The wonderful thing about anthropology is that its approaches cover the
entire range of epistemologies depending on the sub-specialty (physical or
biological, linguistics, archaeological, and socio-cultural), the age and
education of the practitioner, and the anthropology question there are
seeking to answer.

Mythologies of the "field" of anthropology

There are four sub-fields of anthropology, not just socio-cultural anthro.

Because physical/biological anthropologists often interface with
biologists, epidemiologists, geneticists, forensic doctors, etc, they tend
to fall on the positivist side or at least have a fluency in the positive
languages as part of the culture.

Linguistics can run the gamut from the positivism of computation
linguistics (which informs a lot of the computation work in natural
language modeling) to the highly interpretive work done in everyday
conversation analysis (Deborah Tannen's, You Just Don't Understand: Women
and Men in Conversation, William Morrow, 1990; is the popular version of
this kind of work).

Archaeology in the past was more positivist, but the interpretive school,
led by figures such as Ian Hodder, now at Stanford, represent in many ways
the contemporary practice of archaeology. In terms of community
participation, the repatriation laws, in the 1990s, of native artifacts
have made archaeology now one of the most inclusive and least colonial of
the anthropological fields, when it was the most colonial. For example,
when I was an archaeology TA at Stanford (in 1995), we had Native
Americans on staff at all digs and if any significant materials were found
(human remains especially) the dig was stopped and went to the tribal
council for resolution.

Cultural anthropology runs the gamut, but it is now quite dominated by
women and people who were former colonized subjects, who fall into the
post-structuralist/post-modernist/feminist/postcolonial camps. To Danny
and Norm's comment about the critiques of Samoan anthropologists. There is
every type of anthropologist under the sun and moon. The practice evolves
with every new generation while still maintaining an understanding of the
old. Right now, I am finding the work of visual anthropologist, Sarah
Pink, most useful to my art and design students.

The contemporary practice of anthropology by those who are engaged with
design are not of the positivist sorts at all. My own intellectual
genealogies are from the Boasian (4-fields, actively engaged in current
issues, historically sensitive, attempt to understand interrelated
systems, albeit partial understanding, highly documented processes) and
Geerzian (interpretive, attention to form and content or representation,
sense of positionality of researcher, focus on significance of the mundane
as well as the sublime) traditions. Right now, I am most influenced by
Paul Rabinow's reframing of Foucault for anthropological
"problematization" as opposed to the study of groups of tribes. All
graduate students at Stanford since the 1980s are steeped in French
post-structuralist, international feminist/womanist, Marxist, and
Post-Colonial (Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Valentin
Mudimbe) thinking.

Mythologies of field work

This is often used to distinguish between anthropology and design
research, without contextualizing the practice of long term field work.
First, anthropologist only have one long term fieldwork period. This is
when you are a graduate student doing your major fieldwork. Normally, you
needed to stay a year or more because you spent the first six months
learning to speak the language. Tee hee. Really, its the anthropological
equivalent to spending a summer in Europe as an undergrad. It happens once
before you get at real job and it never happens again, but you always
refer to it as the "golden days" of your youth.

After graduate school, you will spend maximum of 4-8 weeks in your field
site(s) at a given time and that is if you work in an academic context.
Hopefully, you still know the language. For some halfie or "native"
anthropologists (as many are now), you may live in your field site most of
the time, so the point is moot.

I spent 21 months in Ethiopia doing my fieldwork, but it was because I had
to travel to over 5 different regions, in which I spent only 3 months
maximum in each.

Mythologies of relevance to design

The point of my post is that if design is moving into problem formation,
then anthropology provides lots of knowledge and experiences about how to
go about that ethically. Anthropology has that knowledge because it has
screwed up in the past and now its just about started to get it right:
this is called now Anthropology 2.0. <smile> The contemporary role is the
anthropologist is different in that we are used as a mediator between
global forces and local meanings. Design is wanting to move into that role
as well. My point is that we can help ease the transition, so they don't
screw up as much as we did, but don't go about labeling things as design
when it is really anthropology. tee hee.

There is not a human phenomena under the sun in which there is not an
anthropologist somewhere trying to studying it or has studied it in the
past. My favorite past time is providing students with over 10 articles,
spanning 50 years, about some topic they are wanting to explore (ex. the
visualization of subjective time). It's not about methods of data
collection, but rather tools for analytical reasoning and exploration that
anthropology can provide to design. Anthropology is not the only field,
but it is the one that covers human experience to the same breadth and
depth of the field of design. There are sub-sub-fields of anthro like
psychological anthro, medical anthro, anthro of education, political
anthro, social anthro, cultural anthro (those are distinct depended on
which side of the pond you live on), visual anthro, anthro of work, anthro
of consciousness, humanist anthro, applied anthro, design anthro, and
probably an anthropology of anthropology. Anthropology is the super
hybridizing field because its subject is the entire range of human
experience across time and space.

And that variation in anthropological approaches works. When I taught my
class, Design Anthropology, different types of designers gravitated
towards different anthropological approaches. The electronic visualization
students like structural-functionalism and its ideas of rules and
functioning parts that work together, because it matched their own
programming mentalities. The graphic designers and artists gravitated
towards the interpretive and post-structuralist approaches because it
matched their own ideas about the variability of meaning and the fluidity
of the sign/signifier relationships.

One student working on Chinese iconography for the Olympics explored
archaeological history and interpretation. Another working on consumer
culture engaged in anthropological theories of consumerism like Arjun
Appadurai, Mary Douglas, and Daniel Miller.

I don't understand why anyone would not want to avail themselves of such
rich knowledge before going out and making under-informed statements about
the way the world works, which is what problem formation is about.

Mythologies about design and colonialism

There are lots of studies of the role of design in the colonial project.
Two of my favorites are Lifebouy Men and Lux Women by social historian
Timothy Burke (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996) about
commodity culture in Zimbabwe in the post-WWII period and Imperial Leather
by English lit and feminist scholar Anne McClintock, which looks at it
from a feminist perspective(New York: Routledge, 1995). We all have
colonial skeletons in our closet. Tee hee.

But this has been a very exciting conversation that has helped me to
sharpen my thinking on the topic. So thanks all for sharing.