Sillitoe (2003) lists a good number of areas in which anthropologists might work. In fact some of those that he considers less likely as well as those that he classifies as likely were represented during our seminar series. We learnt not only about what anthropologists are actually doing in these areas, but also how their involvement is developing, what new roles they are presently involved in, and how they envisage the future of applied anthropology in their field.⁴ More specifically our focus was on how the developments are unfolding in the socio-cultural and political context of contemporary Britain and how they are part of a particularly British experience of applied anthropology. As well as its particular place in the global political economy, Britain also has its own unique experience of applied anthropology. In the United States there are well-established associations of applied anthropologists⁵ and a substantial literature for teaching, professionals and career guidance,⁶ some of which I refer to below as point of comparison and as the ‘existing literature’ that this work contributes to. In Britain no such associations are currently active (although they have been in the past) and no similar body of literature exists (with the exception of the Anthropology in Action Journal and e-mail list discussed in more detail by Susan Wright in Chapter 1).⁷ It is however clear that in Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century the demand for anthropological approaches, understandings and methodologies outside academic departments is shifting and changing. This is happening in relation to developments both internal and external to the discipline. Wider changes in British culture, society and politics within a global context, changing approaches within anthropology, not to mention a situation where there are more anthropology Ph.D.s than academic jobs, all contribute. The contributors to Applications of Anthropology explore this new context where anthropologists, anthropological approaches and ethnographic methods are increasingly important in the public sector and in industry. For example, in organisations as diverse as television production companies, multinationals such as Unilever and Intel, as expert witnesses in legal cases, as public health service researchers and as employees of or consultants to government in the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Department for Education and Skills (DfESS) and Department for International Development (DfID).

Although it may as yet lack the public profile that Sillitoe urges it to develop, applied anthropology is beginning to thrive in Britain. It also has a history (see also Pink forthcoming). In Chapters 1 and 2 respectively Susan Wright and David Mills outline this historical context.⁸ Some early missionaries and colonial administrators can be said to have practised applied anthropology of a sort, although it was not named as such (Mills personal communication; see also Van Willigen 2002: 20–25 for a North American perspective). As for some other western national anthropological traditions (see Hill and Baba 1997), the roots of British applied anthropology were as Shore and Wright put it, embedded in its ‘Colonial Gaze’. They note how Evans-Pritchard’s (1951) and Firth’s (1981) writings tended to define applied anthropology ‘in the rather narrow terms of its value for government’ (1997: 141). During this time the Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRC) (1944–1962) funded applied anthropology in the colonies until it was wound up in 1961 (Mills 2002; see also Pink forthcoming). Rather than dwelling on this well-versed colonial history here I would direct the reader to the detailed historical work of David Mills (especially 2002, 2003 and this volume) and Adam Kuper (1996).

In this volume Mills draws from archival materials to offer us an insight into how, after the colonial period, a new form of applied anthropology – what is today sometimes called ‘business and industrial anthropology’ (see McDonald 2002: 378–421) – was flirted with and finally abandoned by the leading anthropologists and institutions of the 1950s. Mills’ chapter also provides an important historical context for the question of the relationship between the ‘pure’ (academic) and ‘impure’ (applied) anthropologies of the ensuing years (see below), as well as a delightful contrast to the contemporary blossoming of the relationship between anthropology and industry reported both in the media (see for example Hafner 1999) and in the contributions to this volume. Susan Wright’s chapter provides our second stage of the historical context, drawing from, amongst other things, Wright’s own experience of being one of the people central to developing and promoting applied anthropology in Britain in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. Indeed it is particularly important that we take heed of her commentary as it has happened all too often in Britain (but not in the U.S.) that proponents of more systematic attention to Applied Anthropology become caught up in a cycle of reinventing a wheel which gradually stops spinning, awaiting the momentum of the next generation of enthusiastic seminar and network organisers. However one encouraging factor regarding the particular wheel that this present book spins is that it has been fully supported by the key institutions involved in the development and representation of anthropology in Britain today: the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA); the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI); and the Centre for learning and teaching in Sociology, Anthropology and Politics (C-SAP).

In the ensuing chapters, through a set of case studies of anthropologists’ experiences of working with diverse organisations, this book revisits historical debates about applied anthropology, defines existing issues and explores possible futures. In doing so it develops a series of themes that by way of introduction I begin to unravel below: the relationship between the ‘pure and the impure’ – academic and applied – anthropology; the question of anthropological identities in new working environments; innovative methodologies appropriate to these new contexts and the new research questions they involve; the skills needed by anthropologists working in applied contexts where multidisciplinary work is often undertaken; issues of ethics and responsibility; and how anthropology is perceived from the ‘outside’. It reflects on the implications of these for the future both of the application of anthropology outside academic departments and of the new generation of anthropologists who might be involved in this.

To consider what might be specifically British about this situation we might take recourse to one of anthropology’s ‘traditional’ endeavours – cross-cultural comparison. Hill and Baba (1997) compared the status of applied anthropology internationally in the 1990s. According to them, ‘The relationship between anthropologists who practice anthropology and those who work in traditional academic settings often is an uneasy one in many countries’. In Britain (c.f. Shore and Wright (1997)) and elsewhere (such as France, Canada and Australia) ‘the usefulness of anthropological knowledge is being held hostage by the culture of the discipline itself’. Comparing this with Central America, Mexico and Israel they note how ‘the practice of anthropology in these countries dominates the discipline, and, in effect, is the discipline’ (emphasis in original) (Hill and Baba 1997: 10–11) in these ‘countries that have a tradition of using anthropology to solve their problems’ (Hill and Baba 1997: 12). The status of applied anthropology is particularly bound up with its relationship to theory which in the 1990s in Britain, as in most western/westernised nations, was one of a ‘traditional linear model’ whereby a ‘one way flow from theory to practice is reinforced by various distancing mechanisms that separate theorists and practitioners -- they work in different types of institutions with little interchange between them, they dwell on different ends of the disciplinary status hierarchy and they clash almost obsessively over ethical issues’ (Hill and Baba 1997: 16). There was, they note, an ‘absence of a strong feedback loop from practice to theory in the West’, whereas in non-Western nations (Costa Rica, India, Mexico, Nigeria and Russia) ‘anthropological theory often was embedded consciously in larger state-level political and economic theories that were used broadly to construct and implement national policy over many decades’ (1997: 17).

In the context of British social anthropology in the 1990s Shore and Wright described this in terms of Mary Douglas’s (1966) work on classificatory systems. There was, they propose ‘a characteristic preoccupation with the purity of academic boundaries, where “purity” is associated with academic theory, neutrality and detachment’, thus maiming applied work ‘not only “untheoretical”, but also “impure”, even “parasitical” and “polluting” to the discipline’ (1997: 142). Moreover, the discipline was conservative and reluctant ‘to accept that knowledge generated from work in policy and practice can constitute a legitimate basis for constructing theory’ (1997: 143). This assessment is still accurate to some extent, and the cross-cultural comparison Hill and Baba engage in demonstrates how the relationship between applied and academic anthropology in Britain is part of a specific national context, providing a background that situates chapters 1 (Mills) and 2 (Wright) globally.⁹ Currently, however, with the expansion of applied anthropology in Britain an increasing number of anthropologists are beginning to bridge the gap between making a theoretical contribution to the academy and applying their anthropological approaches to practical problems. My book, Home Truths (2004a), a monograph, based on a video ethnography of ‘Cleaning, Homes and Lifestyles’ carried out for Unilever Research, is an attempt to achieve just this. Contributors to this book also combine theoretical and applied work relating to the same project. In chapter 9 Marvin describes how his academic work on the fox hunt has involved him in filmmaking and report writing and in chapter 10 Schwander-Sievers discusses how as an academic she also plays a role as an expert witness in legal cases. Further examples of projects that combine academic and applied components can be found in Gellner and Hirsch’s (2001) edited volume Inside Organisations: Anthropologists at Work. However, it should be noted that when they have engaged in work that has had both applied and theoretical import, most anthropologists involved have been employed by academic institutions. Practising anthropologists working full-time outside the academy have less time to develop and publish theoretical work to contribute to academic anthropology. Indeed they have less motivation to do so as their own career development does not depend on academic publications, unlike for academics publishing for Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) success. This however does not mean that practising anthropologists have no need for theory, that they are incapable of producing it or that their work has no theoretical implications. Indeed, the need to establish and maintain a dialogue between applied and academic anthropology was emphasised throughout our seminar series. There are various ways to bridge the gap between the academic and applied and different arrangements (e.g. seminars, training and updating workshops, invited speakers) will suit academic and applied anthropologists in different working situations.

Wright (chapter 1) describes how, in the 1980s and 1990s, GAPP steered away from dichotomy between pure and applied anthropology (not least in its decision to use the term ‘practice’ rather than ‘applied’ in its title, but also to emphasise the importance of practice for anthropological teaching and researching).¹⁰ By the early twenty-first century it is clear that any mutually exclusive dichotomy between applied and academic anthropology is not only now undesirable for a great many contemporary anthropologists from both ‘camps’ but also clearly misinformed. In many areas of practice the two are fundamentally related: academic anthropology nowadays often has an applied or ‘user’ focus (and indeed this appears to be encouraged by the Economic and Social Research Council who asks applicants to name potential users of their research in their grant application forms); and applied anthropology is inevitably academically informed in that it draws from and represents the theoretical and methodological concerns of academic anthropology. The current problem is that these links are often not sufficiently consolidated in the training, work practices, publications and networks of applied and academic anthrop...