Applied and action anthropology - Ideological and conceptual aspects

Applied anthropology in the United States emerged as a mixture of New Deal humanitarian liberalism and progressive industrial management ideology and in Britain as a humanitarian advisory function for colonial administration in Africa. In both countries applied practitioners were subjected to considerable ideological criticism during the I96os and '7os. In the U.S. case, one manifestation of this critical approach was Sol Tax's populist-inspired action anthropology, which renounced the employment of practitioners by government or any large organization in favor of voluntary academic projects engaging in intensive intervention in the problems and needs of local communities. The approach did not prevail, but its ideas continue to stimulate interest. Meanwhile, applied anthropology was undergoing attenuation as cultural anthropology proliferated into ''institutional anthropologies.'' The significance of these subfields (e.g., educational anthropology) was that they replicated the approach of sociology and economics: social scientific intervention as a normal part of the institutional activities of modern society. The basic problem in fitting anthropology for practical application was the preoccupation of the discipline with tribal (not contemporary urban-industrial) society.