International African Institute

Applied Anthropology
Author(s): E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Source: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Apr., 1946), pp.
92-98
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute
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 [92 ]

APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGYI
E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD
I DO NOT intend to say to-night all over again what has been said many times
before in admirable addresses to learned societies.2 I propose only to bring to your
notice some features of the subject which have often been overlooked or disregarded
and yet seem to me to be important.
May I in the first place mention the confusion which frequently arises when some-
one asks whether social anthropology can, or should be, an applied science. It is
evident that it cannot be applied in the same sense as, for instance, medicine or
engineering are said to be applied sciences since it cannot state its findings as laws in
the light of which it can predict events. Perhaps it will never be able to formulate
laws as these are understood in the exact sciences. Nevertheless social anthropology
is a body of knowledge about human societies and, like all knowledge of the kind,
can be used in a common-sense way to solve social problems; and there is surely no
one who holds that it should not be so used.
However, some writers have found difficulty in deciding whether the anthropolo-
gist should himself try to apply his knowledge or should content himself with record-
ing facts and leaving others to make what use of them they can. I must confess that
I do not experience the difficulty myself. I cannot see what objection there can be to
an anthropologist advocating a policy or helping to frame an administrative measure
in the light of present anthropological knowledge. In those cases where a consider-
able amount of anthropological knowledge is required to make a sound judgement
about what ought to be done, or how it should be done, he is likely to be the person
best qualified to make it. It has been objected that judgements about what ought to
be done imply moral values. Naturally they do; but it is surely not required of an
anthropologist that he shall have no moral values or shall refrain from using them in
situations which demand an ethical standard. What is objectionable is for an anthro-
pologist to allow his particular philosophy to determine his observations, to influence
his deductions, and dictate his problems within the field of his own science. Within
the anthropological field the anthropologist is, like any other scientist within his
particular field of study, bound to exclude moral values because they are methodo-
logically irrelevant. In practical affairs, where they are relevant, he is equally bound
to include them. Personally I do not find that any acrobatics are necessary to speak
sometimes as an anthropologist within the anthropological field, sometimes as an
anthropologist within other fields, such as those of politics and administration, and
at most times not as an anthropologist at all. Misunderstandings and self-deception
can alike be avoided by making clear not only in what capacity one is speaking but
also in what field.
I Lecture given to the Oxford University Anthro- best serve the Needs of Anthropology? ', J.R.A.I.,
pological Society, 29 November I945. 1917; J. L. Myres, 'Anthropology, Pure and
2 A. C.
Haddon, 'What the United States of Applied', J.R.A.I., vol. lxi, I93I; idem, 'The
America is doing for Anthropology ', J.R.A.I., vol. Science of Man in the Service of the State ', J.R.A.I.,
xxxii, 1902; Sir Richard C. Temple, Anthropology as vol. lix, 1929; Rev. Edwin W. Smith, 'Anthro-
a PracticalScience(addresses given in I904 and I913), pology and the Practical Man', J.R.A.I., vol. lxiv,
London, I9I4; A. Keith, 'How can the Institute I934; and others mentioned in footnotes to the text.

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 APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY 93

THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE

I have made some general observations lest it be thought that I have given no
consideration to questions to which some of my anthropological colleagues attach
more weight than I do. A question which I now propose to examine has, for me at
any rate, more immediate interest: How should an anthropologist best employ his
knowledge and, which comes to very much the same thing, his time ? I would suggest
that he can best use his knowledge for the purpose for which it was collected, namely
the solution of scientific problems. The purpose of the science is to discover the
nature of human society and of social development. An anthropologist does research
to discover what he can about these things and the kind of observations he makes
will be determined by the kind of problems he has formulated. An anthropologist
within his own scientific field will use the knowledge he acquires by research to solve
anthropological problems and these may have no practical significance whatever. It
may be held that it is laudable for an anthropologist to investigate practical problems.
Possibly it is, but if he does so he must realize that he is no longer acting within the
anthropological field but in the non-scientific field of administration. Of one thing
I feel quite certain: that no one can devote himself wholeheartedly to both interests;
and I doubt whether anyone can investigate fundamental and practical problems at
the same time. Moreover, there is a grave danger that the pressure of political and
administrative interests, and the allurements that accompany them, may draw away
so many of our small band from the investigation of purely scientific problems that
the advance of the science may be seriously retarded.
I would urge all the more that the anthropologist should restrict his research to
the investigation of scientific problems for the reason that the value of social anthro-
pology to the arts of politics and administration must depend on its theoretical
advance. In attempting to solve a social problem in a particular society a study of it
will be of very limited value if the facts brought to light by the investigation cannot
be interpreted by reference to a more general body of knowledge. This point is so
important and so often overlooked that I would like to drive it home by quoting to
you a passage from an excellent paper on Applied Anthropology by Mr. Sol Tax:
'If one wishes to apply anthropological knowledge to a given Indian tribe, science
would hold that knowledge about that tribe is less important than knowledge about
all Indians, or generalizations about human nature and society. To the administrator,
this may seem to be a reversal of common sense; but it should be apparent that just
as a sheep-breeder applies to his sheep knowledge of sheep-genetics rather than
knowledge of his sheep, so the administrator applies to the Indian tribe knowledge
not about the tribe, but knowledge about some aspects of human nature.'I
From this argument there follows another, and perhaps even more cogent, reason
why the anthropologist should devote himself to understanding the fundamental
nature of human society rather than to an investigation of those particular admini-
strative problems that worry colonial governments in Africa and elsewhere. In the
long run the value of anthropological research must be in the contribution it makes
to our understanding not of primitive societies and their problems but of our own
I Sol Tax, 'Anthropology and Administration', AmericaIndigena,vol. v, no. I, pp. 26-7 (reference given
by Professor Radcliffe-Brown).

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94 APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY
society and its problems which, I am sure you will agree, are serious enough to merit
our chief attention. After all, we study primitive societies only as a means to an end,
to gain a better understanding of ourselves and of our own social system and, as
teachers, we try to explain to our fellow men Polynesian or Central African social
systems, not because we expect them to have any particular interest in Polynesians
and Central Africans, but in order that through a knowledge of them they may have
a clearer understanding of the nature of human society in general and hence of the
workings of their own society. It happens that Britain has an empire and that
anthropological studies have mostly been of primitive peoples, so that it is natural
that at the present time many of our students should be future administrators in the
colonies, but we should not allow this position of the moment to obscure the real
teaching function of our science. The sciences of man must teach all men about the
nature of their bodies, their minds, their society, and their culture. I agree with those
who hold, as Professor Herskovits does in his address in I936 to the Anthropological
Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that ' the debt
we owe the society that supports us must be made in terms of long-time payments,
in our fundamental contributions towards an understanding of the nature and
processes of culture and, through this, to the solution of some of our own basic
problems '.1
Now it often happens in the development of a science that those problems which
are of greatest scientific interest to a student, and the solutions to which prove in the
end to be of greatest benefit to mankind, are precisely those which appear at the time
to be of little or no importance to the man of affairs. If, therefore, we allow his
interests to decide the direction of our research we shall not only do our science a
disservice but do him an injury as well. Settlement schemes, land tenure difficulties,
labour migration, and such-like problems interest administrations; kinship systems,
ritual, and mythology do not. But, apart from the fact-and a very important fact
it is-that in primitive societies the one set of problems can seldom be investigated
without investigation into the other, it would be deplorable if such fundamental
problems as anthropologists have always concerned themselves with, like religion
and magic, were to be neglected merely because inquiry into them does not promise
an immediate dividend. Yet this is what will happen if we allow considerations of
utility to guide and limit our research.
This would matter less were it not for the fact that the primitive societies, from
a study of which we can learn so much about the nature of man and his institutions,
are disappearing before our eyes, and in some cases the peoples with them. We are
not social cobblers and plumbers but men of science on whom rests the responsibility
of our time to record what cannot be recorded after us. Dr. Haddon in his Presi-
dential Address to the Anthropological Institute in 1903 urged that we should ' spend
the whole of our energies in a comprehensive organised campaign and save for
posterity that information which we alone can collect '.2 During the forty-two years
since he spoke what we have accomplished is pitifully small. The ungarnered harvest
is still immense and the reapers few. Professor Radcliffe-Brown, in his Presidential
I Melville J. Herskovits, 'Applied Anthropology 2 Dr. A. C. Haddon, ' Anthropology: its Position
and the American Anthropologist ', Science,6 March and Needs ', J.R.A.I., vol. xxxiii, p. I .
1936, vol. lxxxiii, p. 7.

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 APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY 95
Address to Section F of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advance-
ment of Science at Brisbane in I930, remarked that ' at the present time we know
very little indeed about the New Guinea natives ',I and his statement still holds true
for the whole of Melanesia, Australia, and the Pacific generally. Since I925 specialist
research has been mostly done in Africa, but the position in this continent is no better.
The Rev. Edwin Smith, in his Presidential Address to the Royal Anthropological
Institute in 1935, said: 'What we know [about Africa] is still little in comparison
with what we do not know. I question whether half a dozen tribes have been
adequately described.'z When we turn to the Arab lands of north Africa and the
Near East we seek in vain for a single comprehensive sociological study based on
intensive field-work. The situation in India and the Far East generally is even more
depressing.
WHY SO LITTLE RESEARCH?
I could continue the catalogue of ignorance; but enough has been said. The
reason why so little research has been done is obvious: there have not been enough
men to do it. A comprehensive study of a single society, even of a society of the
simplest kind, by intensive methods of field-work takes several years. Therefore, to
make the slightest impression on the vast unknown areas of the world it is necessary
to increase very considerably the number of field-workers, and this can hardly be
done in present circumstances. The anthropological departments in the universities
have always been few and have generally been starved. Those who have embarked
on an anthropological career have therefore lacked security, for no scientist, especially
in a discipline like social anthropology, can go on doing research indefinitely. It is
unfair, unwise, and unworkable to launch a student on research unless there is a
reasonable chance that he will be able to make a living when he has completed it and,
as the only way he can make a living out of social anthropology is by taking a teaching
post, the number of men engaged on research at any time must be in proportion to
the number of anthropological teaching posts in the universities. The first anthropo-
logical posts in England were those of Tylor as Reader at Oxford in 1884 and Haddon
as Lecturer in Ethnology at Cambridge in 1900. When I started my anthropological
career in 1924 there were, I think, five posts in the British Isles devoted to social
anthropology or Ethnology, and one (Cape Town) in the Dominions. The position
is somewhat better to-day. There are about ten posts in the British Isles and seven
in the Dominions. It is clear that very little research can be accomplished on the
basis of so limited a number of teaching posts and our first need is to-day what it has
always been: increase in the size and number of university departments.
I raise the question of our research potentialities partly for reasons already men-
tioned, the advancement of our science by investigation of important theoretical
problems on a much larger scale than has been hitherto possible and the recording
before it is too late of the disappearing primitive social structures of the world, but
also because the colonial governments are now showing themselves more interested
in sponsoring anthropological research in their territories. At present we are not able
to supply them with adequately trained research workers and, though this is partly
Professor A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Report of the 1930, p. 12.
Australian and New Zealand Association for the 2 Rev. Edwin W. Smith, 'Africa, what do we
Advancement of Science,Brisbane Meeting, May-June, know of it ?', J.R.A.I., vol. lxv, p. 77.

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96 APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY
due to the war, it must be recognized that the universities cannot cater for the needs
of colonial governments unless these governments make provision on their estab-
lishments for men with anthropological training and field-work experience. In the
past there have been government anthropologists conducting researches in a few
territories. At the present time there are none. These posts were filled by persons
already in government service, so that while much information was recorded by men
like Rattray, Meek, and Williams, which would not otherwise have been recorded,
their posts could not be regarded by students in the anthropological departments of
the universities as future openings. Colonial governments have also encouraged
research by contributing, directly or indirectly, towards its expenses. Thus in the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the researches of the Seligmans, Nadel, and myself were
wholly or in part financed by the government of that country. These governments
have taken the view that they had no further responsibility for the research-worker
when the period of his research came to an end, assuming that sooner or later he
would receive a university appointment. Clearly this procedure will not suffice for
the future if the amount of research in the colonies is to be greatly increased. The
university departments cannot expand their research side out of all proportion to
their teaching establishments.
Therefore, if the universities are to provide the required workers to conduct
research in the colonies in addition to those carrying on research elsewhere, neither
the seconding of political officers to do anthropological research nor the making of
research grants is sufficient. A third method by which the colonial governments hope
to make use of social anthropology is to be seen in the creation of research institutes
with official standing but autonomous administration, such as the Rhodes-Living-
stone Institute in Northern Rhodesia, the West African Institute, and the proposed
East African Institute. Unfortunately these institutes cannot at present be staffed
with adequately trained anthropologists, though this obstacle can, of course, be
overcome in time. A difficulty which cannot be overcome so easily is the one I have
already repeatedly mentioned: the disproportion of temporary research posts to
university teaching posts. For, though these institutes create some permanent
administrative posts they create many more temporary research posts, with the result
that some research-workers may be forced, when their research-contracts with an
institute have expired, to adopt some career which cuts them off from both social
anthropology and colonial administration, the two careers most suitable for them.
I may add that I am of the opinion that a much higher standard of research will be
maintained if it is conducted from the universities and not from colonial institutes
of the kind I have mentioned, the proper function of which is to act as local research
centres, equipped with libraries and museums, through which anthropologists may
work in any territory.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL ADVISERS

My own view is that both social anthropology and colonial administration will be
the gainers if the colonial governments will allow research to be organized from the
universities and other scientific institutions at home, or in the Dominions, and will
on their side appoint anthropological advisers as members of their administrative
staffs so that they will be able to make the fullest possible use of the results of the

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 APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY 97
research; for only a man with anthropological training and field-work experience is
fully capable of interpreting and applying anthropological knowledge. If they were
to make such appointments they would, of course, have to fill them with men of
some standing, experience, and seniority, from outside the service, as is sometimes
done in the case of other technical posts in the colonies.
It is important that the anthropologist who acts as adviser, or consultant, to an
administration should be a full member of it. He cannot advise the administration
on the bearing of their legal, educational, economic, and other social programmes on
native life unless he knows the bureaucratic machinery from the inside, has full access
to all government documents, and meets the heads of departments round the same
conference table as an equal. Otherwise he will not be able to see problems in their
full administrative context as well as in their full anthropological context, to translate
an administrative problem into anthropological terms and vice versa, and to speak as
one who shares to the full responsibility for the actions and policy of the administra-
tion. Administrators naturally resent advice from outsiders, but will gladly accept it
from someone who has the same loyalty towards the administration as they feel
themselves and who can, moreover, speak about some of its problems with special
knowledge they lack. Mr. Sol Tax remarks, in the paper already quoted from,' that
although he had spent ten years in research into the social anthropology of the
Chiapas and Guatemala Indians no one had ever asked his technical assistance in
solving the social problems of the region. Other anthropologists have experienced
the same thing. Professor Seligman once told me that in all the years he had worked
in the Sudan or on Sudanese problems he was never once asked his advice and that
the only time he volunteered it, in connexion with the rain-makers of the Nuba Hills,
it was not taken. During the fifteen years in which I worked on sociological problems
in the same region I was never once asked my advice on any question at all. If I may
refer to my own experiences again, I would contrast the position I held in the Sudan
as a guest of the Government, and doing research at its expense, with that I held, at
the end of the late war, in Cyrenaica as Tribal Affairs Officer in the British Military
Administration of that country. In Cyrenaica I did no anthropological research at all.
I was an administrator who in view of his training and past experience was very
sensibly given, or rather allowed to give himself, the job of keeping in closer and less
formal contact with the Arabs, particularly the Bedouin, than was possible for other
officers of the administration. As part of my duties I submitted to the Chief Admini-
strator reports on any native problems which I thought should be brought to his
notice together with recommendations about what I thought should be done to solve
them, and I commented on any proposed measures which might in any way affect
native life and institutions. I was thus in the position of being able to acquaint myself
at first hand with Arab needs and difficulties and to bring them to the notice of the head
of the administration. I also received every file which contained any proposal which
might affect native interests and, when necessary, put up a case for or against it. This
arrangement worked very well. I may add that I never put up a good case without
the Chief Administrator and his colleagues accepting it and doing their best to
implement it. After all, the administrative staff of a colonial government is just as
anxious as any anthropologist to see that the native peoples in their charge get a
' Op. cit., p. 26.

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98 APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY
square deal, and what they particularly want to know from the anthropologist is how
a square deal can best be accommodated to administrative requirements and imperial
policy. In giving his advice he will not be acting as a scientist with some experience
of administration but as an administrator with scientific training and knowledge of
a special kind. It stands to reason therefore that he will advise on policy as well as
on fact.
I do not see that there can be any contradiction between applied anthropology in
this sense-the only sense in which it can be applied-and pure research. On the
contrary, I would say that the two are complementary. Quite a number of anthro-
pologists find in the course of their field-work that they become more interested in
administrative problems and methods than in scientific problems and methods, and
others feel that they must have greater security than an anthropological career would
seem to offer. It is good for both social anthropology and for administration that
some of these men should devote themselves to colonial administration. At present
they are often lost to teaching, research, and administration. The training provided
by the university departments and the experience gained in research should produce
the kind of mind which, given some acquaintance with administrative methods, is
admirably fitted to advise colonial governments on native problems and what
research in their territories university departments and other scientific bodies can
reasonably be expected to undertake. What it amounts to is this: if the colonial
governments want to make use of anthropological knowledge they will have to
obtain the services of anthropologists, and anthropologists will not be forthcoming
unless they make provision for them on their establishments. The value of anthro-
pological advice to administrations will depend on the general theoretical advance
of the science, which depends on much more extensive research being undertaken
than is at present possible, and the increase of research in its turn largely depends on
the provision of such anthropological posts as I have suggested on colonial estab-
lishments, for it must be remembered that before a man could qualify to hold such
a post he would have done a fair amount of research.
I think we should make this point of view quite clear to the Colonial Office and
the colonial governments. We should explain to them that, much as we would like
to help them, with our present limited resources research in social anthropology is
only just kept going and certainly does not keep pace with the deterioration of its
primitive field, so that they cannot expect us to turn aside from our scientific research
and teaching to investigate their practical problems and advise on their policies. If
they want qualified men to assist them they must create posts in the colonies which
will attract them. Scientific work can then go on unimpeded by constant distractions
and deflections and at the same time the knowledge it brings into being can be applied
in the field of colonial administration, for, given posts in applied anthropology, a
sufficient number of men will be forthcoming to perform both tasks. Colonial
administrations do not expect to have the services of doctors, botanists, geologists,
and engineers without giving them appointments on their establishments. Why
should they expect the services of anthropologists on different terms ?

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