Applied Anthropology - Spanning Academic Disciplines

Spanning Academic Disciplines

The American Anthropological Association website describes anthropology as a focus on “the study of humans, past and present. To understand the full sweep and complexity of cultures across all of human history, anthropology draws and builds upon knowledge from the social and biological sciences as well as the humanities and physical sciences.” Thus, the field is divided into four subareas: Sociocultural Anthropology, Biological (or Physical) Anthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistic Anthropology. Because a central tenet of the anthropological field is the application of shared knowledge and research about humans across the world, an anthropologist who specializes in any of these areas and enacts research into direct action and/or policy can be deemed an “applied anthropologist.” Indeed, some practical problems may invoke all sub-disciplines. For example, a Native American community development program may involve archaeological research to determine legitimacy of water rights claims, ethnography to assess the current and historical cultural characteristics of the community, linguistics to restore language competence among inhabitants, medical anthropology to determine the causality of dietary deficiency diseases, etc.