ABSTRACT
Marietta Baba has written that a discipline's social legitimacy depends on public understanding about the role of that field in society. Diversity of employers is an old story for archaeologists, for whom a terminal master's degree is often quite sufficient for a viable career in cultural resource management activities for federal, state, and local agencies, as well as private consulting firms. However, the rise of the terminal master's is a newer trend for us non-archaeologist anthropologists. Not all anthropologists will enthusiastically embrace a future in which their colleagues are respected for their skills in predictive market analytics. It is not just that Google, Facebook, or Uber might use ethnographic market research to increase profits. Instead, it touches on longstanding tensions between academic anthropology and its myriad forms of practice outside the academy. The economic shifts that will be opening the job market for anthropologists in the next eight to ten years are already changing the lives of human beings everywhere.
