Social Science & Medicine 99 (2013) 205e208 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Social Science & Medicine journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/socscimed Enhancing the public impact of ethnography This special issue concludes with pragmatic advice for ethnogra- phers seeking to have an impact on public perceptions of health problems, and to influence public policy. We asked four people with different disciplinary perspectives e an academic anthropolo- gist who launched a popular interest anthropology magazine, a journalist for an internationally cited newswire, a policy maker- cum-visual-ethnographer, and a health official in a national gov- ernment agency e a single question: What is an immediate step that ethnographers of health might take to affect social change? Publish in Popular and General Education Presses Emily Martin Professor of Anthropology, New York University Founding Editor, Anthropology Now I have long seen ethnography as useful for educating broader pub- lics. In The Woman in the Body I analyzed the account of menstruation in early editions of the women’s health movement classic, Our Bodies, Our Selves (Collective, 1984) which was much the same as distressing medical text books’ accounts of menstruation as failed production (Martin, 1987, p.229). Eventually the message got through to the women’s health movement and subsequent editions of Our Bodies, Our Selves were rewritten to reflect this (Collective,1998). Just as grat- ifyingly, a children’s book reflecting knowledge of the misleading ste- reotypes in the canonical story of the egg and the sperm has recently been published (Silverberg, 2012). More recently I developed a graduate course in “Anthropology and its Publics”. I have taught it on my own and jointly with Leith Mullings at the City University of New York. We introduced stu- dents to classic works on intellectuals in the public sphere, to different forms of practicing anthropology in collaboration with fieldwork interlocutors, and to specific genres of writing for the public, such as the Op-ed. To achieve this last, we are indebted to training from The Op-ed Project, an organization that runs highly effective workshops on how to write an Op-ed. 1 Weber cautioned against demagoguery e or any form of politics e in the classroom because the professor has authority over the student and can punish his or her failure to conform. But he went on to say that in a public meeting it is your “damned duty” to enter the fray and express your personal point of view (Weber, 2004, p.20). It is for this reason among others that I have put energy dur- ing the last decade and more to develop a general interest maga- zine for anthropology. This product cannot determine how it is used: it can be bought, borrowed, or stolen; it can be read and shared or ignored and discarded. Hence it is a forum in which the lessons each researcher wishes to conclude from the ethnographic method can be espoused in as convincing a way as possible. Anthro- pology Now is, in 2012, in its 4th year. It is growing in circulation and reach, both in its print form and its web form. Growth in circulation has been helped by the General Anthropology Division of the Amer- ican Anthropology Association, which recently adopted Anthropol- ogy Now as its official journal and by JSTOR, which accepted the magazine into its electronic offerings. A large number of faculty and graduate students have given labor (editing, organizing, pro- moting, soliciting, designing) and original materials (essays, photo- graphs, book reviews, field notes, poems, memoirs). Dean Birkenkamp, president of the independent publishing company, Paradigm Publishers, has enabled financial backing because he be- lieves in the efficacy of anthropology to shed original light on public issues. 2 Our collective goal is both to show the public what the labor of ethnography actually is (a social/cultural version of an archaeolog- ical dig or fossil exploration) and to illustrate some of the conclu- sions anthropologists have reached about matters of social justice in contemporary life. We believe that these interventions into the “marketplace of life” will lead to many forms of social change (Weber, 2004, p.25). The audience for anthropology is also growing internationally. Anthropology Now has been in correspondence with the UK Royal Anthropological Institute about the newly established provision for high school students to take an A-level exam in an- thropology: this means that anthropologists are developing a cur- riculum for anthropology in UK high schools, an exciting prospect that I hope will inspire anthropologists in other countries as well. 3 For example, the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago in 2013 will feature “Anthropologists Back to School,” a program to bring scholarship in anthropology into the Chicago public schools. The Back to School program focuses on African history; Anthropology Now articles in print and on the web have covered current issues such from the Haitian earthquake to climate change and shed unconventional light on the cultural meaning of such things as football or Hopi songs. In these times when public values, critical thinking, and liberal arts education are all under attack, we should cherish this sign that the perspec- tive of anthropology is gaining a wider audience, and as a result, is expanding the public’s vision of what is socially and politically possible. Build a Following Online Gideon Litchfield See http://www.theopedproject.org. 0277-9536/$ e see front matter O 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.11.020 See http://anthronow.com for a current list of contributors and past issues. See http://web.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/humanities/anthropology-_overview.php.