Anthropology in Practice I: Applied, Action, Engaged, Experimental and Public Anthropology, Public Archaeology, Urban, Development and Business Anthropology, Medical, Visual, and Food and Nutritional Anthropology, Genomic Studies, Genetic Screening and Counselling, Forensic Anthropology, Ergonomics and Kinanthropometry

Applied anthropology is the use of anthropological knowledge, methods and perspectives to address practical problems, usually on behalf of a client — a government, an agency, a firm or a community. It began with colonial administration: government anthropologists were appointed in Nigeria (Northcote Thomas, from 1909) and the Gold Coast (R.S. Rattray), Malinowski wrote on "Practical Anthropology" (1929), and in India census commissioners and administrator-ethnographers served the same purpose. In the United States the Bureau of Indian Affairs under John Collier employed anthropologists in the 1930s, the Second World War drew many into government work, and the Society for Applied Anthropology was founded in 1941, with the journal now called Human Organization. The field's ethical crises shaped its codes: Project Camelot (1964–65), a United States Army study of counter-insurgency in Latin America, and the use of anthropological research in Southeast Asia led the American Anthropological Association to adopt its Principles of Professional Responsibility (1971), which put the anthropologist's first responsibility with the people studied; the Human Terrain System (2007–14), which embedded social scientists with military units, revived the debate. Action anthropology, developed by Sol Tax and his University of Chicago students with the Meskwaki (Fox) of Tama, Iowa, from 1948, rejects the client model: the anthropologist works with a community to help it define and pursue its own goals, learning while helping, without imposing values, and respects the community's right to make its own mistakes. Engaged anthropology, in Setha Low and Sally Engle Merry's survey (2010), covers a range of commitments — sharing and support, teaching and public education, social critique, collaboration with communities, advocacy and activism — that link research to the concerns of the people studied. Public anthropology, a term associated with Robert Borofsky, calls on anthropologists to address broad public issues and audiences beyond the discipline, through writing, media and policy, rather than speaking only to one another. "Experimental anthropology" is used in two senses. In the first, from Marcus and Fischer's Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), it refers to experimental ethnography — new, reflexive, dialogic and multi-sited forms of writing and research after the crisis of representation. In the second, it refers to experimental methods: field experiments and economic games, such as the ultimatum and dictator games that Joseph Henrich and colleagues played in fifteen small-scale societies (2001, 2005), showing that ideas of fairness vary with market integration and cooperation; and experimental archaeology, which reconstructs past technologies and processes — knapping stone tools, firing pottery, building houses, growing ancient crops, as at Butser Ancient Farm in England (from 1972) — to test inferences from the archaeological record. Public archaeology, a term given currency by Charles McGimsey's Public Archeology (1972), is archaeology practised in and for the public: heritage legislation and management, cultural resource management and rescue excavation before development, museums and site interpretation, and community archaeology in which local people help decide what is excavated and how the past is presented. In India the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958 and the Archaeological Survey of India frame this work, and debates about heritage, tourism, displacement and the ownership of the past are part of it.

Urban anthropology grew from three sources. The Chicago school of sociology (Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, Louis Wirth, whose "Urbanism as a Way of Life", 1938, defined the city by size, density and heterogeneity) studied city life ecologically. Robert Redfield's folk–urban continuum (The Folk Culture of Yucatan, 1941) set the isolated, homogeneous folk society against the city, expecting disorganisation, secularisation and individualisation as one moved toward the urban pole; Oscar Lewis's restudy of Tepoztlán (1951) and his studies of migrants in Mexico City showed that migrants kept kinship, religion and village ties, and his later "culture of poverty" (Five Families, 1959; La Vida, 1966) — a design for living passed down among the urban poor — was itself criticised for blaming the poor for structural conditions. The Manchester school in Central Africa studied labour migrants in the Copperbelt towns: J. Clyde Mitchell's The Kalela Dance (1956) showed how "tribal" identity was reworked in town as a category of interaction, and A.L. Epstein and Mitchell developed situational analysis and social network analysis. Urban anthropology later distinguished anthropology in the city — studying communities that happen to be urban — from anthropology of the city, studying urbanism itself: housing, informal economies, slums and their improvement, migration, ethnicity, class and caste in the city, and the politics of space. In India, Owen Lynch's The Politics of Untouchability (1969) studied the Jatav of Agra, Sylvia Vatuk's Kinship and Urbanization (1972) white-collar migrants in Meerut, and M.S.A. Rao's Urbanization and Social Change (1970) a village absorbed by Delhi. The anthropology of development has two faces. Anthropology in development works inside projects and agencies: social assessment, participatory planning, resettlement design and monitoring. Michael Cernea, the World Bank's senior sociologist, argued in Putting People First (1985) that social variables must be designed into projects, and his impoverishment risks and reconstruction model identifies the risks displacement creates — landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalisation, food insecurity, increased morbidity, loss of common property and social disarticulation. Robert Chambers's Rural Development: Putting the Last First (1983) and his methods of rapid and participatory rural appraisal (RRA, PRA) turned local people into analysts of their own situation. The anthropology of development, by contrast, studies development itself as a cultural and political project: James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine (1990), on a World Bank–funded project in Lesotho, showed how development discourse depoliticises poverty while expanding state power; Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development (1995) analysed development as a discourse that made the "Third World". Business anthropology applies ethnography to organisations, work, markets and consumption. Its roots lie in the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric (1924–32), where W. Lloyd Warner advised the observation of a work group in the Bank Wiring Room and showed the force of informal organisation. Today anthropologists study organisational culture, mergers and teams; do consumer and user research, observing how products are actually used at home and at work; contribute to design, as in Lucy Suchman's work at Xerox PARC (Plans and Situated Actions, 1987); and analyse brands, advertising and global supply chains. Ethical questions — confidentiality, consent, who owns the findings — follow the field from the academy into the firm.

Medical anthropology studies health, illness and healing in their social, cultural, biological and political contexts. Its classic distinction, set out by Arthur Kleinman in Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980), separates disease (the biomedical malfunction), illness (the person's experience of being unwell) and, in later usage, sickness (the social role of being ill). Kleinman described health care systems as made up of popular (family and community), folk (non-professional specialists) and professional sectors, and asked patients and healers for their explanatory models — what caused the problem, why now, what it does, how it should be treated. Ethnomedicine studies healing traditions on their own terms; medical pluralism, a term developed by Charles Leslie (Asian Medical Systems, 1976), names the coexistence and combined use of several systems — in India biomedicine alongside Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa, homoeopathy and yoga (together administered under AYUSH), and folk healers and shrines. Culture-bound syndromes, such as dhat in South Asia (anxiety over the loss of semen), are now described in the psychiatric manual DSM-5 (2013) as cultural concepts of distress. Critical medical anthropology, associated with Merrill Singer and Hans Baer, and Paul Farmer's analysis of structural violence (from AIDS and Accusation, 1992), locate the causes of ill health in poverty, inequality and power. Biocultural medical anthropology studies how culture and biology interact — in the epidemiological transition from infectious to chronic disease (Omran, 1971), in nutrition, reproduction and stress. Visual anthropology uses and studies images: ethnographic film, photography, material culture, museums and the visual cultures of the peoples studied. Its landmarks are Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), shot with the Inuit; Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead's photographic analysis in Balinese Character (1942); Jean Rouch's films in West Africa, such as Les Maîtres fous (1955), and his cinéma vérité with Edgar Morin in Chronicle of a Summer (1961), in which the film provokes and records its subjects' reflections; John Marshall's The Hunters (1957) on the Ju/'hoansi of the Kalahari; Robert Gardner's Dead Birds (1964) on the Dani of New Guinea; Timothy Asch's The Ax Fight (1975) on the Yanomamö; and David MacDougall's observational and participatory cinema. Sol Worth and John Adair's Through Navajo Eyes (1972), in which Navajo people made their own films, began the study of indigenous media. Food and nutritional anthropology studies what people eat, why, and with what consequences. Audrey Richards's Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe (1932) and Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (1939), on the Bemba, founded the field by joining nutrition to social organisation. Symbolic approaches read food as a code — Lévi-Strauss's culinary triangle, Mary Douglas's "Deciphering a Meal" (1972); materialist ones explain food rules by their costs and benefits — Harris's Good to Eat (1985); historical and political ones trace food through class and empire — Jack Goody's Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982), Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power (1985) on sugar. Nutritional anthropology measures diet by twenty-four-hour recall, food-frequency questionnaires and weighed intakes, assesses nutritional status by anthropometry (Chapter 9), and studies undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, the "double burden" of undernutrition alongside obesity, and the nutrition transition toward processed foods. In India the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21) reported stunting in about 35 per cent of children under five, and the National Food Security Act (2013), the midday meal (PM POSHAN) and the Integrated Child Development Services are the main public responses; anthropologists study how caste, gender and food taboos shape who eats what within the household.

Genomic studies examine variation across whole genomes rather than single markers. The Human Genome Project (1990–2003) produced the reference sequence; the International HapMap Project (from 2002) and the 1000 Genomes Project (2008–15) catalogued common variation across populations; genome-wide association studies link variants to traits and diseases, and polygenic scores summarise many small effects. Ancient DNA, pioneered by Svante Pääbo's group (the Neanderthal genome, 2010; Nobel Prize, 2022), has transformed the study of human origins and migrations, as Unit II explains. In India, the Indian Genome Variation Consortium (2008) and studies by Reich, Thangaraj, Singh and colleagues (2009, 2013) showed that most Indian populations descend from mixtures of Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian components, followed by long endogamy, which also raises the frequency of some recessive disorders within particular groups; the GenomeIndia project, begun in 2020, set out to sequence 10,000 genomes from across the country. Anthropology asks the ethical and social questions: informed consent, community consent and benefit sharing, the return of results, and the risk that genetic data are misread as supporting racial or caste hierarchies. The Human Genome Diversity Project (proposed in 1991) was criticised by indigenous organisations, and the Havasupai case in the United States, settled in 2010, arose because blood samples given for a diabetes study were used for other research without consent. Genetic screening identifies people at risk of, or carrying, genetic disorders. Newborn screening began with the Guthrie test for phenylketonuria in the 1960s and now covers conditions such as congenital hypothyroidism and G6PD deficiency; carrier screening identifies healthy carriers of recessive disorders — thalassaemia, sickle-cell disease, Tay–Sachs disease — before marriage or pregnancy; prenatal diagnosis uses amniocentesis, chorionic villus sampling and, increasingly, cell-free fetal DNA; cascade screening tests the relatives of an affected person. In India beta-thalassaemia and sickle-cell disease are the main targets: sickle-cell disease is concentrated among tribal and some other communities of central, western and southern India, and the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission, launched in 2023, aims to screen the population under forty in the affected States and to eliminate the disease as a public health problem by 2047. Genetic counselling, a term introduced by Sheldon Reed in 1947, helps individuals and families understand genetic risks, the inheritance pattern shown in a pedigree, the options available and their implications; its ethic is non-directive — the counsellor informs and supports, the client decides — together with confidentiality and informed consent. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (1994, renamed in 2003) prohibits the use of these techniques for sex selection. Forensic anthropology applies the methods of physical anthropology and archaeology to legal questions, above all the identification of human remains. From skeletal remains the forensic anthropologist estimates a biological profile: sex, from the pelvis (the subpubic angle, the greater sciatic notch, Phenice's ventral arc, 1969) and the skull; age, from dental development and epiphyseal fusion in the young and from the pubic symphysis (Todd, 1920; Suchey–Brooks, 1990), the auricular surface and cranial sutures in adults; stature, from long-bone lengths by regression formulae such as Trotter and Gleser's (1952), which must be population-specific; and, more cautiously, population affinity. The field also analyses trauma (ante-, peri- and post-mortem), estimates the time since death through taphonomy — studied at outdoor research facilities such as William Bass's at the University of Tennessee (1981) — and uses facial reconstruction and photographic superimposition. DNA profiling, developed by Alec Jeffreys (1984–85) and now based on short tandem repeats, and fingerprinting — whose Henry classification was worked out in Bengal in the 1890s by Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose under Edward Henry — complement skeletal methods. Forensic anthropologists work on disaster victim identification, under Interpol's protocol, and on the investigation of mass graves and human rights violations.

Ergonomics (from the Greek ergon, work, and nomos, law), called human factors in North America, is the study of the interaction between people and the tools, tasks, workplaces and systems they use, with the aim of fitting the work to the worker. The word was used by the Polish scholar Wojciech Jastrzębowski in 1857 and revived in 1949 by K.F.H. Murrell and the founders of the Ergonomics Research Society in Britain, after wartime research on aircraft cockpits and equipment. Anthropology's contribution is engineering anthropometry: the measurement of body dimensions for design. Structural (static) dimensions — stature, sitting height, eye height, shoulder breadth, hip breadth, knee height, hand length — are taken with the body at rest; functional (dynamic) dimensions — reach, clearance, range of joint movement — in working postures. Because people vary, design uses percentiles and three principles: design for extremes (a doorway sized for the 95th-percentile height, a control reachable by the 5th-percentile arm), design for an adjustable range (a seat adjustable from the 5th to the 95th percentile), and design for the average only where neither is possible. Since body size varies between populations, sexes and age groups, data must come from the users: equipment designed on European or American data may not fit Indian farm or factory workers, which is why Indian institutions have compiled anthropometric databases of agricultural and industrial workers for the design of tools, machinery and workstations. Ergonomics also studies posture, load and repetition as causes of musculoskeletal disorders, the physiological cost of work, heat stress and the design of tools used by women in agriculture and informal work. Kinanthropometry is "the study of human size, shape, proportion, composition, maturation and gross function" in relation to growth, exercise, performance and nutrition. The term was introduced at the International Congress of Physical Activity Sciences in Montreal in 1976, and the International Society for the Advancement of Kinanthropometry (ISAK, 1986) standardised its landmarks and measurements: stature, body mass, lengths, breadths, girths and skinfolds. Its main tools are somatotyping — the description of physique by endomorphy, mesomorphy and ectomorphy, from Sheldon (1940) to the Heath–Carter anthropometric method (1967), treated with the history of somatotyping in Chapter 10 — and body-composition assessment, by skinfold equations (such as Durnin and Womersley, 1974), bioelectrical impedance, densitometry and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Studies of Olympic athletes, beginning with J.M. Tanner's The Physique of the Olympic Athlete (1964), showed that each sport selects characteristic physiques — the tall, linear high jumper, the mesomorphic sprinter and weightlifter — which kinanthropometry uses in talent identification, training, the monitoring of growth in young athletes, and in health, where it tracks obesity, sarcopenia in the elderly and the effects of physical activity.