These days an increasing number of social anthropologists do not find employment within academia. Rather, many find jobs with commercial organizations or in government, where they run research teams and create policy. These scholars provide a much-needed social dimension to government thinking and practice. Anthropology and Public Service shows how anthropologists can set new agendas, and revise old ones in the public sector. Written for scholars and students of various social sciences, these chapters include discussions of anthropologists’ work with the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence, the UK Border Agency, and the Cabinet Office, and their contributions to prison governance.

Cultural and social boundaries often separate those who participate in public health activities, and it is a major challenge to translate public health knowledge and technical capacity into public health action across these boundaries. This book provides an overview of anthropology and illustrates in 15 case studies how anthropological concepts and methods can help us understand and resolve diverse public health problems around the world. For example, one chapter shows how differences in concepts and terminology among patients, clinicians, and epidemiologists in a southwestern U.S. county hinder the control of epidemics. Another chapter examines reasons that Mexican farmers don't use protective equipment when spraying pesticides and suggests ways to increase use. Another examines the culture of international health agencies, demonstrates institutional values and practices that impede effective public health practice, and suggests issues that must be addressed to enhance institutional organization and process.; Each chapter characterizes a public health problem, describes methods used to analyse it, reviews results, and discusses implications; several chapters also describe and evaluate programs designed to address the problem on the basis of anthropological knowledge. The book provides practical models and indicates anthropological tools to translate public health knowledge and technical capacity into public health action.

Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and ways of life of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspective. As a discipline, anthropology has often advocated — and even defended — the cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline’s original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This is a vitally important kind of anthropology that has the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.

Contemporary anthropology is done in a world where social and digital media are playing an increasingly significant role, where anthropological and arts practices are often intertwined in museum and public intervention contexts, and where anthropologists are encouraged to engage with mass media. Because anthropologists are often expected and inspired to ensure their work engages with public issues, these opportunities to disseminate work in new ways and to new publics simultaneously create challenges as anthropologists move their practice into unfamiliar collaborative domains and expose their research to new forms of scrutiny. In this volume, contributors question whether a fresh public anthropology is emerging through these new practices.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the demand for anthropological approaches, understandings and methodologies outside academic departments is shifting and changing. Through a series of fascinating case studies of anthropologists’ experiences of working with very diverse organizations in the private and public sector this volume examines existing and historical debates about applied anthropology. It explores the relationship between the "pure and the impure" – academic and applied anthropology, the question of anthropological identities in new working environments, new methodologies appropriate to these contexts, the skills needed by anthropologists working in applied contexts where multidisciplinary work is often undertaken, issues of ethics and responsibility, and how anthropology is perceived from the ‘outside’. The volume signifies an encouraging future both for the application of anthropology outside academic departments and for the new generation of anthropologists who might be involved in these developments.

There are few areas of society today that remain outside the ambit of policy processes, and likewise policy making has progressively reached into the structure and fabric of everyday life. An instrument of modern government, policy and its processes provide an analytical window into systems of governance themselves, opening up ways to study power and the construction of regimes of truth. This volume argues that policies are not simply coercive, constraining or confined to static texts; rather, they are productive, continually contested and able to create new social and semantic spaces and new sets of relations. Anthropologists do not stand outside or above systems of governance but are themselves subject to the rhetoric and rationalities of policy. The analyses of policy worlds presented by the contributors to this volume open up new possibilities for understanding systems of knowledge and power and the positioning of academics within them.