Peace Corps and Anthropology

Becoming an anthropologist is a slow  and challenging process. As I remarked in an earlier essay, Expanding American Anthropology, 1945 – 1980, published through the Association of Senior Anthropologist, brought back lots of early memories. One article is by Robert Textor  where he described the formation of the Peace Corps. This brought back many memories.

In 1960, toward the end of my freshman year at Brown University I walked into Faunce House, the Student Union at the time, and picked up a copy of the Brown Daily Herald, the campus newspaper. That day there was a Supplement (I don’t remember the name) but I do remember an article about the British Overseas Volunteer Corps[1]. As I read the article, I thought to myself –“Wow, I’d like to do that!”

I had enrolled in NROTC in the Fall of 1959, this article suggested an alternative type of service. Little did I know at the time that I would be suspended from NROTC that fall because of my grades the previous year. Those grades which included the math required for my planned major in astronomy, were to be life changing as was the article I had read.

According to Textor[2], a few days after his inaugural address President John F. Kennedy began work to establish a new governmental organization that became known as the U.S. Peace Corps. President Kennedy chose his brother-in-law, Sergeant Shriver, for the task of turning the concept into a reality. On March 1, 1961, Kennedy signed the Executive Order that created the Peace Corps.

Textor’s article traces the development of the early days of the Peace Corps and some of its key personalities. He also recounts his role in the process. At the time, I was still struggling with the immediate personal issue of being placed on academic probation as I entered my sophomore year.

Textor’s major contribution to the development of Peace Corps was to lobby and insist upon a strong language training program for the volunteers who would be assigned to serve in the program. The tradition of US representative such as embassy staff, USAID, and military advisers to live in enclaves and work in English in the metropolitan cities and with host government officials. But this would not work at the village level where the PCV’s (Peace Corps Volunteers) would be assigned.

At the time, Textor was a post-doctoral fellow, Yale/Harvard anthropologist, who was working on a book about Thai Religion when he got the invitation to join the Peace Corp/Washington. The goal was to develop a language program to train the PCV recruits in Thai and to get them in place quickly. Textor’s article brought back memories of my own training for Peace in the summer of 1964.

In the May, 1964 I graduated from Brown University and faced the question – “What next?” 

This is the perennial question facing AB graduates in anthropology. “Is anthropology simply a major, like history or English, preparation for a middle-class job or professional graduate school?” Or, “Is it a path toward an academic career?”

Another question I faced at the time was, “What about the “peace time” draft?” 

I considered my options. After an interview with a J. Walter Thompson recruiter, who chained smoked Marlboro cigarettes while bragging, “This is one of our clients!”, I decided that advertising was not for me.

 I consider OCS, Officer Candidate School, as a way of fulfilling my military obligation. I also applied to 10 anthropology graduate programs mostly west of the Mississippi. I figured that I would play the IVY LEAGUE degree and geographical distribution card to overcome my early academic record.

 And, I remembered the British Overseas Volunteer Corps article I had read and how it had excited me. So I decided to apply to the newly created Peace Corps.

I was accepted by several of the graduate programs in the mid-west and south-west. However, an offer from the Peace Corps to train for Peru arrived and was more attractive. Our training would be at Cornell (famous for the Vicos Project). There I became one of some 50 candidates who would go through the basic RCA/Tools project training.

I wrote to the schools that had accepted me and indicated my decision. A problem I’d been concerned about was how I would handle the logistics of applying from overseas while serving as a PCV. So, I asked in the letter, ”If I went to Peru, could I update my application for the entrance class of 1966?” Most responded that I would have to reapply for the 1966 class. One, however, the University of Arizona, wrote back that they would update my acceptance to the class entering in 1966. This solved my problem.

In late June, I prepared to go to Cornell and begin my training. There I ran into Robert Textor’s idea for intensive language training. The Cornell Program, headed by William Rideout and anthropologist, Cara Richards, had two language tracks. For those who knew Spanish (either as Spanish majors, or native speakers) there was training in Quechua, the predominate Indian language of the highland Indians. For the rest of us, the language was Spanish. Language training was the dominate subject we trained in for 4 to 6 hours a day for the 8 weeks of training. If we survived Cornell, we would spend 2 weeks in Puerto Rico at Camp Radley.

Reading Textor’s essay brought all this back. My Spanish teacher was an American Graduate Spanish major, a young woman, who spoke Castilian Spanish. Other classes had native speaking instructors who were graduate students at Cornell and represented different Latin American “dialects”.

The classes seemed to go on and on. I found myself getting out of seat and pacing back and forth in the back of the class. That earned me the nickname, El Tigre. I found that as I was learning Spanish, the German I’d studied at Brown also improved as I tried to not respond in English but would go to a German translation first.

I learned from this training the two major truths that Textor described in his essay. Most Americans, outside of the diplomatic corps and who were US representatives in country, did not have good language skills. Most lived in American enclaves that insulated them from the local population. Peace Corps was modeled more like the traditional anthropological field situation, living and working with the locals and in their community. 

Our first task was to learn and/or develop our skills in the indigenous language

As an anthropologist, I observed how my classmates’ language skills had improved and been altered by their communities. Indians, Cholos, and Metizos did not speak Castilian. They spoke with accents that combined Spanish and Quechua derived elements. Second, those of us assigned to work as a link between the PC and the American community – tended to fall into the class that Textor was attempting to have Peace Corps avoid.

 I fell into this latter class.  My spoken language proficiency never exceeded a 3.5 on the foreign service exam. I was based in Cuzco but covered the Departments of Cuzco, Puno, and Apurimac where I was assigned to work on Special Projects as a liaison between USAID/Alianza para Progreso and the Peace Corps Volunteers working in Southern Peru. Special projects included local school construction, potable water, introduction of rabbits as a food source, etc. at a cost to USAID of around $1,000.

Textor’s essay describes the ideals behind the Peace Corps and documents the history of the very earliest days of the Peace Corps, from the Washington perspective. It is a valuable lesson in the history of anthropology and points to the anthropological input in the development of training for the foreign service.

My “class” was part of the second wave of volunteers into Peru. When we arrived at the airport, we were met by the local PC office’s American secretary. The problem was she was there to meet her friend returning from vacation. No one had informed her of our arrival. There were no preparations made for us. In addition there were the representatives of two other classes of PCVs arrived with us. What we found, when we arrived, was a poorly organized program that was still working out its purpose and processes.

It took the regional Cusco office several months to get everyone assigned and settled. My roommate, an artist/ceramist had been told that he would be helping to set-up a kiln in one of the native villages in Cuzco. That never happened. He ended up working with local PC office. In those days, we h had to learn to be flexible and adaptable.

I discovered that there was more than just the basic speaking skills to learning the language . This is what Textor described as his goal in the formative days. There was also learning the “occupational or subject” vocabulary of the language.  This was especially true if your assignment dealt with cultural differences in a specific skill set or activity. To this day, much of my “agricultural” vocabulary and knowledge is in a bastardized Spanish/Quechua based on a mixture of 16^th century and 20^th century agricultural culture.

 In my assignment as a liaison, I learned the “culture” of grantsmanship and program administration. Each has its own language and English and Spanish vocabularies. In essence, Textor was correct insisting that PCV’s know and speak the language of the peoples they would be serving. I doubt, however, he thought of it in this other sense. 

There was a disconnect problem between language training and the country and skills training components at US based facilities,  and, in those early days, the uncertainty of the in-country assignments., When Peace Corps later shifted to an in-country training model, this problem was corrected.

Peace Corps was an adventure, especially for a young BA in anthropology. It confirmed my interest in anthropology – working with village leaders, other volunteers, government (Peruvian and American) officials developing simple low-tech projects – as an applied field.

At the end of my tour, I was offered a contract to work with the Lima USAID office. I turned it down and exercised my option to enroll in the graduate program at the University of Arizona. I recommended a fellow volunteer for the position, which he accepted.

In Arizona, I met Dr. Edward H. Spicer and enrolled in the Community Development Seminar that he conducted with Dr. Cortland Cleveland from the sociology department. There I was introduced to Spicer’s case-book approach to training, Human Problems in Technological Change and had an opportunity to put my personal experience into perspective.

Peace Corps has been the training ground for many who have since considered anthropology as a career. It carried forward a certain Boasian quality even as academic anthropology was fragmenting in to narrower and narrower specialties. It has also trained many in the more exotic languages humans have developed over the history of the species. More important, Peace Corp has helped to salvage may tongues that might have been otherwise lost in the expansion of our global culture.

 For me, reading about those very early days, reawakened many fond memories.

 Isn’t part of what the Association of Senior Anthropologists mission is, is to document the traditions of the profession?

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Service_Overseas

[2] Chapter 2, Textor (1980:22),in Expanding  American Anthropology 1945-1980

What is the legacy of an anthropologist -- Edward H. and Rosamont B. Spicer Foundation

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It is carried out by individual men and women which is the legacy of all those who have, those who are, and those who will add to the discoveries and traditions that are the basis and core of our discipline, our science, our profession, and our passion. That is, today's anthropology is the legacy we, as the intellectual heirs of our founders, have been entrusted with to honor, to build upon and to apply for the benefit of humanity. Have you made plans for preserving and passing on your legacy?

One such legacy is that of the late Edward H. Spicer and his wife, Rosamond.

The Edward H. and Rosamont B. Spicer Foundation is a non-profit foundation incorporated in the state of Arizona. Its mission is to honor and further the legacy and life works of Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer in the fields of anthropology, community development, and social justice. The foundation was founded by Scott Spicer, Ned's grandson and Lawson Spicer and several of Ned's former colleagues and students to honor the memory and further the work of the Spicers


In Edward Spicer'and his wife Rosomond's case, their legacy is to be found in the combination of his body of work, the depth of which has just been scratched.  And second in the students he trained with his unique perspective of anthropology as both a science in the pursuit of knowledge about the human condition and a body of knowledge about that condition that could and should be used to bring about a better world

The body of work

A listing of Spicer's major works can be found first in James Officer's Spicer biography published in the National Academy of Sciences  Biographical Memoirs V.68 (1995) and second his papers located in the Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer Archive at the Arizona State Museum Library. It is from these resources that the legacy is to be found, picked up, and carried forward by all who hold these values.

Ned Spicer was invited to participate in a symposium, organized by Thomas Weaver of the University of Arizona, entitled  "Anthropology in the 1990's: Conditions, Needs, and Prospects." The symposium was held in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in San Francisco in the winter of 1974. The subheading of the symposium was, "Suppose They Began the Twenty-First Century and Forgot to Invite Anthropology!!!"

Ned presented his paper entitled, "Anthropology in the society of the 1990s", on February 28, 1974.
Twenty years later, in 1994, the paper was republished in Human Organization with a forward by his widow, Rosamond Spicer, under the title, "Reassessing Edward Spicer's Views on Anthropology in the Society of the 1990s: How and Why This Paper by Edward H. Spicer Was Written" (Spicer, Rosamond 1994 Human Organization, Vol. 53. No. 4, pp. 388 - 395). From her forward, we can gain an insight into Ned's thinking and approach to the future.
Rosamond observed that

"In preparing this paper on the future of cultural anthropology, Ned apparently gave it a great deal of thought. As was his habit, he wrote down voluminous notes and lists of ideas. He also made a number of starts, each different from the last.”

“At one point he wrote, 'I react strongly against nineteenth century economic-determinism, that technology and physical environmental conditions are the essential factors to consider in forecasting. I rather look to the future in terms of the adaptation of social structures and cultural orientations to one another in the context of the influence of firm cultural products. I shall therefore take off from consideration of the probable alternative trends which we may expect in the form and functions of societal structures and cultural value orientations.'  “

“Such a point of view was always the basis of his thinking and writing." (p. 388)

In describing Ned, Rosamond says,

"His interests, reading, and studies ranged through drama, literature, economics, city planning, philosophy, history, poetry, the environment, and all the fields of anthropology. All of this vast array of information and understanding he brought to bear in some way or another on any project he undertook, on any subject on which he wrote.”

“Perhaps one of his outstanding characteristics was his ability to synthesize, as was so evident in his Cycles of Conquest. I have long thought that the practice of that art of synthesis was connected with another, the appreciation and writing of poetry. I mention all these aspects of Ned because they seem to be contained in the following paper." (p.388).

It was his global interests and ability to synthesize vast amounts of material that I remember from my first graduate classes with Ned.  I was drawn to his Community Development Seminar where  he challenged us to look at the problem at hand from multiple points of view. He asked us, “What are the “felt needs” of the various parties in this change situation?” He encouraged us to seek a synthesis of these views as a way toward understanding the issues and their complexities. As community developers, he taught us that our job was to help the parties to synthesize their shared interests. Our job was to facilitate, not impose, problem resolution.

Ned was a humanist who understood and taught the connection between a people’s past, present and how these shaped their future. In his paper on the February day in 1974, he outlined 5 trends in the social and cultural environment that he felt would shape the next 20 years for anthropology.

The five trends that Ned chose to characterize the society he envisioned for the 1990s were the following:
(1) increasing intercommunication among the peoples of the world;
(2) increasing occupational specialization with accompanying organic differentiation within societies;
(3) increasing failure of technological solutions for the resolution of human problems in acceptable ways;
(4) increasing assertion and self-expression of ethnic groups within nation-states; and
(5) increasing reaction against centralization in political and administrative structures.

He stated "In general, continuation of these trends will, I believe, result in a society more heterogeneous than it was in the 19th or any previous century, more aware of its heterogeneity, with stronger than ever tendencies to compartmentalization, with increased awareness of and interest in non-technological and non-economic factors affecting human life, and with a growing tendency to view the nation-state in a wholly new light, especially with reference to its ethnic components and its political and administrative units." (p. 389)

Now. nearly 40 years later, it might be worth considering just how prescient Ned’s predictions were for the 1990s and for the 21st Century. It is time to evaluate the predictions and further the legacy

.

Why do we need to think about our Legacy!

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary a legacy is 

  “1. something (such as property or money) that is received from someone who has died and  2.  something that happened in the past or that comes from someone in the past.”

A legacy can be envisioned as a “cultural atom.” It is initially the symbolic remains of the life of a once living and breathing human being. It is the material evidence of that person’s existence, the biological continuity of his/her presence, and the psychological impression left on one’s contemporaries and successors. The legacy, like “culture”, exists in the corporate memory or tradition of the “group(s)” impacted by an individual’s action and activities during a specific time and in a specific place. What that legacy is, its meaning and impact on the future, are a mixture of the desire by the deceased to influence the future and the futures evaluation of the deceased’s life. A legacy is where personality and culture meet for better or worse. It sets the stage for the next generation being both the source of wisdom and the curse that comes from the “sins of the fathers”.

As professional anthropologist, trained in a tradition passed on to us by those who came before us and as the ones who will be passing on that tradition, we should be both personally and collectively concerned about our legacy.  As knowledge producers and members of the knowledge industry, i.e. researchers, scholars, teachers, and advisers, we have a duty to insure that our work products are made available to our heirs.

Buried on page 4 of the 2009 version of the AAA ethics code, under the major heading III Research, subsection, B. Responsibility to Scholarship and Science is the following item:

6. Anthropological researchers should seriously consider all reasonable requests for access to their data and other research materials for purposes of research. They should also make every effort to insure preservation of their fieldwork data for use by posterity.

Like so many of the “ethical principles” of the AAA, this provision is a wish that has never been truly addressed by the profession in terms of an actionable item. It is offered only as a suggestion with little thought of the important role it might play in the future development and management of the profession and the science.

This is a very important observation. If you read the various versions and note the changes that have taken place in the AAA ethics statements, you would see that there is considerable concern about how one's work will be received, first, by those studied and, then later, with the human subjects issues imposed by sponsors on how the research and data will be managed. Research is made even more complex by the technology for digitally recording field observations and now digitally archiving research documents in their original form. This technology makes public’s access and data retrieval, through legitimate or illegitimate means, easier. It also places the access and use of such data beyond the researcher’s control. Today, the ethical issues involved in human subject research are more complex and challenging.

Concern over one's legacy is not restricted to cultural or social anthropology. It applies to all the sub-disciplines in ways that are both shared across anthropology and which are specific to the sub-discipline. 

Another reason for the original question is that these data are, to the extent you have ownership and control of the data, your responsibility. If you are concerned about how your material might be received, then you have to be concerned about the disposition of your material after your death. Once you are no longer alive, you will have no control over what is saved or how it will be used. Thus, planning and executing a Legacy Plan for the disposition of your materials -- planning for your legacy -- at some point of your career is crucial. This might mean physically destroying material that you don't want to be passed on, or assigning it to a trustee with an embargo on the release of the material to the "public" for some period of time, or you can just leave it to chance.

The challenge we face today is a black or white ethical choice. Remember, one can never expect to satisfy everyone. The choices are: What value do you feel your data might have for the future of the science vs. What harm do you feel that public release of your data  might have do to the individuals and society you studied? 

Do you have a Legacy Plan? Will your legacy be used by the future anthropologists for the benefit of the science? How can the AAA make actionable the ethical concerns of members for safe keeping their legacy?

What will be your Legacy to Anthropology

What will your or mine legacy be for future anthropology students and the profession? As a member of the 4th generation (1960s - 1980s) of  American anthropology now transitioning into retirement, I ponder these questions:

• What do I do with my files and data accumulated over 50 years of academic and applied work?  
• Should I just throw it all away or should I donate it to some archive for "lost" or "gray" anthropology? And where will that be?
• Is there any "auto-ethnographic" value in these files that might contribute to the present or future development of anthropology and the profession? 

 Why ask such questions, you might ask? As a graduate student I ran across a copy of a dissertation written by Panchanan Mitra, a student of Clark Wissler at Yale in the 1920s, who later became an early founder of Indian (the country) anthropology. He observed as far back as1933 that anthropology is a sub-culture of Western culture. As he states:   

Anthropology ... is the science of man, but it is also a trait of European civilization and its point of the view is that of the European observing the rest of mankind. So the growth of the science is intimately bound to the knowledge and outlook of Europe (1933:1)

  American anthropology is a sub-set of that tradition. As Mitra (1933) stated:

Our regional study of science in America has shown the rise of anthropology here from the science of the America Indian, beginning with the discovery of the New World in 1492, and the theological speculation arising there from. Thus it has been eminently objective and regional from its very start. Philology, Geology, Prehistoric Archaeology and still later evolutionary Biology only modified its outlook. Its museum methods, its German geographical lead, and its close association with the remarkable development of Experimental Psychology and Social Science, mark America Anthropology by the history of its experience as distinct from the anthropology of Europe. (Mitra 1933: 211)

One can conclude that anthropology, like every other scholarly or scientific discipline produced by Western Civilization, is worthy of study in itself. Further, it can be subjected to the same anthropological treatment one might apply to any other intellectual or cultural tradition. As such, anthropology must become reflexive, and the anthropologist must include him or herself  as actors as well as observers in their studies. This applies to all anthropologists, but especially to the ethnographer. As a participant in the society one studies, the ethnographer comes an accomplice to the event she/he reports in the ethnographic context. It is the subjective role which provides both a depth of emotional response to the event and a narrower focus on its meaning than one obtains from the observer role.

In recent years, one new research avenue in ethnographic research is auto-ethnography. This is a reflexive approach which raises some very interesting and challenging issue for the discipline of anthropology and the ethnographer. Auto-ethnography is a process that formalizes the process of including the field worker as “an accomplice” to the events taking place in the society and culture at the time and place being studied. Chang (2009) in her AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AS METHOD Developing Qualitative Inquiry  includes a range of techniques and products from journaling and diaries, to personal essays and presentations as methods for recording one's reflections on one’s experience in the field, both as the observer and as the participant. These sources can then be used to study the role of the professional anthropologist in context and evaluate their impact on anthropology and the profession. It is here where the anthropologist describes and reflects candidly upon the role of Self (the ethnographer's individual Self) in their role as observer as the witness to and the recording instrument for the social and cultural behavior of the Other.

Over the last 50 years, there has emerged a split in American anthropology between those who pursue the traditional academic teacher and sometimes researcher roles, and the social activist/practitioner and sometimes policy researcher roles. The former has adopted the institutional incentive system of the academy which rewards those who pursue the academic career of research, teaching and service, They are expected to contribute to the academic, or basic research literature, through an institutional structure designed to promote research and publication. At the same time, it punishes the latter who opt for the practitioner role which is based on a reward system of client service, policy research and evaluation and consulting.

As a result of the institutional structure, academic anthropology has become nothing more than another academic discipline, limiting itself to the fads and fashion of the academy and research funding communities. Its institutional focus on basic research and publication has created an elitism reflecting the structure of the American post-secondary system as a whole of which it is a part. In the process, it condemns thousands of students and graduates to a professional caste system.Through this internal status system, an informal, mandated path to professional acceptance and recognition has evolved. Those who fail to follow the path are shuts out of the opportunity to do meaningful research and/or to publish it. Here the clientele for the academic product is the disciplinary elite who through a peer review process impose standards designed to defend the prevailing theoretical paradigm(s). The system of academic hierarchy prevents many from ever making a meaningful contribution to the discipline through the traditional hierarchy of affiliation (e.g. Hurlbert, Beverley McElligott  1976,   Rogge, 1976, Roose, Kenneth D., and C.J. Anderson   1970 )

This situation was made worse for those who choose to apply their insights drawn from anthropology to the development of policy solutions to social problems or to actively seek out and find innovative products that are solutions to a need in the marketplace. Here the incentive system is oriented toward the production of practical applications for a non-academic clientele. The rewards are not based on publications nor academic status, but rather on career advancement within the institutional structure, increased income and one's reputation as a problem solver and effective administrator of people and programs. Often what is produced is the proprietary product of the client, and not the practitioner. The lessons learned and made available to future generations from these experiences are rarely available to the discipline and fall into the category of the discipline’s gray literature,

Gray literature, in anthropology, is that vast body of information and observation made by anthropologically trained individuals that has been produced to achieve a specific, often limited or proprietary purpose, for a non-academic public, private client or specific audience. Such materials are often time sensitive, contextually limited, problem specific, and politically or subjectively biased to reflect the employer's interests. Yet, they also can provide an insightful glimpse into our understanding of the institutions that produced them.(e.g. Nader, Laura 1972)

In the tradition of anthropology, these materials are as valuable as the oral histories collected by the 19^th and early 20^th century ethnographers. Those oral histories attempted to “salvage” what was left of the “native” or “indigenous” cultures that were undergoing rapid acculturation, assimilation and/or extinction brought on by Western cultural expansion and imperialism. Today, these records are a valuable resource for the ethnohistorian and our understanding of cultural change.

In the academic debate between the proponents of scientific vs. humanistic anthropology, history has played and does play a crucial role. A historical dimension is a necessary condition in the development of an anthropological theory of cultural dynamics. Unlike most other subject that mankind seeks to understand, human events are always unique on the individual human level. Such events happen once and only once. They can’t be replicated in the experimental sense that physics, chemistry, or biology can repeat events.  Human cultural events can only be recorded by witnesses to the event at the time and place of the event. 

In the Western tradition, ethically, morally and legally, the researcher should not and cannot experiment on another human being without that the subject’s permission. This does not mean that humans do not use other human beings as guinea pigs. Such research must respect the limitations that the rule of “informed consent” imposes upon the researcher. Another way such research can take place is when the researcher and authorities dehumanize their subjects, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments using American Blacks or the Nazi WWII experiments on Jews as subjects, so that the subject’s humanity is passively ignored or formally denied.

Ethnography is even more restrictive regarding experimentation on moral, philosophical, and practical grounds. The ethnographer is ethically bound by the profession to leave the subject community in a state that would, as much as reasonably possible, not prejudice a future researcher's chances of coming back and be welcomed to study the same group. On a practical basis, this ethic makes the reflections and recordings of the field ethnographer’s personal experience even more valuable to the interpretation of the field data he/she has gathered and for preparation of others to go into the field. 

The field experience can be treated as the observation of a natural experiment. The ethnographer’s observations become the record of the natural experiment that takes place when the Stranger (the ethnographer) comes to live and study the Other  (the subject). The auto-ethnography is the record of the context in which the Stranger is transformed from the status of Stranger to the status of “not quite One of US” as seen from the Other’s point of view.

The challenge as a practitioner is that we are defined initially by the Other’s status structure. We are hired or engaged for a position in an established status network. That network exists in the institution(s) that our client controls and interacts with. This is a reversal of the tradition observer/participant role of the academic researcher. 

The academic researcher starts from the position of observer. Beginning by studying the literature on the topic, the culture, and context of the proposed research, the researcher arrives at the site as the Outsider/ Observer and Stranger. He or she becomes, to the extent permitted by the subject, a participant in the society and experiences the culture only after being accepted by the Other. The ethnographer experiences this acceptance from the point of view of the status position assigned to him/her by the Other. In order to better observe the natural experiment that is his/her focus of study the ethnographer must play the role expected of one assigned to that status. Mead’s study of adolescent girls in Micronesia reflect the interaction between the Observer and the Participant status and role as seen from the researcher and subject points of view. 

On the other hand, the practitioner becomes the participant first by taking a job (a status) with an employer or client. He or she must do so if they wish to apply their anthropological insight to the job in order to become a better and more effective observer in the institution. Before he/she can become the observer, the practitioner must begin by demonstrating the skills called for in the job. One’s success as a practitioner anthropologist begins with his/her technical skills and are expanded by how these are informed by a holistic integration of these with the observations and understanding of system in which the job is a part.  The observer role is a means for establishing the legitimacy for an observer or advisory status within the client social network.

As an anthropologically trained observer, the practitioner is prepared to evaluate his/her role in a holistic sense. He or she is able to reflect more deeply on the meaning of his/her place in the institution as well as the institution’s mission. Such reflections when recorded and documented become part of the gray literature that constitutes the corpus of autoethnography. Unlike the literature search done by the academic prior to entering the field, the auto-ethnographic process begins when one enters in the field and is completed only after leaving the field, if done at all. It is the personalized 'administrative" record of the field work prepared by the field worker.

As a product of the participant role, these internal observations by the practitioner can be incorporated into the preparation of future anthropologists working with the Other. They can form a basis for the later literature review by the academic before going into the field. The gray literature can also be treated as part of the data used in evaluating the natural experiments that are used as the basis of a scientific anthropology. 

The problem we face today is that much of this data is being lost to the discipline. It is being lost because there is no formal organized structure for acquiring, evaluating, archiving and retrieving these data. The proliferation of the practitioner role has opened up tremendous opportunities for anthropology. But these opportunities exist only as theoretical and pedagogical potentials. Unless the profession recognizes and addresses that potential in time, these data will lost forever. 

So the question facing both the profession and the practitioners is, 

“What will be your legacy?”

Bibliography:

Hurlbert, Beverley McElligott  1976  "Status and Exchange in the Profession of Anthropology"  American Anthropologist Vol 78, no.2 p. 272 - 284

Mitra, Panchanan  1933  A History of American Anthropology. Calcutta, University of Calcutta

Nader, Laura  1972  "Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up" In: Dell H. Hymes (Ed.) Reinventing Anthropology. New York, Pantheon Books, 1972. p. 284-311

Rogge, A. E, 1976 "A Look at Academic Anthropology: Through a Graph Darkly" American Anthropologist, Volume 78. Issue 4. December (Pages 829 - 843)
 
Roose, Kenneth D., and C.J. Anderson   1970 A Rating of Graduate Programs. Washington: American Council Education