Action Anthropology

Raymond A. Bucko

Action anthropology is a scholarly enterprise based in field research, data collection, and theory building, during which the anthropologist is also committed to assisting local communities in achieving their goals and meeting specific felt needs. Rather than pursuing pure science or perusing their own agendas, action anthropologists see themselves more as tentative coexplorers who help the host community to identify challenges and seek ways to meet them. In the process, action anthropologists contribute to the community while learning from their experiences. While applied anthropology generally focuses on programmatic concerns of nonlocal funders, both public and private, action anthropology discovers local concerns in the course of ethnographic work and engages local resources in addressing them. Though related to applied anthropology, which began in Great Britain in the 1920s and the United States in the 1930s and which shares the goal of being a useful rather than purely scholarly field, action anthropology ...

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