Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

Students' education in applied anthropology can occur through a variety of sources including classroom instruction, hands-on experience and professional mentorship. Anthropology programs, and especially those with an applied focus, can help facilitate these types of experiences. This article details one such attempt: the creation and implementation of a local conference. The Texas Applied Anthropology Summit (TAAS) was first developed in 2016. The purpose of this and subsequent TAAS events was to bring together anthropological practitioners, faculty and students in an effort to build and strengthen relationships around applied anthropology in Texas. Based on data collected from past TAAS events and additional outreach with anthropologist practitioners it was determined that while key differences in practitioner and student/faculty interests exist, TAAS serves as an important networking tool for all attendees. This article also details what is needed, including programmatic support, to organize and implement a local conference.

The increasingly intractable nature of many social problems has given rise to cross-institutional and interdisciplinary collaborations in order to respond to social problems that no single entity can resolve on its own. One value of anthropology lies in its capacity to provide culturally tailored strategies for successful collaboration between different stakeholders in communities, across disciplinary fields, among public policymakers and practitioners. In this article, we revisit the emergence of a collaborative initiative to support at-risk youths of Haitian descent and their families. This work was undertaken by university researchers, juvenile justice professionals in Miami-Dade County, and community-based practitioners. Guided by a holistic anthropological perspective and a multidimensional approach to collaboration, we provide a processual analysis of almost two decades of opportunities and challenges posed by our collaboration and illuminate the importance of collaboration in identifying evidence-based solutions to social problems. While not all collaborative teams experience the same processes or operate within the same sociocultural contexts, we argue that there are some fundamental principles to establishing effective collaboration: a shared common goal, shared objectives, and time.

In this essay, we tackle the challenge of adapting the dominant way we think about health in the United States—through an individualistic, technocratic, biomedical lens—to address social problems rooted in structural inequality. As scholar activists, the authors participated in a coalition effort to improve community health in a postindustrial New Jersey city. Adopting a social determinants of health perspective, we describe efforts to move discourse away from wellness and toward a deeper understanding of the role of education and learning in building a "culture of health." The essay discusses how this structural analysis of health competed with much more narrow cultural understandings of education and health rooted in a pervasive wellness ideology. Coalition success hinged on correctly identifying the obstacles to health and learning in the community as understood by community members: violence emerged as a pressing obstacle that impeded both learning and health. Once we clarified a shared understanding of health as learning and a common understanding of violence as the most immediate obstacle to health as learning—our coalition was energized and made progress.

As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, anthropologists have not typically sought study-participant drawings. Using a protocol in which a request for a drawing was embedded, this study captures the internal dynamics of three successful university-based teams. Our questions followed a specific Describe–Draw–Explain sequence. All interviewees offered some novel element in their drawings (Draw step) beyond what they conveyed in their verbal descriptions (Describe step), while 85 percent of them again offered additional detail in the Explain step. The data also revealed stark and surprising cultural contrasts across teams, including one that was understood best as a network that could be activated upon demand. Gathering drawings is a fast yet valid and reliable method when the prescribed sequence of questions is followed. Another virtue of this approach is that the interviews can be conducted virtually, essential during the COVID-19 era.

This essay examines the tensions between participatory ethnographic research methods and newly emerging legal regimes of data protection and privacy. Drawing on the example of recent grant-funded research in Mexico, the essay charts how the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation impedes the practices and ethos of participatory research in significant ways. In particular, new legal requirements about data collection, access and storage, and “the right to be forgotten,” effectively preclude integrating community members into research planning or data collection. As countries around the world move toward more robust and comprehensive data protection and privacy laws, the issues raised in this essay are likely to become more pressing in many different research contexts in the future. [Mexico, data protection, participatory research, privacy laws].

To write about Indigeneity means already being deeply enmeshed in identity politics. The much researched rural south of Mexico City is a case in point. Anthropologists have described the Nahuatl speakers of Milpa Alta as “heirs of the Aztecs,” and knowledge of Nahuatl and folklore has become key to maintaining municipal land rights in the context of current multiculturalist politics. Thus, Nahuatl has become a politicized marker of prestige. This has led to various tensions, including acrimonious competition over what constitutes the “correct” way of speaking Nahuatl and frictions with newly arrived speakers of other Indigenous languages. To avoid exacerbating these tensions, I suggest that anthropologists should commit to decolonizing their work by politically and epistemologically situating it and by adopting participatory approaches, as well as an iterative, adaptive approach to research ethics. This means continuously reevaluating and tailoring one's ethics to concrete situations as they emerge—and never truly leaving “the field.” [Identity politics, decolonization, Nahuatl language]

In this essay, I contemplate the ethics of community engagement based on my work as an applied medical anthropologist in Guatemala. During my dissertation fieldwork in a highland community, I lived with a local Mayan family, and our lives together centered on discussing their goals, community organizing, and strategies for improving indigenous rights. I describe how the relationships I built with this family and the social justice work happening in the community gave me a sense of purpose as an applied anthropologist. At the time, it seemed like participatory and collaborative research at its best. A year later, an adult son of the local family was murdered for his community work, calling into question the notions of progress and advocacy. Here, I discuss my struggle with the moral imperative of applied anthropologists to support the human rights of local communities in counterbalance to our ethical obligation to protect research collaborators.

This essay explores various reasons and politics behind learning a field research language that go beyond the merely pragmatic function of being a tool to collect data. Moreover, the role of language competency in one's field language is interlinked with the ethics of conducting research and by reflecting on specific ethnographic contexts in Guatemala, it is possible to explore some of the contours of participatory research. One dimension, the appropriate language competency in cultural context, collaboration is considered foundational to participatory research. It is argued that ethnographers’ collaborators and friends in their research sites shape the roles and language use. In some cases, it is unethical and culturally disrespectful to not use the language preferred by collaborators. In short, the language used in participatory projects is not just about data collection, it is an ethical choice.

This introduction explores particular ways in which participatory research is practiced in Mesoamerica by ethnographers. It provides an introduction to the history of participatory research and its interlinkages to a host of ethical concerns that are explored in greater depth in eight, reflexive ethnographic essays by anthropologists who conduct research in Guatemala and Mexico. This introduction and the ten essays in this issue, including two commentaries, present several, sometimes conflicting, discussions about the complicated processes of conducting ethnographic research in Mesoamerica and, in particular, what participatory research means in this linguistically and culturally diverse region of the world. In this introduction, key aspects of the history of participatory research are reviewed, as well as ethical issues related to consent and confidentiality in specific field sites that may conflict with the requirements of funding and academic institutions. This collection of essays aims to capture a panorama of ethnographic experiences in Mesoamerican field sites to highlight the collaborations, as well as the ethical and pragmatic dilemmas encountered in participatory research.