Anthropology and Power to the People?

Abstract

A couple of decades ago, I took a career move that seemed somewhat odd: after I completed a PhD in social anthropology, I joined the Financial Times newspaper to report on business and economics. At the time, my colleagues were often baffled by the fact that I had studied anthropology, not economics. So were many of the business executives and policy makers I met. That was no surprise. After all, in decades past, anthropologists and business leaders have often appeared to inhabit entirely different social tribes, in the Western world. The former were perceived to be devoted to studying exotic cultures and living fairly anti-establishment lives that were suspicious of money or capitalism; the latter were at the heart of the capitalist system and were usually far more interested in analyzing hard numbers than soft social issues. To a hard-bitten economist, banker or policy maker, a subject such as anthropology was thus apt to seem rather " hippy, " as one senior financier once remarked to me. Meanwhile, to many anthropologists, the world of Western business was not just morally dubious – but very boring compared to all the other issues and cultures that could be studied. Indeed, the gulf was so large that when I started my own PhD in anthropology at Cambridge University, in 1989, it never even occurred to me to study Western business: instead I headed off to Soviet Tajikistan, to study marriage rituals and ethnic identity in a remote mountain community; that fitted my idea (or prejudice) of what anthropology " should " be about.