Anthropology Coming of Age: Keynote for International Conference of Business Anthropology, Guangzhou, China, May 19, 2012

Abstract

I present myself to you as the accidental business anthropologist, for in my first academic career, which ended 25 years ago, anthropological study of business was little more than a curiosity, having neither a distinctive name nor an epistemology other than ethnographic empiricism and was on the fringe of the ethical debates that were then swirling in anthropology. Far more contentious was anthropology's treatment of indigenous peoples and its collusion with government agencies at home and abroad. Business Anthropology scarcely had a name; Lloyd Warner and his associates did valuable ethnographic studies in business, industrial, and other contemporary settings, but in the 1940s through 1970s, no one called it "business anthropology," and their work was marginal to the discipline. "Real" anthropology, we knew, was measured by the distance of one's field sites and the risks one bore of tropical diseases once there.