Why The World Needs Anthropologists: from a question mark to an exclamation point
It started with a question mark. Why does the world need anthropologists? In 2013, the organising team of the first WWNA event, to be held in Amsterdam, was hesitant to sound too certain of the answer to this question. But then we thought: the world needs anthropologists, and we should say it loud and clear. We left out the question mark and went with a statement: Why the world needs anthropologists.
This turned out to be an appropriate choice: if there was any doubt about the world’s need for anthropology back then, after a decade of the WWNA movement, the scepticism has lost much of its power. The recent global crises – like the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and the war in Ukraine – have made it clear that we will not be able to address them without the input of anthropologists. Full stop. An exclamation point, actually!
Covid-19 in the spotlight
Covid-19 provides an obvious example of the need to include anthropologists and other social scientists on expert teams working on containing the spread of the disease. After nearly three years of the pandemic, policy- and decision-makers have begun to understand that these teams cannot only consist of infectiologists, epidemiologists, and other medical experts. If we use Marcel Mauss’ term, SARS-CoV-2 virus is a “total social fact,” affecting all aspects of our lives. Thus, if we want to effectively address it, we must consider the broader picture and think about people-centred solutions rather than relying purely on answers based on narrow expert opinions.
Only when we understand people in different social groups and cultural environments can we begin to develop solutions with people, not just for them; a crucial step towards more acceptable and sustainable solutions. An example? Think of the efforts to contain Covid-19 again. If the control measures, from masks to vaccination, were not imposed in a top-down fashion – from decision-makers and experts on the people – but were instead tailored to different social groups, we might have been in a very different situation right now. For instance, young people tend to follow platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat rather than the so-called mainstream media. With many governments focusing their communications on the latter, younger social groups were often not reached by the Covid-19 news and advisories.
As implied above, what the Covid-19 pandemic also put to the fore was that, rather than relying on “one-(wo)man bands,” the future of anthropology lies in interdisciplinary teams functioning like a symphony orchestra where each field of science and each expert contribute their part to the collective melody.
Regenerating anthropology – and the world
The Covid-19 pandemic sped up the trends in anthropology mentioned above – which WWNA had long been representing – and served as a call to our discipline to regenerate. It invigorated our methodological approaches, challenging us to invent alternatives to our typically long-term, in-person ethnographic fieldwork. It encouraged us to further question the reasons for a divide between academic and applied – or “pure” and “dirty” – anthropology, calling on us to think beyond it and explore how the two enrich rather than challenge each other.
Almost a decade since those first conversations about WWNA – and at yet another stage of the Covid-19 pandemic, global climate crisis, and geopolitical games – we find ourselves in a very different anthropological field and a drastically changed global reality. On the downside, the world is in need of an even more serious change than back then. On the positive side, however, WWNA, in partnership with the broader international community, has worked hard to transform anthropology from an obscure field of social science to a respected profession, ready – now more than ever – to jump in and inform this necessary regeneration.
Dan Podjed & Meta Gorup
Dan Podjed is a co-founder of WWNA and EASA AAN’s Convenor from 2010 to 2018. He is a researcher at the Institute for Innovation and Development of the University of Ljubljana, Research Fellow at ZRC SAZU and Associate Professor at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Meta Gorup is a co-founder of WWNA and co-organized five editions of the event between 2013 and 2017. She served as EASA AAN’s Convenor from 2012 to 2018.
The article was firstly published in the Why The World Needs Anthropologists 2022 Official Magazine, which can be found following this link.