In and Out of the Academy: Policy and the Case for a Strategic Anthropology

The paper is structured around a sequence of autobiographical accounts of engagements with policymakers. Each of these encounters elaborates on the challenges anthropologists face in engaging policy because of the nature of United States policy goals, the relative power of anthropologists vis-á-vis policymakers, and the incompatibility of ethnographic knowledge with the epistemological demands of policymaking. I embrace instead a call for collaborative engagement with activist, communitybased, and issue-based movements as well as the more complicated work of collaborating with marginalized communities that may not envision themselves as activists but who have community goals for how to define their place in the broader society. I focus on the particular constraints and strengths of academic anthropologists for working with activists, communities, and issue-oriented networks to affect policy.