Beyond Anthropology's Edges

Abstract

In recent years, anthropology has become a buzz word in the corporate world. Companies such as Google have hired anthropologists for research and product design while marketing consultancies such as Red Associates have built their brands around anthropological methods. Yet, corporate anthropologists such as myself occupy an uneasy space within anthropology. Despite the discipline's internal commitment to reflexivity of its complicity in broader hegemonies, on the ‘outside’ when communicating to the public, the pristine figure of a ‘noble anthropologist’—acting to make the world a better place, free from influence and self-interest—is often evoked. While some applied anthropologists conform to this image of the ‘noble anthropologist’, the corporate anthropologist often does not. In the context of decreasing student numbers and dissolving departments for anthropologists working in the academy, I consider how a pragmatic and entrepreneurial approach to securing corporate work, while not necessarily ‘noble’, might still be ‘good’.