ANTH 392D Applied
Anthropology
Spring 2009
Guidelines for
Midterm Paper
This assignment asks you to respond to one of the Human Organization articles we have
looked at thus far, or will look at up to week seven (if you wish, go ahead and
choose the article you, as discussion leader, have yet to announce to the
class) in a ~ four-page paper (standard fonts and margins). Please keep the following guidelines in
mind:
- First
(maybe obviously), summarize briefly the what, where, who, and why of the
article: what the issue is, where
the research is situated, who the stakeholders are (both explicitly
identified in the reading and/or implied by the issue in that place, that
community), and what the broader significance of the research may be.
- These
are applied anthropological
studies, and we like to claim that anthropological approaches to
understanding social problems bring something to the table that other
disciplines might not. Please
evaluate the contributions of anthropology to getting a grasp on the
problem by virtue of its methods (what’s the difference between
ethnography and statistics, say?), its central concepts, and its analytical
strategies (you might, for example, discuss what culture has to do the
problem and/or solution to the problem).
- Discuss
the implications for policy both/either by describing your visualization
of another research step that would be more explicitly geared to policy
and/or by fleshing out the policy insights you find a glimmer of already
(for instance, the article for Tuesday on Haiti does make some reference
to what will be needed to sustain illness support groups into the
future). Try to be concrete in
this section.
Due: Friday, May 8, by 5 p.m.