Hi Ranjan,
I appreciate your thoughtful response and can only answer brief. I am
right in the middle of an essay addressing these topics so I give you the
highlights.
Design and anthropology are converging within the space of problem
definition and solving for social, cultural, and environmental good. So
strange or not we are more likely to shack up more than less and the
intentions (have a positive impact on the world through the use of deep
human understanding and crafting of future scenarios) are converging.
In anthropology, this is actually a re-engagement with being direct agents
of social change after a withdraw in the 1970s and 1980s due to guilt of
anthro's role in colonial project (where we were "re-engineering
societies" and for the US, the participation of anthropologists as spies
during the Vietnam war. By the 1990s, where I come of anthropology age,
most anthropologists (who now have become dominated by women and people of
color) are practicing "Engaged anthropology" or "public anthropology." The
goal of anthropologists at least from the US "theory" schools of Stanford,
Harvard, Brown, U of Chicago, are to be "public intellectuals" who publish
in the Nation as much as in Cultural Anthropology.
The emphasis on history has to do with the anthropology comparative
mandate to learn about things across time as well as space. But even when
anthropologist direct studied the past it was with the intention to apply
that knowledge to the present so to create a new future. So even the
"cultural conservation" projects with Native Americans done by Franz Boas
was so to (1) preserve practices (for use of future generations) that were
being destroyed by American government policy which had as strong
assimulationist bent, (2) to understand and document through photography
the origins of contemporary practices, and (3) to provide this knowledge
so that it can be used by Native American populations in legal battles
with the US government. The tools of craft design were a part of the
communication of these practices and thus very valuable to the
anthropological project.
What you are doing I would call design anthropology with equal emphasis on
both. It falls within the long tradition of the anthropological study of
material culture, which most anthropologists started with because they
could not speak the language well enough. tee hee. Again, my concern is
only with the position of someone who would say, "No this is design and
only us designers can do this." Unfortunately, I feel that it is beginning
to happen a little bit and wanted to call attention.
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