When I choose to self-identify as an anthropologist on my Twitter profile, David Hussman asked me that question. It irked me because the best I could come back with was something like “I am trained as an anthropologist and I use what I learned all the time.” Damn it. I should have said, discount
“Yes.” with a nice big solid period afterward. In either case, the conversation stopped there. In my mind, I hemmed and hawed. Well, I DO have a degree in anthropology. I DID study it for seven years in both undergraduate and graduate programs at major universities. I use ethnographic methods in most of the jobs I’ve had since. The principles and practices I’ve learned have allowed me to flourish in otherwise frightening environments from prisons to foreign countries. I’m a member of the American Anthropology Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. I keep up with all the major anthropology journals. But I have never in my life carried a business card with the word “anthropologist” anywhere on it.
What are we to say to such a question? How many of us, trained by anthropologists with the word “anthropology” on our degrees actually have that word in our job titles? Certainly, if you have a Ph.D. in anthropology and you are employed by a university to teach in the anthropology department and you use your research time to take public money to conduct ethnographic research and publish ethnographies than yes, I suppose you’re definitely an anthropologist. But what about the rest of us? The design researchers, the marketing consultants, the international human resource managers, the public and non-profit sector project and program managers and all those other fields that actively recruit people with our training, tools and mindset because it’s valuable in those fields? Are we anthropologists, too?
I’m gonna take a bold stand and just say “Hell, yes.” I’m tired of being wishy-washy about it. It’s me. It’s you. It’s our self-identity. Own it, and show them what we can do. If we all did that, not only would people stop asking the question, but we’d no longer have to explain or justify ourselves all the time. The good work done by anthropologists working outside academia would speak for us every time a reporter, manager, or even guy on the street re-told a story about the successes attributed to us, the anthropologists in their midst.
