ABSTRACT

When Margaret Mead and her colleagues created the Society for Applied Anthropology, few would have anticipated either the current expansion of applied social science or the recognition that issues of social and cultural development would receive. Ethnicity and religions revive and reshape the planet's social map. To remain relevant to developments, social scientists must learn to think differently of development itself. The main workbench for social anthropological endeavor in the World Bank is the development project. Projects come in all forms, sites, and sectors: from health care systems in Asia. Applied anthropology is often deprecated by unfriendly voices and accused of being irrelevant to anthropological theory. The research objects of applied anthropology generally have no less intrinsic potential to generate theory than the research objects of academic anthropology. The part of development anthropology that perhaps best demonstrates the infertility of a dichotomy between applied and theoretical anthropology is the work in policy formulation.