ABSTRACT
This chapter tries to pull together what you need to know to understand the anthropological underpinnings of evaluation anthropology. The author tries to write this for the curious social scientist who is not necessarily an anthropologist, who tend to form the core of evaluation teams. Anthropology ranges across all of the domains of human life and human experience, from Neanderthals to kinship studies to the general nature of language to the philosophy of knowledge. The improvement in the status and understanding of practice as anthropology has been partly because of the presence of practitioner-academics in the community to educate anthropologists for practice. New approaches to multisite ethnography promise to enhance our ability to model general processes in localities by embedding several communities in a single research inquiry. Anthropology traces its beginnings to early contacts between European and American powers and the "savage" peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
