“Action Anthropology—the Art
of Social Science”
Cultural anthropologists are
generally tremendous observers of how people learn and behave, especially of
how people transfer their traditions, ethnic identities, and lessons in life
from one generation to another.
Action anthropologists engage
in the cultural world of the host population. This role expands the fieldwork
notion of participant observation with the goal to help the people of the host
population help themselves with needs of their own communities.
The action anthropologist is
a social scientist, and as such, must apply the discipline and what it has to
offer with utmost professional discretion among the decision makers of the
host.
Karl Schlesier said his hosts
saw him as a person first, then as an anthropologist who taught them a new
meaning of the discipline he represented. He was a teacher and in the “Cheyenne
culture teaching is the most honorable profession of all…”
What began as the science of
man has become the search for the knowledge of being and becoming human once
more.
(excerpt from video script)
