The NPS Applied Ethnography Program: An Agency Outsider’s Perspective

Abstract

Miki Crespi joined the National Park Service (NPS) in 1981, the year I completed a technical report on cultural resources for the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Tennessee and Kentucky. This kind of research on contemporary culture had been unusual when the Southeast Archeological Center of NPS commissioned my project in 1979. I was lucky that its novelty and serendipitous timing brought my work to Miki's attention when she was beginning to lay groundwork for what became the NPS Applied Ethnography Program. The Big South Fork project exemplified how ethnography and oral history could contribute to park planning and resource management. Because of this I was privileged to observe the process of policy and program development as it unfolded in the 1980s and 1990s. By the 1990s, because of Miki's work, ethnographic and oral history projects like mine had become recognized as standard components of parks research.