Scenes from museums, hospitals, federal government agencies, factory floors, and even a bank play on a DVD distributed by the American Anthropological Association, highlighting a host of career options for anthropologists.
But one potential workplace is purposely missing: a college campus. That’s because roughly half of all anthropologists work outside of academe—a number that is fundamentally changing an 11,000-member association that has historically catered to college professors.
In recent years, the association has revamped parts of its annual meetings and its publications to better serve anthropologists who do not go into academe. With efforts like the DVD, it is also trying to promote alternative career paths to graduate students.
“We saw what was happening, and we have made a concerted effort to try to reach out to them and to be relevant,” says Bill Davis, executive director of the association, whose annual meeting is under way in New Orleans. Such moves set the stage for an influx of new members and are needed for the association to survive long term.
The movement is driven by a tight academic job market, and in some cases by lack of interest in university positions. But balancing nonacademic and academic interests has been a struggle. Some academic anthropologists believe that practicing anthropologists are skirting ethical rules because they sometimes do research that isn’t disseminated publicly. So the appeals to nonacademics, Mr. Davis says, are sometimes “uncomfortable for our scholars.”
Still, Cathleen Crain, an anthropologist and managing partner of a human-services consulting firm, is hopeful."The battles are largely in the past,” says Ms. Crain, whose LTG Associates has been around for more than 25 years. “There is a growing vision of a unified anthropology, where academics informs practice and practice informs academics.”
That vision of unity, say those in the discipline, was nothing but a pipe dream when the association created a panel in 2003 to come up with ways to better serve anthropologists employed outside of academe. When its members interviewed about 50 practicing anthropologists, they heard some frank assessments of the association’s shortcomings.
“The AAA and its members do need an attitude change toward nonacademic work,” one interviewee said. “There is still a two-class system. AAA itself isn’t necessarily promoting that image, but it exists.” Indeed, one corporate anthropologist recalled that while talking with a small group of people at one of the association’s meetings, “one person turned their back on me and walked away. I was told that I had sold out.”
Among other comments from interviewees: The association’s newsletter didn’t include articles about people who did the kind of work they did, and journal articles were almost always written by academics. They also said that nonacademic practicing anthropologists were largely missing from leadership positions, and that too many sessions at the association’s annual meeting weren’t useful to them, such as those that focused on theory or some aspect of the discipline’s history.
The panel’s final report, in 2006, featured recommendations on how to make the association more inclusive to all its members. One suggestion was to make the panel permanent. A year later, the standing Committee on Practicing, Applied, and Public Interest Anthropology, with eight members appointed by the association, was formed.
“That was really the first time that practicing anthropologists had been taken seriously at the association level,” says Mary Odell Butler, president of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, which is one of many specialized units of the larger association.
In 2007 the group got space in the association’s newsletter to run profiles of practicing anthropologists, which later morphed into a column written by practicing anthropologists about various aspects of their jobs. A bigger coup for the committee in 2010 was a new section in American Anthropologist, the association’s flagship journal. In it are reviews of Web sites, blogs, digital ethnography, and reports geared toward practicing anthropologists. The journal also now has an associate editor who taps anthropologists outside academe for content.
The association also wants to make annual meetings more fruitful for practitioners. Last year, for the first time, sessions for them were largely grouped all on one day, rather than spread throughout the five-day meeting.
“Practitioners just aren’t going to stay at a meeting that long,” says Kathleen Terry-Sharp, the association’s director of academic relations. The nature of their work might limit the time they can spend at meetings. “We tried to make it work for them.”
Beyond Peer Review
Even practicing and applied anthropologists within academe stand to benefit from the committee’s work. On tap for next year (with the help of a consortium of practicing and applied anthropology programs) are some guidelines for departments on how to value work that doesn’t always take the form of a peer-reviewed article or a book.
“That kind of voice is something that we didn’t have before,” says Ms. Butler, of the committee’s work on the issue. “I’m very appreciative of everything the committee is trying to do.”
The committee is also working to increase anthropologists’ access to “gray literature,” or reports from industry or government agencies that aren’t available from commercial publishers. “AAA has done a tremendous job of making our own publications available digitally, but as practicing anthropologists, we often need reports that fall outside of that,” says Shirley Fiske, chair of the committee.
One of the people this could appeal to is Alicia Davis. Just after getting her Ph.D. in May 2010, she started work as an anthropologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Anchorage, Alaska. Her current job is a “perfect fit,” she says, for her interest in studying policy and how it affects communities.
But although she had no intention of going into academe, Ms. Davis says, she discovered a love for teaching and research as a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is “extremely interested in the academic side” of anthropology, she says, and wants to remain engaged in that arena.
“I would be thrilled to come back to academia one day,” says Ms. Davis, who was scheduled to present a paper on community-based conservation strategies around a national park in Tanzania—based on her dissertation—at the association’s annual meeting this year.
Association officials also have their sights set on another group of anthropologists: those with master’s degrees. Many of them graduate from applied-anthropology programs and don’t go on to get Ph.D.'s. Instead they opt to go right to work—outside of academe. “They aren’t tied to the association at all after they leave their programs,” says Ms. Terry-Sharp, who also directs the group’s practicing and applied programs.
In a move to find out more about the workplaces where those anthropologists end up, the committee conducted a survey in 2009 of nearly 850 anthropologists who had received master’s degrees during that year. The results won’t be officially released until December.
“As an association, we want dues-paying members who are going to help us,” Ms. Terry-Sharp says. “But we have to do the work to put the products and services in place, and to change the culture so that practitioners feel welcome or come back to us.”
Ms. Butler says grooming the next generation of practicing anthropologists is key. To that end, the practicing-anthropologists unit, with help from the association, has organized an employer expo. It’s not a job fair, but a chance for students, new professional anthropologists, and those who teach professional anthropologists to learn more about which employers might value their skills. The employers at this year’s expo included State Farm Insurance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“Faculty are coming to the exposition more and more” to get information about the many ways anthropologists can contribute to workplaces outside of academe so they can teach the skills their students will need, says Ms. Crain, who coordinates the expo, now in its fifth year.
Anthro in Industry
Still, the association has some work to do—at least for anthropologists who work in industry. Alexandra Mack, whose ties to the association date back 15 years, says a dearth of corporate anthropologists among its membership is a drawback. However, she says she appreciates the association’s logistical support for the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, held this past summer in Japan, where her role as a workplace anthropologist, at Pitney Bowes, is more common.
“That conference is incredibly important to me,” says Ms. Mack of the gathering, which started in 2005. “It’s just a more targeted community that speaks more to what I do.”
She decided to actively pursue jobs outside academe while still in graduate school. After earning her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 2000, she landed a job with a small design-consulting firm. Three years later she was hired at Pitney Bowes, where she still works, mostly conducting research on how the company’s customers do their jobs to determine what products the company can make that will help.
“I’ve never applied for an academic job,” says Ms. Mack.
Some professors who teach in programs that value applied anthropology say some of their students aren’t hesitant to follow in Ms. Mack’s footsteps.
“Many of our students come in knowing they don’t have any interest in my job,” says Clarence C. Gravlee, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. “Students who come here generally understand that applied anthropology has a place in this department. Probably the majority of our Ph.D. students work in nonacademic positions.”
Mr. Gravlee says undergraduates in anthropology who talk with him about graduate school mistakenly think that earning a Ph.D. means life as a professor. But he tells them they can pursue opportunities to use their skills outside academe, “and I try to convey to them that there’s no shame in that.”
The association, for its part, wants students to know that there are people in the association who don’t work in academe, “so they don’t feel the association is not for them” if they choose a different arena, Ms. Terry-Sharp says.
The association does not know how many practicing anthropologists it has beyond the 600 who are members of its National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. “Some practitioners still refuse to join AAA,” says Ms. Butler, who worked for 25 years at Battelle Memorial Institute evaluating the effectiveness of public-health programs for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Things are still not as good as they could be.”
Meanwhile, luring practitioners to the association becomes tougher the longer they work outside academe, she says. “When you get out in the world of practice, it’s easy to lose track of your identity as an anthropologist,” says Ms. Butler, now an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland at College Park.
In many instances, practitioners and academic anthropologists may be one and the same. “People think that anthropologists are either practitioners or academics, but it’s not that linear,” says Linda A. Bennett, a professor of anthropology at the University of Memphis and a past chair of the practicing-anthropologists’ committee. “There’s much more back and forth.”
Ms. Fiske, the committee member who is an adjunct faculty member at Maryland, can relate. A former anthropologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who worked on research issues related to fisheries, she has also been a professor at the University of Southern California and a legislative assistant.
Even as she crisscrossed between the two worlds, she says, “my struggle has been to to get a more general acceptance of our work within a discipline that has always looked very askance at anthropologists who don’t work in traditional departments.” She has been active in the association’s leadership off and on since the early 1980s.
Mr. Davis, who is in his 14th year as the association’s executive director, and others believe that sentiment will have to change as fewer anthropologists opt to call academic departments home. “This is the future of the discipline,” he says. “If we don’t keep them connected to the association, they’re going to drift off, and we’ll never see them again.”
