Anthropology and Policy Research: From Colonial Counsel to Multi-Sited Engagement

For much of its history, anthropology has been a discipline that studies power more than it exercises it. Yet from the earliest days of the field, anthropologists have also stepped into government offices, tribunals and planning committees to advise on how policies affect real communities. This dual identity, part observer and part adviser, has never been simple. It began in the colonial period, deepened through India’s own tribal administration, and has now evolved into something far more complex: multi-sited, comparative, and increasingly focused on power itself. Understanding this journey tells us a great deal about what anthropology can offer policy today, and where its limits lie.

From colonial counsel to critical distance 🔗

Anthropology’s engagement with the state has deep roots in colonial governance. The discipline’s early preoccupation with documenting “other” cultures made it a useful tool for administrators who needed to understand and control the populations they governed. Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of modern fieldwork-based anthropology, actively pushed the field in this direction. He proposed what he called practical anthropology, arguing that anthropological insight could help colonial officers govern more effectively by explaining why local customs and institutions made sense within their own context. Through his work at the London School of Economics and the International African Institute, he trained a generation of anthropologists to work alongside British colonial administrations in Africa, believing that cultural knowledge could soften, if not entirely reform, the machinery of empire.

Not everyone agreed. Edward Evans-Pritchard, whose meticulous studies of the Azande and the Nuer shaped social anthropology for decades, grew wary of anthropologists getting too close to administrative power. He believed that policy work risked compromising the discipline’s scientific independence and pulling scholars into what he saw as the compromised, “tainted” business of colonial rule. This tension between engagement and distance is not just a historical footnote. It set up a debate that anthropologists still have today: should the discipline serve power, study it critically, or attempt both at once?

Verrier Elwin and tribal policy in India 🔗

India’s own version of this story centres on Verrier Elwin, a British-born anthropologist who took Indian citizenship and became one of the most influential voices in shaping post-independence tribal policy. After years of fieldwork among the Baiga and Gond communities of central India, Elwin was appointed as an adviser on tribal affairs, and Jawaharlal Nehru specifically sought his guidance on the North-East Frontier Agency in the early 1950s. Elwin’s advice shaped Nehru’s approach to the region, encouraging administrators to let tribal communities develop “along the lines of their own genius” rather than imposing external models of progress. Whatever one thinks of the paternalism embedded in that phrase, it shows how directly anthropological reasoning entered the machinery of Indian state-building.

This is not a closed chapter. Anthropologists in India continue to be commissioned by state governments to assess and advise on the classification of Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes, a task that carries enormous consequences for who receives constitutional protections and welfare benefits. Every such classification exercise repeats, in a smaller and more bureaucratic way, the same question Elwin faced: how much should outside experts shape the fate of communities they study?

What changes when anthropology enters policy work 🔗

Doing anthropology for a policy client is a different exercise from doing anthropology for an academic audience. Scholars who study this shift, notably Glynn Cochrane, point to several structural differences that reshape how research gets done.

First, time is compressed. Traditional ethnographic fieldwork can take a year or more of immersion; policy studies often have to be completed within weeks or a few months. Second, the goal changes. Academic anthropology aims for publication and peer recognition, while policy research succeeds only if the report is actually adopted and acted upon by decision makers. Third, policy research tends to be forward-looking, asking what is likely to happen if a scheme is implemented, rather than simply describing what already exists. Fourth, researchers are often required to take an explicit position on contested issues, whether a dam should be built, a community relocated, or a scheme redesigned, which inevitably creates both allies and opponents. Finally, because policy studies are usually commissioned and funded by a government department, corporation, or agency, that sponsor may retain significant control over what gets published and what stays confidential.

Together, these constraints force anthropologists to rethink their craft. Rigour has to coexist with speed, and academic caution has to coexist with a willingness to make recommendations under uncertainty.

Advocacy and the rise of measurable impact 🔗

Policy-oriented anthropology also demands a different relationship with evidence. It is not enough to describe a community’s way of life in rich qualitative detail. Policymakers need information they can act on and justify, which usually means some form of measurement or quantification. This has pushed anthropologists toward mixed-method research that blends ethnographic depth with statistical rigour.

Nowhere is this clearer than in social impact assessment, now a standard requirement in large infrastructure and land-acquisition projects across India. Under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, any government agency seeking to acquire land for a public project must first commission a social impact assessment that examines who will be affected, how severely, and what compensation or rehabilitation they are owed. These assessments routinely draw on anthropological methods and, in many cases, employ anthropologists directly, since understanding livelihood dependence on land, forests, or common resources requires exactly the kind of contextual fieldwork the discipline specialises in. Policy researchers have noted that this legal requirement marked a significant shift away from the more discretionary, top-down approach of the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894, embedding community consultation into the process itself.

Standing with displaced communities 🔗

One of the clearest examples of anthropology’s practical value in policy comes from work with displaced populations, whether displaced by large development projects or by communal violence. Anthropologists working in these settings generate detailed evidence about who exactly has been displaced, how vulnerable different groups within that population are, and what limited livelihood options remain to them once their land or social networks are disrupted. This evidence has repeatedly shaped how rehabilitation packages are designed and who qualifies for support.

Beyond the data itself, something subtler happens in this kind of work. Anthropologists often become the people who can speak on behalf of communities who otherwise have little access to policy circles. That representational role, translating lived experience into a form that administrators and courts can act on, blurs the line between research and advocacy. It shows how anthropological knowledge does not stay confined to reports; it becomes part of the political process through which rehabilitation actually happens.

Comparing policies across societies 🔗

Anthropology’s comparative instinct, developed over a century of cross-cultural fieldwork, also makes it well suited to analysing how policy choices produce inequality. Nkiru Okongwu’s comparative study of the United States and Namibia is a good example. Her work traces how different national policy decisions, in employment structures, social welfare design, and family support systems, produced similarly severe patterns of inequality in two very different societies, including a rise in female-headed households struggling with limited access to stable, well-paid work. Placing two unrelated national contexts side by side reveals something a single case study cannot: that certain kinds of inequality are not accidents of culture but predictable outcomes of particular policy architectures.

Studying up: turning the gaze toward power 🔗

Globalisation and the spread of neo-liberal economic policy have reshaped who anthropologists need to study if they want to understand how policy actually works. International institutions, national governments, and multinational corporations now shape economic and social outcomes as much as, or more than, local custom does. Scholars such as Sony Pellissery argue that anthropological attention to the relationship between knowledge and power inside these institutions is uniquely capable of explaining a puzzle that plagues policy analysis everywhere: why the policy that gets announced so often looks nothing like the policy that gets implemented on the ground.

Answering that question requires what anthropologist Laura Nader famously called “studying up.” Rather than confining fieldwork to marginalised or less powerful communities, Nader urged anthropologists to turn their ethnographic tools on colonisers rather than the colonised, and the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless. Applied to policy research, this means treating bureaucracies, elite decision-making bodies, multinational agencies, and business networks as legitimate ethnographic sites in their own right, not just as sources of funding or authorisation for research on someone else.

Multi-sited ethnography and blurring the local-global line 🔗

George Marcus took this reorientation a step further with his concept of multi-sited ethnography. Rather than anchoring research in a single village or community, Marcus proposed that ethnographers follow connections, people, objects, ideas, or capital, across multiple locations, tracing how the same forces show up differently in different places. His approach explicitly rejects a clean separation between the “local” and the “global,” arguing that any local site is already shaped by global forces, while the global itself is nothing more than the sum of countless local practices interacting with one another. As one review of his work put it, this approach asks researchers to build a multi-locale, system-directed ethnography of complex connections, following chains and threads across sites rather than staying rooted in one place.

Indian policy research offers a strong example of this kind of thinking in action. Kerala’s People’s Plan Campaign, launched in 1996 and documented extensively by economist T. M. Thomas Isaac and anthropologist Richard Franke, mobilised millions of residents across more than a thousand villages and urban wards to decentralise development planning. Rather than building institutions first and hoping resources would follow, the campaign devolved funds directly to local bodies and let institutional capacity grow around that responsibility, an approach the Kerala State Planning Board continues to document as one of the most extensive experiments in participatory local governance anywhere. Understanding why this campaign succeeded required exactly the kind of multi-sited attention Marcus described: tracing how funds, authority, and local expectations moved between the state secretariat, district offices, and individual panchayats simultaneously.

This blending of disciplines and methods is now a defining feature of contemporary policy anthropology. Working alongside economists, planners, and public health researchers, anthropologists increasingly contribute not just qualitative insight but a genuinely multi-sited, comparative view of how programmes are designed, implemented, and experienced differently across contexts.

What do you think? Should anthropologists studying policy prioritise speed and adoption by decision makers, even if it means less rigorous, slower-paced research? And as more of India’s development challenges span multiple states, institutions, and levels of government at once, is multi-sited ethnography becoming less of a specialised method and more of a basic requirement for good policy research?

References

1. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2022/12/15/malinowski-and-colonialism/
2. https://nehruarchive.in/documents/north-east-frontier-areas-24-april-1953-lw6e8
3. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/2121?sam_handle=123456789%2F1362
4. https://www.teriin.org/article/social-impact-assessment-can-we-do-away-it
5. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0287.xml
6. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/11673/pdf
7. https://spb.kerala.gov.in/en/decentralised-planning-division