Public Policy and World Anthropologies

Anthropology has long been involved with public policy, both in its formulation and its implementation, though often we have ignored our direct and indirect involvement. The historiography of anthropology and power has focused mainly on three core nations, Great Britain, France, and the United States (see Asad 1973, Hymes 1972, and Vincent 1990). Other parts of the world appear in these accounts as colonial possessions, or not at all. Attention is now turning to the many, diverse national traditions in anthropology, including both scholarly and applied anthropology (Baba and Hill 1997, Hill and Baba 2006, Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). This special set of papers in Practicing Anthropology is a modest contribution in this direction, examining the interactions of anthropology and public policy in three national settings: Peru, the Philippines, and Mexico.