Anthropology Today

Anthropology Today

In society today, the discipline of anthropology has made a tremendous shift from the practices it employed years ago. Anthropologists of today have a very different focus from their predecessors, who would focus on relating problems of distant peoples to the Western world. In more modern times, their goal has become much more local, in focusing on human problems and issues within the societies they live.

This paper will identify the roles anthropologists today play, such as where

they perform the bulk of their work, and what it is they do in both problem

solving, as well as policy making. It will also identify the issues they are faced

with, that is, the nature of the problems they address. Ethics have always been an

important part of anthropology, and this paper will also deal with the ethical goals

of today's anthropologists and some of the ethical problems they are faced with.

The information of this paper was obtained entirely from the internet. It

was designed as an internet project structured to both teach and familiarize

research through the World Wide Web. Any data in this paper was derived

through information posted publicly on internet sites available to any member of

the public with an internet connection.

As a result of the narrow area of research, the information provided both to

the author and the reader is limited. While it is true that the internet is a source of

boundless information, the sheer amount of it all makes reading all of it

impossible. Also, the total lack of journal reports, or texts, means that while the

information provided may not be minimal, it is nonetheless limited.

When people think of an anthropologist, the image of the jungle traveling

character comes to mind. A white man sitting in a hut on some primitive island,

taking notes on the local tribes s/he is living with. Decades ago, this was actually

the case. However, as time progresses, so does the role of the anthropologist in

today's society. Very rarely now does anthropology actually involve extensive

fieldwork in an exotic location. Today, an M.A. or a Ph.D. in the field of

anthropology means that a job locally may be available to you. There is always

the academic side of things, such as becoming a professor of the discipline, but

this paper will focus more on the non-academic roles of the anthropo...

... middle of paper ...

...y have come full-

circle; no longer do they study the foreign, but now study the local. Their

positions in society are almost too many to mention, but the severe increase in the

business world must be mentioned. It can be said that the discipline of

anthropology covers a wide variety of tasks as well as overlapping with other

fields of the social sciences, but that statement becomes more true with each

passing year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. AAA 2000 "Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association",

http://www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ethcode.htm

2. Anonymous 2000 "Society for Applied Anthropology", http://www.sfaa.net/sfaajobs.html, Oct. 18, 2000

3. Anonymous 2000 "A guide for field projects on adaptive strategies",

http://iisd1.iisd.ca/casl/CASLGuide/ParticipantObserver.htm, Jan. 17, 2000

4. Cassell, Joan and Sue-Ellen Jacobs "American Anthropological Associasion Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology", http://www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/toc.htm

5. High Top Media 2000 "Anthropology Links", http://hightopmedia.com/HTMANTHlinks.htm,

Apr. 2000

6. SfAA 2000 "Society for Applied Anthropology", http://www.sfaa.net/, Sept. 29, 2000