Anthropology is good

Abstract

Anthropology does not just study people; it studies with people, drawing them into a conversation, of concern to everyone, about how to live. But this means turning the academic model of knowledge production outside in. As a way of knowing from the inside, through participant observation, anthropological study exposes its practitioners to other ways of being with the aim to learn from them, not to write them up. Its true purpose, then, is not ethnographic but educational. It requires of all of us to place our anthropic selves at the center of a shared world while acknowledging the exceptional responsibility we bear for its future flourishing.