I was faced with two recurring scenarios when I first started to explore anthropology and ethnography through my undergraduate university course.

The first involved my peers who, at the time, had also set out on their own academic journeys in the more ‘traditional’ disciplines of medicine, law, engineering and the natural sciences. They were oblivious to what anthropology entails and often questioned me about what ‘we’ did and studied.

The second scenario involved senior kin who were reasonably more inquisitive about the usefulness of a university degree in social anthropology in terms of future job prospects.

Admittedly, it took years of immersion in anthropological theory and practice before I could confidently face my peers and relatives with some concrete answers.

To their surprise, those answers were not even remotely about khaki outfits, hats, whips and quests to find ancient tombs or lost arks.

The ripple effects of historical ‘blip’ events can carry tangible consequences on consumers’ mundane lives

Rather, as I still find myself explaining to the uninitiated from time to time, the discipline’s interests, purposes and usefulness hit much closer to home.

Anthropological science, for instance, has much to contribute to the field of marketing. The essential nature of the discipline as ‘the study of Man’ implies an unravelling of the human condition as it manifests itself within various social and cultural contexts, at different points in time and space.

Traditionally, anthropologists have studied structures and processes as these occur within remotely situated and isolated groups of people.

Forefathers of modern day anthropology have, for example, analysed and documented complex processes of gift exchange among tribal people of the Pacific Northwest and dissected the impacts of the introduction of metal tools among aboriginal people who, for years, had based their world view and relationships with each other around axes made from stone.

In many ways, such classic ethnographies can be used as tools in providing marketers with valuable insight into processes engaged by consumers within the contemporary Western world, such as the exchange of text messages and modes of use of application software packages.

When anthropology is applied in this way, fundamental social and cultural forces which drive these processes can be examined and used in maximising the marketability and utility of a product.

Moreover, the methods of research employed by anthropologists on the field, distinguishable for being particularly intensive and in-depth, can be engaged in gathering valuable information about the intricacies of consumer life and culture.

The insight and information gathered through participant observation among consumers interacting with a specific brand and associated products, for example, would not only be useful in generating campaigns that reinforce the brand’s identity and consumer loyalty but also in creating and modifying the products themselves to make them more holistically applicable to users’ lives.

As anthropologists, we are a naturally reflective species who are used to thinking critically about the universe.

In negotiating our own identities as simultaneous insiders and outsiders, we are able to consider different human collectives from both their own internal (emic) perspective and ‘the other’s’ objective external (etic) perspective. In balancing these two points of view, we are able to link consumers, and their stories and emotions, with products they have used in the past, they are using in the present and they could use in the future.

We are therefore in a favourable position to contribute to the development process of brand identities by directing these towards a reflection of actual human experience and bringing a unique kind of controlled empathy to the table.

In what is arguably a less evident sense, a trait of the anthropologist which renders him/her usefully distinct among professionals within the marketing and business fields is an inclination to consider the larger, complete picture. The anthropologist is simultaneously concerned with human micro- and macrocosms and the impacts these are likely to carry on each other.

We are thus interested in minority groups, their customs, identity, belief systems and the ways in which they negotiate and reinforce their existence within a wider global context.

At the same time, we keep an eye on – or, perhaps more appropriately, a foot in – that which Emile Durkheim has qualified as “collective consciousness”, Max Weber has termed “the fate of our times” and has been popularly referred to as ‘the zeitgeist’.

As I write this piece, the terrible events at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris were unfolding. Besides being reasonably shaken and worried as a strong advocate of all kinds of freedom, I am also concerned about the strong repercussions the tragedy will most likely have in terms of the current global circumstance.

The ripple effects of such historical ‘blip’ events span across the board and can not only affect policy and power structures but also carry tangible consequences on consumers’ mundane lives.

Perhaps, at this time in history, being able to provocatively make other professionals within a sector which prioritises a ‘business as usual’ work ethic pause and consider such events and their immediate and less immediate implications is the most important part of our role as applied anthropologists within the corporate world.

John Micallef is an applied anthropologist.

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