‘Teaching’ Practicing

In Spring 2005 editor Jeanne Simonelli taught Applied Anthropology to a mixed group of graduate and undergraduate students at Hebrew University. As part of the course, the class worked together to define Applied Anthropology in the context of Israel's complex cultural setting. They determined that: • Applied anthropology is designed to be useful to people and offer solutions to practical problems. It goes one step further than theoretical anthropology, where the primary goal is advancing new theoretical explanations. Applied anthropology takes the theory (of anthropology) into the practical day to day life of a given culture. • Applied anthropology focuses on populations that share a problem, an interest or a distress, using the knowledge, theory, ethnographic methodology and tools of analysis and understanding of anthropology, in order to provide tools to a specific culture that will assist in dealing with a certain situation. Applied anthropologists are involved in studying, designing, counseling, planning and evaluating policies, programs and organizational courses of action. • While taking into account cultural, ethnic, and gender differences, poverty and class, resources and power, applied anthropology tries to help solve human problems, local and global. A goal is to empower groups and individuals by making it possible for them to deal with cultural colonialism and other forms of social and cultural oppression.