal, speculative agenda for evaluating the ethics of corporate anthropological engagements.

I organise this argument in three parts. First, I contextualise the peculiarity of the anthropological imagination and these edges. By briefly examining the discipline's knotty relationship with its past, I describe how discussions of its role in public life have been bounded by the outward construction of the ‘noble anthropologist’. This construction, I argue, renders the corporate anthropologist problematic, as a figure that does not readily fit the description of ‘noble’. Second, I explore how this boundary making can limit discussion of the ethics of corporate anthropology and the reach of the discipline more broadly, as public discussions of pragmatism and entrepreneurialism are rejected as ‘dirty’. Finally, I propose a speculative agenda for pursuing applied anthropological work in corporate settings via a discussion of how the work I am currently undertaking with 50 Crates addresses this criterion. This article is demonstrably personal, drawing on my experiences moving between the worlds of academia and business; however, I have drawn on academic and popular anthropological literature where appropriate to illustrate the broader evidence of these ideas. I am hopeful that it will inspire others working between these worlds to critically consider the work they conduct, pursue, and promote.

But first a note on nomenclature. By ‘corporate anthropologist’ I am referring to an applied anthropologist hired to support the aims of corporations. In my case this typically means conducting research for express business objectives. For example, I may be hired by a food company to understand how to market their cereals better or what type of new foods they could produce for a particular group of people. More commonly, however, I am hired through research, strategy, or advertising agencies to support them in delivering research for various companies. Through these engagements I have worked across a diverse range of both service and product industries, including aged care, telecommunications, banking, supermarkets, technology, insurance, hospitality, frozen foods, and coffee.

Anthropology's Edges and the Construction of the ‘Noble Anthropologist’

As Alan Bernard concludes in History and Theory in Anthropology, ‘anthropology is a discipline very conscious of its past’ (2000: 184). In undergraduate degrees, the discipline's beginnings through colonialism and ongoing imbrication within systems of inequality are indispensable aspects of curricula. From evolutionism to the Decolonial Turn, anthropologists-in-training are taught to be reflexive of their positionality and the messiness of disentangling their practice from broader hegemonies. In marketing the discipline to the outside, however, such complexity and self-consciousness can be difficult to ‘sell’. I recall, for example, crafting a presentation to promote the anthropological discipline to prospective undergraduates and high school career advisers visiting the University of Melbourne. To follow the ‘What is anthropology?’ slide, I had pasted the famous image of Bronislaw Malinowski sitting on a log with men from the Trobriand Islands, and had, in a practice presentation run-through organised by the department, described how the discipline was born out of the colonial endeavour. Following my presentation, the group had agreed that it was best not to ‘lead with the negative’ and I had deleted the slide, instead framing the Tim Ingold quote, ‘anthropology is philosophy with people in it’ (2018: 4) with images of groups of people, working in call centres, drinking alcohol, protesting, and doing other supposedly social and cultural activities. By the day of the presentation, I had removed all references to colonialism, an omission which I have since interpreted as an exercise in boundary making. The thorny topic of anthropology's past, my omission suggested, was for those who studied and worked inside the discipline, and not something we wanted to overtly discuss with its ‘public’, that is, our prospective students. Instead, as I describe in this section, for those on the ‘outside’ of the anthropological academy, the discipline is often represented by those within via the figure of the ‘noble anthropologist’. That is, a Boasian hero, making the world ‘safe for differences’ (Benedict 1974: 15): inspiring tolerance, empathy, and self-reflection amongst all who encounter them. I discuss this disconnect between anthropology's ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and, using the analogy of anthropology's ‘edges’, I describe how this boundary renders the corporate anthropologist as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1986). But first, a brief history to contextualise how this boundary and its related edges came about.

The epistemological foundations of anthropology date back to antiquity and are heavily indebted to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (Barnard 2000: 15–26; Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 1–15). Notably, in the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne published Of Cannibals (c. 1580), his observations of mankind considering conversations with the Tupinamba people of Brazil. In precursor to what would three centuries later become known by the terms ‘ethnocentrism’ and its opposite ‘cultural relativism’ de Montaigne observed that ‘everyone calls barbaric, that which is not of his own custom’ (de Montaigne 1580; see discussions in Harvey 2012: 70 and Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 6). De Montaigne's conjuration of le bon sauvage ‘noble savage’ within Of Cannibals was later famously adopted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) to describe the purity and innocence of man before the corrupting influence of civilisation (Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 12). The non-Western ‘Other’ was hence depicted as a more authentic and noble form of humanity prompting Rousseau to write that ‘man was born free but is everywhere in chains’ (Rousseau 1762 quoted in ibid.).

Despite the ‘study of man’ being a preoccupation of Enlightenment, anthropology did not materialise as a distinct area of scholarship until the mid-nineteenth century (Barnard 2000: 15–26). With the expansion of British colonialism in this period, reports of ‘strange’ and ‘savage’ peoples from around the world became more widely available and, galvanised by enthusiasm for Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species (1859), questions of human ‘nature’ as well as culture captured the scientific as well as popular imagination (see Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 17), In the early twentieth century as evolutionism fell out of favour and was replaced by functionalism, diffusionism, and later structuralism, the image of the ‘anthropologist as hero’ (Sontag 1966; see also Stocking 1989) emerged, intrepidly venturing in the wild unknown of faraway lands. As George Stocking has explored, this ‘ethnographicization’ (1989: 4), by which famous figures such as Malinowski and Margaret Mead navigate islands and Claude Levi-Strauss is subsumed within the jungle, is testament to the influence of Romanticism in anthropology's development.

In the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the broader social and political movements of this era, anthropology experienced its first significant wave of introspection and critical self-reflection. The revival of Marxism, the popularisation of Feminism and the release of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) prompted anthropologists to turn their gaze critically towards the academy (Pels and Nencel 1991: 6) and their previous scientism and positivism, in a move that has not abated since. Importantly, acknowledgement of the anthropologists’ complicity in colonialism and the unflattering sobriquet as ‘scientific colonialism’ (Asad 1973; Pels 1997) came to the fore in this period, prompting a reactionary activism as anthropologists sought to atone for the sins of their forebears and sponsors.

Accordingly, a revised vision of the heroic anthropologist, this time nobly representing the interests of the exotic peoples’ they study, became a popular figure in the 1970s. Thus, as Peter Pels has described: ‘reinventions of anthropology [in this period] often used images of colonialism as their cutting edge’ (1997: 164). The Literary Turn in the 1980s, propelled by postmodernism and post-structuralism, heralded an intensified interest in the ‘poetics and politics’ of ethnographic writing while questioning the legitimacy and authority of the anthropologist (see Clifford and Marcus 1986). As Adam Kuper described ‘who needs a white American male to give voice to an Inuit Shaman, who elected some donnish European to speak for the Melanesian big man?’ (1994: 544).

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the anthropology of colonialism, also known as the ‘anthropology of anthropology’, led by works from Nicholas Dirks (1992), Peter Pels (1997), George Stocking (1991), Johannes Fabian (1983), and Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992) further challenged the discipline by demonstrating that anthropology remained inextricable from colonialism. As Peter Pels described: the ‘discipline descends from and is still struggling with the techniques of observation and control that emerged from the colonial dialectic of Western governmentality’ (1997: 164). To that end, the idea of discrete ‘cultures’ was derived from colonial planning (Dirks 1992), the anthropological method and its prioritisation of observation reflects the ocular-centrism of Western scientific analysis (Fabian 1983), the presentism of ethnographic writing denies the coevalness of the researcher ‘s world with those researched (ibid.) and the Western centricity of the discipline reinforces Western epistemological domination (Chakrabarty 1992). Famously, Bernard Cohn's historiographical work in India also concluded that anthropologists had not only reported on the caste system but also, in part, created these divisions, thus exposing the damaging consequences of a Western tendency towards taxonomy (Cohn 2020). Thus, this branch of anthropology, which sought to promote a ‘historical consciousness’ was in part ‘vindicated’ (Pels 2008: 291) by the release of Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (2000). Written by Peter Tierney, a journalist trained in anthropology, the book sensationally claimed that the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James Neel had on multiple occasions acted against the interests of the Yanomani people in South America, amongst whom they were researching. The release of Darkness in El Dorado (2000) and the subsequent unflattering media spotlight on the discipline prompted a revision of anthropological societies’ ethical guidelines (see Lamphere 2003), adjustments which I will discuss in the final section of this article.

More recently, the imbrication of the discipline within capitalism and the Anthropocene has ensured that such self-reflexivity remains an important and ongoing project. Ryan Cecil Jobson's ‘The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn’ (2020) an American Anthropologist ‘Year in Review’ article, for example, opens with a vivid description of the 2018 American Anthropological Association (AAA) conference held amidst the smoke and fires of San Jose in California. As Jobson writes:

Individual responses to the smoke varied. Some colleagues opted out of the meeting altogether to avoid worsening acute ailments or chronic health conditions. Others brought N95 masks to shield against the toxic air. Many assuredly shared the concerns of those at home but could not afford to miss interviews that carried the possibility of more secure employment. Others, though, did not find the smoke noteworthy, treating the smoke as a petty nuisance. (2020: 260)

Through these responses to climate breakdown, Jobson presents us with an apt structural metaphor for the discipline's fractured attempts to address its responsibility as well as complicity in the less than laudable contexts which shape the discipline, namely: colonialism, neoliberalism and the Anthropocene. As per the article's title, Jobson suggests that in line with indigenous land techniques which oppose practices of protection for liberal private property in favour of ecological renewal, we would perhaps do well to ‘let anthropology burn’. Such a burn, to extend Jobson's analogy, would rid the discipline of its ‘dead wood’—of which the list is long and includes: the possessive individualism of its practitioners; the anthropological ‘star system’ that rewards existing structures of privilege; and the problematic means by which anthropologists use their research subjects as currency and for personal branding within the academy.

Amidst all this self-reflection and intra disciplinary turmoil, I have found it curious to observe how recent works aimed at audiences outside the academy, as with my presentation to the prospective students and career advisers, have decided against ‘leading with the negative’ and have instead largely omitted these ignominious pasts and unclear futures. On the contrary, evoking both the romantic vision of anthropologist as hero and the nobility of the 1970s image of the anthropologist as activist, anthropology is often depicted to outsiders as antidote for many of humanity's ills, and as foil for other disciplines’ abstraction, bigotry, and hubris. Tim Ingold, for example, in Anthropology, Why it Matters places the value of anthropology in ‘taking people seriously’ (2018: 1–25) stating that ‘for what drives anthropologists, in the final resort, is not the demand for knowledge but an ethic of care’ (ibid.: 131). In the second edition of What Anthropologists Do (2021), Veronica Strang concludes by observing that ‘for many of us anthropology is about potentially leading social change—doing something that makes a positive difference’ (2021: 213). Finally, in Gillian Tett's Anthro-Vision (2021) and Matthew Engelke's Think Like An Anthropologist (2017), the ability of anthropological analysis to upend normative assumptions is represented as valuable and, potentially, the answer to the current era's social and political unrest as well as environmental catastrophe.

A repeated motif that arises in these works is that anthropology gives rise to empathy. For example, in Kathi Kitner's encounter with the anthropologist who had been disparaging of her employment at Intel, Tett explains that Kitner ‘believed that her work at Intel was valuable because she was helping engineers gain empathy for people different from them’ (Tett 2021: 51). Ironically, given my ultimate omission of his image in the presentation to prospective students, Bronislaw Malinowski is often depicted in outward facing works as not only the ‘father’ of the ethnographic method but as the original ‘caring’ anthropologist, to use Ingold's phrase. In her chapter ‘Anthropology and Activism’, for example, Strang proposes, quoting Hedicon, that Malinowski was the first activist anthropologist (Strang 2021: 11), while Tett credits Malinowski and Franz Boas as inspiring the anthropological proclivity for tolerance and acceptance of others’ worldviews (2021:11–12).

As those trained in the discipline will of course be aware, however, Malinowski holds a problematic status as a ‘noble anthropologist’. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Malinowski was vocally hawking the discipline to colonial administrators. In his article ‘Practical Anthropology’ (1929), Malinowski writes:

Whether we adopt in our practical policy the principle of direct or indirect control, it is clear that a full knowledge of indigenous culture in the special subjects indicated is indispensable. Under indirect or dependent control the white man leaves most of the work to be done by the natives themselves but still has to supervise it, and if he does not want to be a mere figurehead, or blunderingly to interfere in something he does not understand, he must know the organization, the ideas and customs of those under his control. (1929: 24)

As Peter Pels and Lorraine Nencel (1991: 4) have described, Malinowski's ambition was to secure funding for anthropologists trained in his functionalist mode of analysis, an effort that was successful. The posthumous publishing of Malinowski's A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (2020) further muddies any attempt to re-imagine the so-called father of ethnographic fieldwork as hero by today's standards. The diary awkwardly revealed a foul-mouthed, obsessive-compulsive racist, who was miserable at his internment amongst the Melanesians because of World War I. The response to the release of his diary by anthropologists, was, as George Stocking described: ‘dismay, deprecation, denial…[a] depth of disenchantment’ (in Stocking 1991: 67). According to Clifford Geertz, however, the real scandal of Malinowski's diary was not that Malinowski had had such thoughts but that ‘an ancestral figure told the truth in a public place’, thus debunking the public myth of the anthropologist's ‘more-than-normal capacities for ego-effacement and fellow-feeling’ (1975: 53).

The American father-figure counterpart of Malinowski—Franz Boas—and his school of cultural relativism has also been the subject of internal critique. For example, Jobson has proposed the associated idea of ‘tolerance’ for difference belies a ‘tacit assumption of a normative racial and classed subject who is the principal beneficiary of a Boasian relativist tradition’ (2020: 265). Such posturing is instead a form of placate or, as Jobson calls it—a ‘Boasian Fix’—for what William Mazzarella (2019) has termed the ‘liberal settlement’ of anthropology; wherein the Other is gradually subsumed into and made a part of the white-dominated liberal world (Jobson 2020: 265–256). Such disciplinary ‘dirty laundry’, hence, is in line with Michael Herzfeld's theory of ‘cultural intimacy’ (Herzfeld 2016), the inversion of the noble anthropologist projected to the world.

While it may appear as self-evident that we should be crafting a united and glowing front in marketing the discipline to outsiders, as anthropologists have shown in other contexts, disconnects between exterior and interior presentations, public and private worlds, often reveal important cultural constructions and values (e.g. Herzfeld 2016; Miller 2010). On the outside, the resurrection of the ‘Malinowski archetype’ and the ‘Boasian Fix’ in public works suggests that anthropology's ‘edge’ remains, as it did in the 1970s, drawn via the figure of the noble anthropologist and their care, empathy, and heroism. Evoking Rousseau's romantic vision of the ‘noble savage’ born free, whilst everywhere else ‘man is in chains’, the noble anthropologist is free to ‘see’ the world without the biases and restraints which encumber others. Inside the discipline, however, the messy entanglement of the anthropologist within the world is emphasised. Hence, we are confronted with a series of opposing categories—inside–outside; polluted–pure; self-interest–empathy—and between them, a defended boundary, or ‘edge’ whereby these differences come to the fore. Appropriately, then, the figure of the corporate anthropologist must be categorised, if not as a ‘noble anthropologist’ who inspires empathy, then as one sullied and polluted by the colonialist and capitalist machinations of which they are a part. While certain anthropologists, both within the academy and without, correspond to this noble ideal, for example, Gillian Tett and her investigative journalism warning about the use of credit-default swaps in financial markets before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the figure of the corporate anthropologist is not so easily placed. Helping companies to sell more things in the context of the Anthropocene and the inequalities produced by capitalism is difficult to represent as a pristine endeavour. Instead, as I will discuss in the following section, the corporate anthropologist is instead often ‘matter out of place’; eliciting uncomfortable emotions for those, such as myself, who inhabit this positionality (cf. Borofsky 2019: 207–208).

Beyond Anthropology's Edges: Practicing Pragmatism and Embracing Entrepreneurialism

In August 2018, I joined hundreds of anthropologists in Stockholm, Sweden for the biennial EASA Conference. The conference theme was ‘Moving–Settling–Staying’ and appropriately, I was selected to speak on the panel entitled ‘The Mobility of Applied Anthropologists: In and Out of Fields and Between Jobs’, convened by Siew-Peng Lee and Margaret Bullen. In my talk, entitled, ‘Selling Out While Selling In’ (2018), I discussed my experience ‘selling’ anthropological methods and theories to various market research agencies in Australia. Inadvertently ventriloquising the ‘noble anthropologist’ trope as explored in the previous section, I had described how these studies had perhaps increased the ‘empathy’ of my professional colleagues towards the people they study. I had then moved on to explore some of the tensions that I had experienced in my work as an anthropologist-for-hire, in particular an instance in which I had felt that the industry my research had served ran counter to my values and ethics, particularly as regards climate destruction.

Prior to presenting in the panel, I had been concerned about sharing this work, fearing judgement and dissention, however, it turned out that I need not have been. No one in the audience challenged me or appeared aghast at my admission of being a ‘handmaiden’ (cf. Asad 1973) for some of the worst parts of capitalism. Instead, in the lunch break following my presentation I was approached by peers with whom I swapped business cards. In conversations since, we have schemed various means by which we could ‘sell’ anthropology more broadly in the corporate sector. At another conference, an anthropologist approached me to request that I let them know if I had any paid opportunities that we could collaborate on, adding that ‘I'm a precarious academic after all’. Despite these individual examples of entrepreneurial intent, however, I explore in this section how pragmatism and entrepreneurialism seem to be ‘dirty’ words for anthropologists, discussed behind closed doors rather than in print. With the mainstay of anthropologists—the university—increasingly required to demonstrate its relevance, I argue in this section that these anthropological edges may be holding the discipline back from achieving the ‘noble ends’ its advocates call for.

In 2010, American Anthropologist published Ulf Hannerz's ‘Diversity Is Our Business’, an article in which Hannerz argued that anthropology needed a ‘brand’, and that diversity might be it. The increasingly neoliberal environment, Hannerz had explained, required anthropologists to engage in ‘academic Realpolitik’ (2010: 540) and consider how to market their discipline to the public or risk obsoletion. Within the article, Hannerz considers how anthropology has appeared in popular culture and describes the anthropologist of popular culture as either a musty remnant of a bygone era, a cold-hearted exploiter of others (thanks in part, he believes, to the Darkness in El Dorado [2000] scandal), or as a pith helmet-wearing scientist draining the public purse conducting expensive but largely irrelevant research. Observing that what people think they know about anthropology is often wrong, but that further, the discipline is yet to agree on a ‘coherent endeavour’ (2010: 543), Hannerz makes the case for ‘diversity’ as the anthropological brand, noting that ‘culture’ is a conflicted term. While a discussion of how best to ‘brand’ the discipline is unfortunately outside the scope of this article, I will note here that I disagree with ‘diversity’ as the brand for anthropology—as in the previous section, such a positioning too readily recalls the ‘Boasian Fix’ as critiqued by Jobson (2020).

The enduring value of Hannerz's article is that it articulates a series of issues with anthropology's position outside the academy that remains relevant today. Through my work in the field of corporate research, I can confirm that there is considerable confusion about what anthropology is, and this confusion, it should be noted, is amongst people for whom research is their profession. Indeed, it has often been assumed that as an anthropologist, I will be able to describe and explain ‘human nature’ and how various ‘modern’ and/or ‘cultural’ behaviours a result are of or a response to the lives and habits of our palaeolithic ancestors. Even more worryingly, I have at times heard evolutionist ideas parroted as anthropological insights, with tales of how the ‘tribes in the Amazon’ elucidate our [the West's] ‘true’ nature. That the nineteenth century idea of ‘survival’ lives on in discussions outside the discipline is testament, I believe, to the discipline's failure to participate in and communicate with the world outside of the university.

What Hannerz does not discuss, and this is likely because things have changed in the ten years since he penned that article, was that the idea of anthropology would become so appealing to business. The attractiveness of anthropology to businesspeople and particularly those who work within the realms of marketing and advertising, is, I believe, in a large part due to the increasing requirement for senior levels of management to justify their spend for marketing and advertising (Sear 2021). This need for research has given rise to an ever-expanding world of consumer research and within it, the need for differentiating methods to understand behaviour. So then, in my reading, the current fashion in consumer research for anthropologists is related to the previous fashion for behavioural scientists, and the one before that for psychologists. There are also, of course, clear advantages of the ethnographic method over that of statistical, qualitative methods, such as interviews and focus groups, but that again is outside the scope of this article. Finally, there has been considerable work done by a small number of anthropologists to broaden the understanding of how anthropologists work in the world of business (e.g. Cefkin 2010; Pink 2006; Strang 2021; Tett 2021; see also the journal Business Anthropology 2012–2022).

Yet, in the same period that business has become more receptive to anthropology, the discipline has fallen in relevance within universities. Daniel Ginsberg, reporting for the AAA, for example, observes that the number of anthropology graduates in the United States have declined ‘sharply’ since their peak in 2013 (Ginsberg 2017). In Australia, from where I write, the University of Western Australia has recently dissolved their departments of anthropology and sociology in a cost-saving exercise to improve the student experience (Styles 2021). The move was reputedly made on the back of continuing low enrolments for these disciplines (Ollivain 2021). In 2015, anthropology was scrapped from England's A-Levels (Hicks 2016), while in France anthropology was very nearly recast as a subdiscipline of history rather than a unique field (Pina-Cabral 2006 in Hannerz 2010: 542). As has been well documented, this threat to anthropology comes not only from decreasing student numbers but also due to the subsumption of anthropological methods and ideas into other disciplines as well as other professions. So, then, we have sociologists and cultural studies academics who ‘do’ ethnography as well as marketers and psychologists who write about culture. Additionally, outside of the university, there are the domains of ‘user experience’, consumer research and social research, each of which now use ethnographies to understand ‘culture’.

In this context, therefore, Hannerz's pragmatic approach to addressing anthropology's representation outside the discipline, more than a decade later, remains salient. The article, however, did not appear to be appreciated by most on the ‘inside’. Ilana Gershon, in in the reply to comments on her article ‘Neoliberal Agency’, wrote that ‘Hannerz's call is a pragmatic one, and these days, being pragmatic all too often means being neoliberal’ (2011: 552). If anthropologists are to ‘brand’ themselves for public consumption, Gershon asks, ‘will anthropologists being pragmatically neoliberal remain anthropologists first or become new-fangled marketers and entrepreneurs using anthropological lingo?’ (ibid.). Gershon's disapproval was mirrored by Sabina Stan, who wrote that Hannerz's article was an example of some of the ‘unsettling ways’ that ‘anthropological and corporate views and languages sometimes converge’ (2016: 126). Inherent in both these critiques is a familiar romantic sensibility, a nostalgia for a pristine past before the university was infiltrated by the economy. But, of course, as Stocking has observed, ‘Knowledge has always been implicated in (i.e. both facilitated and constrained by) asymmetries of power. There was never a moment of ethnographic innocence; all anthropology is postlapsarian’ (1991: 67). As anthropologists are all too aware, any pretence or presumption of ‘distance’ from the world in which work is funded and conducted is problematic (ibid.). Nonetheless, as David Platzer and Anne Allison write ‘despite its corporatization in recent years, academia still retains the aura of a something else: a world of ideas and of the mind, which is not reducible to profits or mere instrumentality’ (2018).

Hannerz's suggestion offends then, not because it suggests a corruption of the academy (cf. Borofsky 2019: 207–208) but rather because it derails its ‘aura’ or self-image of the discipline, which as per section one is imagined via the ‘noble anthropologist’. Here, I can certainly ‘empathize’ with Gershon and Stan's critique. Part, if not most, of the discomfort I described in the opening section is to do with the less than noble status of the corporate anthropologist. Unlike anthropologists who work as investigative journalists or academics who become activists, it can be difficult to find the nobility in helping corporations to sell more, although we can, as I discuss in the final section, certainly find the good in it subject to specific caveats (see discussion in Kitner 2016). Gershon and Stan lament the vision of the anthropologist ‘competing’ in the marketplace because such an image is anathema to that of the empathetic noble anthropologist. This is, however, as per the previous section, the inversion of the reality of anthropological departments, wherein individuals must, of course, compete for fame, funding and, famously for those in the United States, tenure.

Indeed, perhaps more telling than these sparing critiques was the silence that Hannerz's article inspired. More than a decade on and the question of how to increase the public standing of anthropology remains fringe to various disciplinary trends and their associated ‘stars’. While Robert Borofsky has interpreted this inattention to the public reach of anthropology as evidence of a Douglasian divide between the corrupt outside and the pure inside (cf. Borofsky 2019: 207–208), I have, as per the previous section, inverted this distinction in reference to anthropologist's ‘edge’, aura, or representation. The conversation of branding and, indeed, the figure of the corporate anthropologist occupy an unclear space between these categories and must be either categorised—as noble or problematic, outside, or inside—or effaced. Like dirt, therefore, the associated calls for a collective pragmatism and entrepreneurialism in a public fashion ‘offends against order’ (Douglas 1986: 2). As with Clifford Geertz's comment regarding Malinowski, it is not that we wish to be pragmatic and entrepreneurial that is offensive, it is that someone said it out loud (1975: 53)—threatening to take the conversation on the ‘outside’ and in doing so, beyond the discipline's imagined edges.

That disciplinary pragmatism and entrepreneurialism are ‘dirty’ words for anthropologists is further reflected in recent essays and articles which have sought to capture and address the experience of anthropology graduates as well as applied anthropologists. David Platzer and Anne Allison (2018) writing in the United States, for example, have discussed how graduates’ concerns about their employment prospects were dismissed by senior faculty as ‘vulgar’, and that professionalisation was rarely discussed by faculty. Studies confirm that a ‘lone wolf’ (Vest 2020) mentality of anthropology departments means that there is little incentive to ‘stick one's neck out’ to create better conditions for others (see review by Fix and Elroy 2020). Despite likely being the answer to the discipline's fading influence in the university, calls for the discipline to be more ‘job ready’ (Ginsberg 2017) have done little to reduce the divide between the academy and those who work on the outside. Instead, issues related to applied anthropology are often perceived as disciplinary ‘backwaters’, so that ‘practitioners are poorly integrated into conferences’ and applied anthropologists are ‘looked down on’ by those in the academy (Platzer and Allison 2018). This perhaps explains the nonchalance that my talk in Sweden received; the people in the audience likely all had experience ‘outside’ the academy and/or were looking to leave the university. Further, researchers have noted that the ‘lone wolf’ tendency within the academy and the lack of practical career training has meant that many anthropologists must ‘individually discover how to bring anthropological insights and skills to settings and people unfamiliar with anthropological practice’ (Fix and Elroy 2020: 3) Hence we have individuals who are pragmatic and entrepreneurial both within the university and without but not the collective efforts necessary to build the anthropological discipline more broadly.

Perhaps the most critical issue with these principally individual efforts, as in my anecdote from the EASA Conference, is that a reflexive discussion about how to ethically engage in the corporate world is often foregone in preference of simply securing employment. Indeed, I recall meeting an American doctorate in anthropology from a prestigious university who told me that they had no qualms about the ethics of applied anthropology. They had stated instead that: ‘I'll work for the army, I'll work undercover, I will literally do anything as long as it pays well…because fuck it, I've got student loans’. The extent of this pragmatism is not what I am advocating for, of course, but it certainly speaks to the classed and privileged bubble that can afford to practice pearl clutching rather than pragmatism in discussions of engaging with business and marketing the discipline.

How to move beyond these edges? As Douglas has stated, such categorisations do not exist in a vacuum and are not absolute nor impervious to change (1986: 4). Like others, I would like to see the academy incorporate applied anthropologists (Brody and Pester 2014; Platzer and Allison 2018; Fix and Elroy 2020). It would also be nice to be able to promise students well-paid and interesting careers and to see the anthropological profession grow in both size and reputation. Certainly, at present, the relative lack of attention to the corporate anthropology has meant that practitioners such as myself are indeed often ‘lone wolves’ left to navigate our own careers and our own ethics within them. As a way of reaching across to other practitioners and starting a conversation in the discipline more broadly, in the next section I share my own way of evaluating the ethics of corporate partnerships, and I use the example of the 50 Crates relationship as a case study of how corporate engagements can meet these requirements.

From Noble to Good: A Speculative Agenda for Evaluating the Ethics of Corporate Work

Perhaps because of the obfuscating figure of the ‘noble anthropologist’, which can distract us from a pragmatic consideration of how the anthropologist relates to the world outside the discipline, anthropological associations have been remarkably reactive as regards ethics and standards. The first ethical guidelines were introduced during the Vietnam War by the AAA following accusations that anthropologists were acting in secret, at the behest of their governments and against the interests of their research informants (see discussion Lamphere 2003). In the year 2000, again following a public controversy—this time the release of Darkness in El Dorado (2000)—the AAA engaged in a review of their ethical guidelines moving towards a model of ‘collaboration’ instead of ‘paternalism’, a change which was mirrored in updates to the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) (see AAA2022 and AAS2022). Such ethics, however, as Peter Pels has discussed, remained ‘dyadic’, dealing only with the relationship between anthropologist and informant rather than acknowledging the broader context in which the research takes part and the ‘third parties’ involved in their research, such as funding bodies (2008: 293). On the back of yet another public scandal, this time the involvement of anthropologists in the US military's ‘Human Terrain Teams’ as ‘Subject Matter Experts’, the ethics of the AAA (and the AAS) were updated again to include questions of funding parties and broaden the ethical implications of anthropological work (Fluehr- Lobban 2012: 114).

The leading principle of these guidelines has been to ‘do no harm’ (ibid.). While this harm was originally referring to the ‘primary’ research participants, the updates to the codes in 2012 have included persons ‘secondary’ to the research—including the anthropological discipline and society at large. In the case of corporate anthropological research, a do-no-harm approach for primary participants is certainly in line with societies such as The Research Society—the Australian association for social and market research of which I am a voluntary member (see The Research Society 2022). Where we consider ‘do no harm’ beyond the immediate research participants, however, categorisations of right and wrong can become considerably more slippery. For example, if I were to conduct an ethnography amongst new mothers to inform the strategy of a diaper company, and my advice serves to inspire a new type of diaper that uses considerably more plastic than previous versions but has greater absorbency, saving mothers the dreaded overnight change—how can I reconcile this detrimental environmental outcome with the beneficial practicality of the innovation?

As Kathi Kitner (2016) has reflected, attempting to analyse the potential harms of corporate anthropological work—beyond the primary research participants—can be a potentially endless endeavour, as one must consider an infinitude of possible consequences. To shortcut this spiral of deliberation, Kitner recounts her own personal method for assessing the ethics of corporate work—a continual reflexivity about how to be ‘good’. She writes: ‘I always somehow felt guided by the idea that anthropologists were, by their training, driven to be good and to defend the practice of “goodness” in their work….The notion that anthropologist have a great and serious responsibility to the people with whom we work continues to be a guiding principle of my career’ (2016: 319). Kitner further explains that she believes herself to be an ‘anthropological burr’ (ibid.: 318) amongst her colleagues, influencing wherever she can to increase the ‘goodness’ of the work she is involved in.

Similarly, I have devised a personal method for evaluating whether I will pursue corporate engagements. While I am bound by the ethics of The Research Society, this association principally prioritises ‘dyadic’ considerations rather than the broader society in which my work takes place. To aid me in making decisions about the broader ramifications of my work, I have developed my own set of criteria for various elements of the engagements. This criteria, or series of questions, can be divided into three categories—the industry; the organisation; and the project—each of which attracts its own set of questions. While imperfect and rudimentary, it is this through this process that I have been able to evaluate and, ultimately, reject or accept work. The remainder of this section concerns the types of questions I have come to ask myself in each category, using the engagement with 50 Crates, described in the opening of this article as an example.

Industry

When assessing the industry, I consider whether I see value in that industry. Do they produce products or services that people enjoy or rely upon? I have, as stated previously, done research in the past for an industry that has established links to climate destruction. While perhaps my moral culpability is low, as the work was to improve the sales of one company relative to others rather than boost the production and sales of the industry in question, I have since decided that I do not want to be working for these sorts of industries. In the case of 50 Crates, which has a broad roster of clients I have had a frank conversation with Slater to this effect. Thankfully, none on my forbidden list are currently 50 Crates clients. Incidentally, Slater has his own list of industries that he likewise would not work for. As economic anthropologists such as Bill Maurer (2006) have explored, there are far more than just questions of money and profit at play in corporations—morality matters. The economy is not a dis-embedded institution despite the discourse surrounding it and the efforts to organise it as such (cf. Callon 1998).

Company

Sometimes it can be difficult from the ‘outside’ to know whether it is wise to engage with a particular company. While there can be glaring red flags, such as public incidences of malpractice, whether an organisation is ethical may not be evident until one is already working with them. To mitigate against such a risk, in deciding to work with a company I am particularly attentive to the characters of the people I will be working with and, additionally, whether it is a collegiate environment where differences of opinion are welcomed. While such considerations might seem inconsequential or even irrelevant for evaluating the ‘ethics’ of a company, I am of the belief that an environment which welcomes different views will be more readily able to identify and mitigate any potential harms in their work. This belief is not totally unfounded, however. Indeed, Gillian Tett observed how insular organisational cultures, such as that of derivatives traders, have produced products and environments with less-than-ideal real-world consequences (see Tett 2009). At 50 Crates I have observed lively conversations with staff, and I have been involved in various debates where my opinion has differed significantly with senior staff members. Throughout these disagreements, we have respectfully argued our respective cases and moved forward without any issues. This had made me confident that if I ever have an issue with a particular project, my concerns will be heard.

Even more positively, Slater and the 50 Crates founder, Simon Hammond, have described their ambition to inspire the companies they work with to have a social impact beyond just profits. Slater, who spent his early career working in non-governmental organisations, found himself disillusioned with the limited impact of ‘development’ agencies. Citing books such as Dead Aid (Moyo 2009), Slater explained to me that he felt corporations were often more accountable and efficient in gaining as well as distributing money. In an era of disillusionment with government and public institutions, Slater believes that corporations have an important and positive role to play in society. In partnering with an anthropologist, he explained, he hopes to inspire business leaders to not only make money but also deliver a positive societal impact within the ‘cultures they serve’. While discussions of ‘ethical capitalism’ have often incited cynicism from anthropologists, a pragmatic approach to working within rather than outside the existing rubrics of society may allow researchers to not only ‘do no harm’ but even, as Slater intends, to ‘do some good’ (cf. Borofsky 2019: 123–172).

Project

For each project I consider how much autonomy I will have in reporting and how much influence I will have in the outcomes. Kitner describes quitting an organisation when she was asked to deliver false results that would negatively impact the fishery community with which she was working (2016: 313–314). I have, thankfully, not encountered such a situation. Instead, I have found that my research has thus far been relatively ‘low stakes’, impacting the positioning of a product or campaign rather than directly affecting communities. Nonetheless, I am careful to understand how the research I am involved in will be used, and I have been fortunate to be able to review reports and presentations before they are finalised. This review process enables me to ensure that my findings have not been misrepresented (whether intentionally or by error) and allows me oversight on how the research will ultimately be used.

Conclusions

In this article I have described how the corporate anthropologist as well as conversations of pragmatism and entrepreneurialism are often ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1986) in the anthropological discipline. Not considered part of the academy but incongruent with the image of the ‘noble anthropologist’, the corporate anthropologist is often relegated to disciplinary backwaters or not represented at all. Similarly, conversations regarding pragmatic and entrepreneurial plans for the discipline's future are often considered ‘dirty’, despite the contradiction that anthropologists must be entrepreneurial and pragmatic to succeed in the academy or elsewhere.

I have explained these discomforts and disconnects via the illusion of the ‘noble anthropologist’—a figure which is often evoked when we attempt to ‘sell’ the discipline to outsiders. The issue with this conjuration, I have argued, is that it is inconsistent with what we know about our entanglements within the broader world. In the current context of decreasing student numbers and dissolving anthropology departments, I believe the discipline should be embracing opportunities to work with and amongst industries and to explore, reflexively, how these engagements and these industries can be improved. To support a more pragmatic and entrepreneurial generation of anthropologists, I have further argued that having a proactive—rather than reactive—approach to considering the ethics of corporate anthropology will be critical. While we cannot be ‘noble’ in the Rousseau sense of the term (see Eriksen and Nielsen 2001: 12)—that is, utterly unshackled from the corporate world of which we are a part—we can, as in Kitner's reflections (2016), be good.

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Contributor Notes

Cynthia Sear has worked in the field of corporate research for almost fifteen years and is a final year PhD candidate (anthropology) at the University of Melbourne. Since completing a master of science in anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2015, Cynthia has used anthropological methods and theories in her engagements with organisations in Australia, United Kingdom, and the United States of America. Cynthia's corporate experience and expertise spans several industries, including banking, retail and grocery, telecommunications, property and healthcare. Cynthia is passionate about bringing anthropological knowledge to a wider audience, and her work has been published in The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Conversation. Cynthia has also appeared on ABC Radio Melbourne.

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Anthropology in Action

Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice

  • American Anthropological Association (2022), ‘AAA Statement of Ethics’, https://www.americananthro.org/LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=22869&navItemNumber=652.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Asad, T. (ed.) (1973), Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter (Vol. 6) (London: Ithaca Press).

  • Australian Anthropological Society (2022), ‘AAS Code of Ethics’. https://www.aas.asn.au/ethics.

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  • Brody, E. and T. Meerwarth Pester (2014), ‘The Coming of Age of Anthropological Practice and Ethics’, Journal of Business Anthropology 1, no. 1: 1137.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Callon, M. (1998), The Laws of the Market (Oxford: Blackwall Publishers).

  • Cefkin, M. (ed) (2010), Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and out of Corporations (New York: Berghahn Books).

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
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    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
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