ideas + images

Grant McCracken responds to an e-mail inquiry on becoming an anthropologist, starting with the need to look at both the trends that permeate culture and the underlying ideas and beliefs that allow them to exist.

If you choose to be a free standing anthropologist, there are two objectives: the culture below and the culture above. The culture below is the long standing ideas and assumptions with which we make the world make sense, the instrastructure, if you will, of thought and feeling. The culture above is the trends and innovations that pour through our world. We want culture above and below because too often anthropology is reduced to a kind of cool hunting, a search for the latest thing and an investigation of culture above. Certainly, we need to know what social networking is, but if that’s all we know, all we can report to the client, we have removed ourselves from usefulness.

McCracken goes on to cover the ups and downs of practicing anthropology outside of the ivory tower and ends with some inspiring advice to paint a picture of a fascinating (but intimidating) career path.