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What anthropologists offer…? The successful implementation of any policy
for government, non-government or financial organisations, or the profitable
marketing of business products, depends on understanding local conditions.
Standardised applications of policies or blanket approaches to marketing
have proven inadequate for this. Anthropology
brings a unique contribution to social planning, policy formation and business
projects through knowledge and understanding of local peoples and conditions.
It offers specific local solutions to global challenges and problems. In the most general sense, anthropologists aim
to understand the way a social group ‘works’.
The social group may be as large as a nation or as small as a household.
Anthropology deals with every aspect of society – from economics and
politics to religion. An important
feature is that the discipline seeks to understand the connections between these
sub-systems, that is, to see how they ‘fit’ together and how they develop
and change over time. In this sense
anthropology is the most holistic of the social sciences, focussing on the
complex interactions that take place between economic, political, religious and
other aspects of society that make up our lived world. Anthropologists carry out their research using
a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.
They usually gain an intimate and in-depth understanding of how social
groups work through the use of fieldwork methods.
These methods are based on close contact with a group studied over a
protracted period of time and often involve a knowledge of various languages. This methodological approach, not usually found in other
social science disciplines, is known as ‘ethnography’. It forms the basis of the scientific method used by
anthropologists which moves from the collection of concrete data on specific
conditions to the creation of general models with broad application.
While traditionally anthropology dealt with ‘exotic’ societies,
anthropological methods are now applied to any social context including the most
industrially advanced countries. Anthropologists offer:
…and to whom. Anthropological knowledge and experience is
valuable to a wide variety of public and private bodies:
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Copyright © 2005 Anthropology Consultants
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