Revitalizing Anthropology:

Revitalizing Anthropology involves graduate students from Australia, Canada, China, Guatemala, Japan, the United States, and Zimbabwe exploring: What are the structural constraints that limit anthropology’s public effectiveness? How successful are the publications anthropologists produce in building cumulative knowledge and helping those who help us in our research? How can anthropologists more effectively facilitate social change?

Revitalizing Anthropology is a tour de force for anyone committed to rethinking the field. From assessing the exclusivity and insularity of the field, to questioning the relationship between publication output and knowledge production, to challenging the efficacy of academic institutions in producing actual change, the book leads the way in shifting the focus from anthropological critique to real-world problem solving by asking students to consider what the field could be.

KAMARI MAXINE CLARKE
Distinguished Professor, University of Toronto, Canada

Graduate students from around the world help us envision forms of locally involved anthropological praxis that may use the lessons and avoid the pitfalls of our discipline’s colonial past.

GABRIELA VARGAS-CETINA
Profesora Investigadora Titular C en Antropología Social, Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, Mexico

This is an extraordinary and seminal intervention/contribution in Rob Borofsky’s career-long insistence on making anthropology literally beneficial to others. He taps into the spirit and motivating impulses of current graduate student projects in several locations globally. In so doing, he provides a much-needed resource for teaching introductory graduate program seminars, especially in the leading departments of the classic metropole.

GEORGE MARCUS
Chancellor’s Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, USA