In the late 1940s, a group of anthropology students showed up in Tama County, Iowa, expecting to do what anthropology students had always done: observe, take notes, and write dissertations about the Meskwaki (Fox) community they were studying. Instead, they ended up rewriting the rules of the discipline itself. What started as a summer field school turned into one of the most influential experiments in the history of applied social science, and it left behind a question that anthropologists are still wrestling with today: whose goals should research actually serve?
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Origins: the Fox project (1948-59)
The story begins with Sol Tax, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago who had already done fieldwork with the Fox community back in the 1930s for his own doctoral research. In 1948, he returned to Tama County, this time bringing along his graduate students. The original goal was straightforward: give nearly forty students a hands-on training ground in ethnographic fieldwork methods over the course of several summers.
But fieldwork has a way of complicating tidy plans. As the students spent more time with the Meskwaki, they began to see the community’s day-to-day struggles up close: strained relations with the surrounding white towns, limited economic opportunity, and a school system that wasn’t serving Meskwaki children well. The students found it increasingly difficult to just observe and record. They started getting pulled into helping, whether that meant explaining government programs, assisting with a local crafts cooperative called Tamacraft, or supporting a scholarship fund for Meskwaki students. Sol Tax’s own papers describe this period as the point where a training exercise turned into something with real stakes for the community involved.
By the time the project wound down in 1959, it had run for over a decade and produced a mix of outcomes, some lasting and some not. The scholarship program had a genuine long-term impact. Other initiatives, like the cooperative economic ventures and popular media projects, faded once the students moved on. But the project’s real legacy wasn’t any single program. It was the working method the students and Tax developed along the way, which they eventually named action anthropology.
The core principle: the right to make mistakes
At the heart of action anthropology sits a deceptively simple idea. Tax argued that any community has the right to make its own decisions, including bad ones. He laid this out explicitly in a 1956 essay titled “The Freedom to Make Mistakes,” where he pushed back against the instinct of well-meaning outsiders to steer communities toward the “correct” choice.
Why this mattered
This principle sounds obvious now, but it was a genuine departure at the time. Government agencies, missionaries, and even earlier generations of anthropologists often approached indigenous communities with a fixed idea of what progress should look like, and then worked to move the community toward that endpoint. Tax’s position flipped this. If the Meskwaki wanted to pursue an economic strategy that Tax personally thought was unlikely to work, his job was not to block it or quietly steer them elsewhere. His job was to make sure they had accurate information about the likely consequences, and then step back.
This is a harder stance to hold than it sounds. It means tolerating outcomes you disagree with. It means resisting the urge to “fix” a plan you think is flawed. Tax’s insistence on this point is really what separates action anthropology from simple community service or charity work; it treats the community as the author of its own story rather than the beneficiary of someone else’s.
Role of the action anthropologist
So if the anthropologist isn’t there to direct outcomes, what exactly are they doing? Tax described action anthropology as an activity where the anthropologist holds two goals at once: helping a group solve a real problem, and learning something valuable about social life in the process. Neither goal is allowed to outrank the other.
Facilitator, not director
In practice, this meant the Fox Project team took on a role closer to a research-backed consultant than a project manager. They would:
Map out the problem using their analytical training, helping the community see patterns they might not have had the distance to notice themselves.
Lay out options and likely consequences, drawing on their outside knowledge of law, government programs, and economics.
Step back from the decision itself, leaving the actual choice, and the responsibility for it, with the community.
This is a subtle but important shift in posture. A traditional consultant is often hired to solve a defined problem and hand over a solution. An action anthropologist’s real product is a better-informed decision-making process, not a specific outcome.
Not the same as classic applied anthropology
It’s worth being precise about how this differs from earlier applied anthropology, because the terms get used loosely. In the earlier model, anthropologists were typically hired by a government agency, mission, or company. Their client was the sponsoring institution, and the community being studied was more of a subject than a stakeholder. Action anthropology inverted that client relationship entirely. The Meskwaki community itself became the party the anthropologist was ultimately accountable to, not an outside sponsor.
A shift towards anthropology “in practice”
This is the piece that makes the Fox Project historically significant beyond its own results. It marked a move from what you might call assigned intervention to desired intervention.
In assigned intervention, the goals are set before the anthropologist even arrives. A funding body or government department decides what “development” or “improvement” should look like, and the anthropologist’s job is to help implement that vision efficiently, gathering community input mostly to smooth the process rather than to shape the destination.
Desired intervention flips the sequence. The community sets the goals, sometimes slowly and messily, and the anthropologist’s expertise gets deployed in service of whatever the community decides it actually wants. This required the Fox Project team to abandon a lot of the detachment that classic ethnography prized. They weren’t neutral observers anymore; they were participants with a stated commitment to the community’s welfare.
A mixed but influential legacy
It would be misleading to present the Fox Project as an unambiguous success story. Later scholars examining the project found real tensions in the model. Some researchers concluded that the action anthropologists were not always as collaborative as they believed themselves to be, and that their involvement in local politics sometimes created new forms of dependency rather than reducing it. Most of the specific programs the project launched, from the crafts cooperative to the community media efforts, didn’t survive once the students left.
Even so, the method itself outlasted any individual program. Sol Tax spent the rest of his career championing this approach, going on to work with the Fox community into the 1960s and to help develop pan-tribal organizing efforts elsewhere. Action anthropology is now widely recognized as an early forerunner of participatory action research, an approach used today across public health, education, and community development work, wherever the people affected by a decision are meant to have a real say in making it.
Why this still matters
The tension the Fox Project surfaced hasn’t gone away. Anyone working in community development, public policy, or grassroots organizing today runs into the same fork in the road: do you bring in expertise to guide a community toward a predetermined “best” outcome, or do you bring in expertise to help a community pursue whatever outcome it has chosen for itself, even if outsiders would have picked differently? Action anthropology didn’t resolve this tension so much as name it clearly, and insist that the second path deserved to be taken seriously.
What do you think? Where do you think the line should sit between offering expert guidance and respecting a community’s right to choose its own path, even when that path looks risky from the outside? And do you think a researcher can ever fully let go of their own opinion about what the “right” outcome should be?
References
- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/371490
- https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/findingaids/view.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.TAXSOL
- https://doi.org/10.1086/200003
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2230
- https://rar.expressions.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1986-Reflections-on-Action-Anthropology.pdf
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sol-Tax
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