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"What good is anthropology?" Rather than accepting a predetermined notion of the good, I ask, What ancestral spirits animate anthropology as a vocation? In pursuing this question, I turn to the inaugural issue of American Ethnologist, which, I suggest, expresses an anthropological spirit readable via Lévi‐Strauss and Rousseau. I examine how this spirit was expressed in other parts of the world, such as the first generation of postcolonial anthropologists in India, as they confronted the question whether India may be seen as a settler colony. How was such a spirit born? As one possible beginning, I offer a creation myth for the birth of anthropological sensibility, located in a key moment of the Ramayana, when its tribal/lower‐caste poet‐author, Valmiki, begins to enunciate differently, after witnessing an act of human, settler violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different forms of care work are essential for the practice of anthropology in South Africa. In this biographical commentary, I describe how I enacted care work in my anthropological practice. I suggest that what is good about anthropology is its potential to be attentive to the multiple ways in which care work is enacted by us as anthropologists, as teachers of the discipline, as well as by our interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years ago, anthropologists, including applied researchers, were caught up in a dilemma of ethics and practice, in the face of criticisms of ethnographic embroilment in colonial, military, and neocolonial projects. But the epistemological crises that this provoked, together with anthropological engagement in political movements, sharpened our commitment to work with others to counter systemic, structural, and enacted violence. Today, continued inequality at local and global levels is deeply complicated by corporate globalization and climate change. Ethnographic research and anthropological engagement is urgent and critical, requiring our persistence to redress social wrongs through supportive, generous partnerships, as advocates and as outspoken witnesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an anthropologist, I have worked with people in both developing new technologies and managing existing ones. Based on this experience, I suggest that although anthropologically informed perspectives can contribute to technology development—from providing insights on particular cases to raising broader questions about a product's impact on society—the route to doing so is sometimes indirect. In this endeavor, anthropology matters by engaging not just the finished product, when critique is so easily possible, but the process of development, as the work is yet underway. Such engagement is enabled by how people leverage their commitments, stances, and manner of being there along the way and over time. To better enable the impact of anthropology in this work, anthropologists would be well served by engaging more with these kinds of applied questions as a part of their training and knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological debates about development are often framed by a moral contrast between pure and instrumental knowledge. But the good of anthropology is situationally produced, as we can demonstrate by reflecting on the discipline's institutional conditions. Institutional contexts sustain our professional identities and research practices, including the claimed differences between them. These contexts are in turn produced by political economies of development expertise and academic knowledge production. Indeed, social anthropology's core research practices were shaped by its configuration within political economies of colonial governance, and they were perpetuated through the expansion of university systems. We should, then, stop sustaining the fictions that our work is situated outside political economies of interest or that we write purely in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, we need to be more transparent about the economies that determine the kinds of knowledge we produce and the political implications of what we authorize as knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reflection on making Indigenous films in a colonized world. The author draws on his experience as an Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on the settler's gaze and its implications for an Indigenous film practice. This is accomplished through telling stories and reflecting on films made over several decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revealing complexity in the world—but also creating it—is at the heart of anthropology. It shapes our engagement with theory and ethics, writing and visual style, and choice of research subjects. But does it create blind spots? I respond to this question by discussing studies of violence, and my ethnographic material in progress on British ex‐soldiers. Owing to the ethical norm of suspending moral judgment of our research participants, we tend to avoid portraying their unlikable traits, internal contradictions, or troubling actions that do not advance our arguments. Ethnography often reveals florid complexity in structures or systems, but it creates simpler depictions of the people who inhabit these forms. Yet, since anthropology has long aimed to holistically capture the truth of social life, it should allow more space in ethnographic narrative for complicated protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do passion and poetry play in our research‐based quest to promote social justice? In this piece—a manifesto of sorts—I make a case for prioritizing both passion and poetry in our ethnographic writing. Such a commitment will allow our insights to be learned, our interlocutors' and our own voices to be heard, and our policy recommendations to be heeded. But writing poetically from a place of passion is just the first step. User‐friendly, public writing deserves a sociologically friendly platform. Hence, in the second part of this manifesto, I outline a series of steps that I recommend our discipline take in order to radically scale up our commitment to practice an engaged anthropology. Such tactics will allow us to more realistically promote our knowledge as we advocate for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of American anthropology from 1974 to 2024 shows that the discipline faces novel challenges in today's "meta," or media ecosystem: two challenges facing theory and two facing ethnography. To remain successful, anthropology must meet these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As anthropology reaches maturity, its contributions are likely to grow. This is because the discipline's practitioners, in writing parochial ethnography, can link a respect for individual difference to our understanding of global humanity. Such a practice aligns with the growing political struggle to retain meaning in an expanding world. Moreover, anthropology's commitment to life as lived research, including private domains and engagement with digital worlds, will also become more significant, while anthropology's ethos of empathy will expand beyond the human. Reaching maturity will require a further repudiation of inequality and colonialism, developing a different relationship to theory, philosophy, and engaged anthropology, as well as fostering a much wider commitment to global education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 2011, public scandals and high‐visibility critiques of research methods in psychology fed a broader "replication crisis": foundational experiments could not be replicated, and statistical methods in social psychology demonstrated vulnerability to fraud and manipulation. Even well‐intended researchers following accepted psychological protocols—zombie methodologies—could unintentionally produce false positives. In response, social psychologists have called for greater sensitivity to cultural diversity, a deeper consideration of social context, and more methodological reflection. The contrast with anthropology is dramatic, highlighting some of the strengths of our field: methodological versatility, appreciation of human variability, theoretical creativity, and a solid foundation for synthetic, interdisciplinary collaboration grounded in our tradition of holism. The human sciences are an important audience for anthropologists, as the example of cognitive science shows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay answers the question What good is anthropology? via a discussion of Susan Sontag's review of photographer Diane Arbus's 1972 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Sontag asserts that Arbus, in depicting people whom Sontag smugly regards as "ugly," is necessarily exploiting them. I perceive an exact comparison between Arbus's photographs and anthropology as an epistemological project and a representational practice. Like Arbus's photographs, anthropology is good for subverting the privileged protocol articulated by critics like Sontag, who are prepared to contemplate "ugly" people, vastly different from themselves, but only through an optic of pity or of vicarious indignation at the supposedly unrelentingly grim conditions under which such people are imagined to live their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic anthropology is a paradoxical realm. On the one hand, opportunities for creatively exploring the human condition are hemmed in by administrators and bureaucracy. On the other hand, scholars in the academy have the space to call for justice—in Palestine and elsewhere, as they did in 2023, when the American Anthropological Association passed a resolution to boycott Israeli institutions. This paradoxical quality suggests some parallels between anthropology and the human rights system, especially in their logics and activities. Drawing from my experiences as I step off the professional academic ladder, I reflect on how this complex academic environment can lead to cynicism and resentment, yet also produce launching pads to collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropological accounts of sexual and gendered difference often serve the role of footnotes that buttress and even expand the reach of Euro‐American concepts. In contrast to this contained role for anthropology, queer footnotes can push the discipline toward more capacious and experimental engagements with powerful knowledge. In 2020, governments around the world introduced lockdowns and border‐control measures in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. This was the case in Australia, where I undertook fieldwork with trans‐ and queer Indonesians living in Melbourne. In Australia, COVID‐19 public health measures paralleled and exacerbated migration restrictions on people living with HIV and the criminalization of sex work. Asian, queer, trans‐, and sex worker bodies were addressed as a moral and physiological contagion. Queer anthropology is good for maintaining a critical ethnographic focus on how the state governs through a racial biopolitics of containment, and generates concepts for public health that shift the focus from security to care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2023, the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) members voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions until they end their complicity in violating Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. The AAA's adoption of this resolution shows the potential good of anthropology, both within and beyond the academy. Anthropology's disciplinary scholarly processes, methods, and theoretical frameworks paved the way for this resolution, providing one answer to the question, What good is anthropology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology and its marquee method, ethnography, have recently been promoted as an analytical key for unlocking problems faced in other domains. This review addresses two books that argue for the value of this anthropological lens: Anthro‐Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life, by Gillian Tett, and How to Think like an Anthropologist, by Matthew Engelke. The differences between these works highlight the risk of deploying anthropology as a means to other ends, without subjecting those ends to the same theorization and scrutiny as one's topic or methods. While these authors demonstrate that there is significant value that the anthropological toolkit can provide, both in life and in business, there remains a fine line to be drawn between the instrumentalization of the discipline and the broader pursuit for knowledge and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]