Royal Anthropological Institute

In recent decades, policy makers have tended to pay far less attention to anthropologists than, say, economists (or even sociologists.) This is partly due to a failure of imagination on the part of the mainstream political and government sector. However, another crucial problem is that anthropologists themselves are sometimes bad at engaging with the wider world and promoting their insights and projecting their methodology into the public arena. This is partly due to the "silo" problem inside universities, but also down to the uneasy relationship that anthropology has with power. Some examples of this have occurred in recent years. But these remain rare. But this is truly a tragedy: now, more than ever, there is an urgent need for the anthropological perspective to be injected into public policy making, in areas ranging from medicine, to social media to the economy.