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“The world needs anthropologists!” This statement provided the starting point of a symposium held in Amsterdam on November 29, 2013, about the relevance of anthropological knowledge and skills in the world outside academia. The seminar was organized by the Social and Cultural Anthropology department of VU University, Amsterdam, in cooperation with the EASA Applied Anthropology network, the University of Ljubljana, the Dutch Anthropologists Organization (ABV), and the Institute for Innovation and Development of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The ‘Soeterijn zaal ’ of the ‘Tropenmuseum’, part of the ‘Royal Tropical Institute‘, provided the venue for this international gathering. Three anthropologists in heart and soul gave passionate talks about their work in the world of big corporations and organisations. The symposium was completed with a panel session followed by a discussion which ended in a heated debate about ethics. The meeting concluded with a clear statement that the world does not just need anthropologists; the world needs anthropological thinking to be applied.
Anna Kirah works for the Norwegian branch of the international consultancy firm ‘Making Waves‘, mainly advising public organisations. Kira calls herself design anthropologist and has previously been employed by Boeing and Microsoft. She mentioned seeing the process of ‘connecting the dots’ as the main job of an anthropologist. By this she metaphorically referred to linking a wide range of interdependent people with different perspectives who are all somehow involved in designing and consuming products like airplanes, airports and train stations. In her people-centred approach she tries to bridge gaps between various experts within organisations or between designers and the consumers of their products. One of the many examples she presented was about a beautifully designed glass waiting room at a new fashionable train station in the outskirts of Oslo, which was not used by the commuters waiting for trains in the cold, however. When an anthropologist would have been involved, she or he could have warned the architect that Norwegian people don’t like to be on display for others when being in a waiting room. Kirah stimulated the audience of anthropology students to offer their expertise to big firms and organisations, but also advised to ‘work on the edge’. Anthropologists should participate but also keep some distance in order to bring in different views from the outside and keep an open eye for diversity and variance. Another slogan she used was: ‘We are facilitators, not experts’, meaning that anthropologists can advise and support the work of others, but in the end the technical designers of products like train stations decide.
Jitske Kramer agreed with Kirah that facilitating is what anthropologists do. As an experienced corporate anthropologist she set up a consultancy firm in the Netherlands, called ‘Human Dimensions‘,which is formed by a large network of specialists offering advice and training to facilitate and manage (cultural) diversity and change within and between organisations, both profit and non-profit. Like Kirah, she stated that anthropologists have special qualities and capacities to look at ‘others’ to learn about ourselves. Connecting the views and perspectives of people at different levels of an organisation or between people from various cultural backgrounds can transform conflicts and fragmentation into a more inclusive corporate culture with space for diversity. She illustrated her statements with the metaphor of a song: combining various rhythms can become chaos or a nice song. Starting with clapping her hands she asked the public to join in. When clapping faster everybody clapped differently. Kramer explained that we have to listen to each other to organise harmony and overcome disorder. Anthropologists can apply their special knowledge of studying rituals, symbols, customs, kinship relations and rites of passage to analyse ranking, prestige systems and change in organisations. Stimulating dialogues and making diversity in organisations manageable by applying her anthropological perspective makes her proud of being an anthropologist. She asked the audience to be proud as well and not hide their training in the discipline when they apply for a job.
“I bring good news for students in anthropology because anthropology is more and more wanted in corporations!” With this statement Simon Roberts started his presentation. Roberts recently started at ‘Stripe Partners‘ as a business anthropologist after having worked for R&D of Intel and some other firms (e.g. http://www.ideasbazaar.com/ ). He explained his statement by stressing that anthropology can contribute much to companies. ‘Fish don’t know about the water until they are beached’. But anthropologists do know about this water, they ask questions when others think the work is done. Referring to Foucault, Roberts argued that anthropologists experience perpetual dissatisfaction and don’t stop posing questions, and that anthropology often produces counter-science. By doing so, anthropologists can contribute much to the continuing flux of transformations in the contemporary world because of their ‘abductive’ thinking: they imagine tentative solutions to social problems like growing obesity or aging populations and its implications for changing life-stage cycles. He also pointed to the unique contribution of the ethnographic research methodology of anthropologists by using the phrase ‘If you want to know how the tiger hunts, don’t go to the zoo, go to the jungle’. In doing so, he rejects a strict distinction between academic and applied anthropology. Roberts closed his talk with stimulating the audience of anthropology students to sell their capacities and knowledge, like Stripe Partners is doing.
In the panel session led by Dan Podjed, EASA Applied Anthropology Network coordinator from the University of Ljubljana, five experts[1]) – two from Ljubljana and three from Amsterdam – informed the public about the use of anthropology in their current jobs. Wayne Modest made a plea for more anthropologists working in museums and Marina de Regt said that her anthropological perspective helped to gain knowledge about the power differences in development projects in Yemen. Towards the end, Podjed raised the question of ethics, inviting the audience and experts to ponder about the use and possible misuse of applied anthropology. The question raised various reactions from the key-note speakers Roberts, Kirah and Kramer, and from some people in the audience. It ended in quite an emotionally-driven debate about where and how to apply anthropology. Rajko Murši?, of the panel, responded that we can’t separate pure academic knowledge from applied knowledge: when knowledge is not used, then it is useless; the application of anthropology is important. An alumna of VU University in the audience remarked that the world does not only need anthropologists, but more wide-spread application of anthropological thinking is needed even more.