ABSTRACT

Anthropologists working as consultants or employed by other kinds of institutions also have a contribution to make to theoretical developments in the discipline, and to the ethnographic canon. Anthropologists often find themselves working in collaboration with people from other scientific disciplines: not just within the social sciences, but increasingly with the natural sciences too: in the environmental arena with botanists, biologists, ecologists, hydrologists and climatologists. Most anthropologists are open minded, with sensitivity and interest for ‘the other’. They have the advantage of being scientists with a broad approach – and research methods in anthropology can often be used in journalism as well. The diversity of ‘what anthropologists do’ means that discipline attracts people with equally diverse cultural backgrounds, interests, beliefs, ideologies and aims. To understand what is going on beyond the superficial is immensely satisfying. And perhaps all, anthropology is exciting: humans are sufficiently complicated and diverse that there is always more to learn and intriguing things to consider.