Early Phases of Applied Anthropology: Salvage Ethnology and the World Wars

Long before anthropology became a subject you study in a classroom, it was already being put to work outside one. Governments hired anthropologists to document vanishing ways of life, armies asked them to gauge a nation’s mood, and factory managers wanted them to explain why workers slowed down on the assembly line. This is the story of applied anthropology’s earliest decades, from a government bureau in 1879 to the committees that kept America fed and motivated during the Second World War. It is also a story with an uncomfortable undercurrent: much of this early work served the interests of the state or the employer first, and the communities being studied a distant second.

The birth of salvage ethnology in America 🔗

The story usually begins in 1879, when the United States Congress created the Bureau of Ethnology under the Smithsonian Institution. The bureau was largely the vision of geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell, and its mandate was to organise anthropological research across the American continent, sending fieldworkers to document Native American languages, kinship systems, and material culture.

Two motives drove this work, and they sat together uneasily. The first was salvage anthropology, the urgent effort to record the lives, languages, and rituals of Native American communities whose populations and territories had been devastated by settler expansion. Anthropologists treated this as a race against time, since they believed entire cultural worlds could disappear within a generation. The second motive was far less neutral. Bureau ethnologists doubled as policy advisers, feeding the government information that shaped assimilationist reforms designed to fold indigenous groups into mainstream American life. Documentation and dispossession, in other words, often travelled together, with little attention paid to preserving the cultures being studied.

Anthropology and the British empire 🔗

A chair built to serve the colonial administration 🔗

Britain ran a parallel experiment, though with a different institutional shape. As South Africa industrialised rapidly in the early twentieth century, colonial administrators wanted a “dispassionate” understanding of African communities to manage the resulting social strain. The result was a dedicated academic post: in 1920, the University of Cape Town created a chair of anthropology that became the nucleus of the School of African Life and Languages, with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown appointed as its first professor of social anthropology. The school was explicitly conceived as a bridge between academic researchers and colonial administrators, training a generation of anthropologists whose findings would feed directly into how Britain governed its African territories.

Knowledge as a cultural technology of rule 🔗

This pattern was not unique to Africa. Across British-administered Asia, including the Indian subcontinent, colonial officials relied on ethnographic surveys, census categories, and anthropological reports to classify and govern enormously diverse populations. The historian and anthropologist Nicholas Dirks gave this pattern a memorable label in his introduction to Bernard Cohn’s work, describing it as the cultural technologies of rule that the British Empire depended on. The phrase captures something important: anthropological knowledge was not a neutral by-product of curiosity about “the native.” It was one of the actual instruments through which subjugation was organised, standardised, and made to look scientific.

The world wars and industrial management 🔗

The period between the two World Wars, and especially the Great Depression, pushed applied anthropology into a completely different arena: the factory floor. As American businesses grappled with plummeting productivity and labour unrest, some turned to anthropologists to understand what was actually happening among their workers.

The clearest example is the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric’s plant near Chicago, led by Harvard researcher Elton Mayo. Mayo’s team included W. Lloyd Warner, a social anthropologist who introduced ethnographic techniques such as open-ended interviewing and close observation of small worker groups, methods borrowed directly from fieldwork among small-scale societies. This work, later joined by anthropologists like Elliot Chapple, came to be known as engineering anthropology, a term reflecting its focus on the practical “engineering” of human relations inside modern institutions. Warner and his colleagues found that productivity depended less on wages or lighting and more on the informal social bonds workers formed with one another, a finding that reshaped how American management thought about the human side of industrial work. This marked a genuine shift for the discipline: anthropology was no longer confined to “primitive” societies at the edge of empire but was being applied to the industrial economies at its centre.

Applied anthropology during World War II 🔗

If the interwar years nudged anthropologists into factories, the Second World War pulled them into government service on a much larger scale. Anthropologists were now needed to help manage migration, nutrition shortages, and unemployment on the home front, problems that touched every household.

The Committee on Food Habits 🔗

In 1940, the National Research Council set up the Committee on Food Habits to study how Americans could be persuaded to change their diets during rationing without damaging morale or nutrition. Among its non-governmental members was anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who contributed research on how households were adapting their cooking and eating patterns to wartime shortages. The committee’s own account describes its task as addressing the securing of scientific information on what constitutes proper diets alongside the practical problem of getting people to actually eat that way. This was applied anthropology in its most literal sense: using cultural knowledge of food habits to solve a pressing wartime logistics problem.

The Committee for National Morale 🔗

A second, equally influential body was the Committee for National Morale, founded in 1940 to study Axis propaganda and recommend how the United States could sustain public morale during the war. Anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead were central figures here, applying the same techniques they had once used to study small island societies to analyse the “national character” of entire modern nations. Bateson and Mead, working alongside psychologists and journalists, applied their anthropological field training to culturally related problems of World War II, producing analyses of both American and enemy propaganda that fed directly into government strategy.

Key institutions and publications that shaped the field 🔗

This wartime surge in demand for applied anthropologists needed institutional infrastructure, and the early 1940s delivered it in quick succession. In 1941, a group of anthropologists including Margaret Mead and Eliot Chapple founded the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), an organisation created to promote the practical application of anthropological knowledge to real-world problems rather than treating it as a purely academic exercise. The SfAA remains, in its own words, the leading international organisation in its field to this day, and it launched the journal Applied Anthropology, later renamed Human Organization, which is still published quarterly.

Health research also gained an institutional home in 1943, when the Institute of Social Anthropology was established as an autonomous unit within the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology, coordinating cooperative research across Latin America. George M. Foster, who later directed the Institute, went on to become one of the founding figures of medical anthropology, a field built directly on this early institutional groundwork.

Britain made a comparable move on the funding side. The Colonial Development and Welfare Act, passed in 1940, allocated substantial government funds not just for infrastructure but explicitly for social science research in British colonies, formalising the flow of money from the colonial state into anthropological fieldwork on the very populations it governed.

The limitations of this early phase 🔗

For all this institutional growth, it is worth being honest about what early applied anthropology was not. It was overwhelmingly oriented toward policymakers, administrators, and employers rather than the communities anthropologists actually studied. Fieldworkers documented, classified, and advised, but they rarely worked alongside communities to identify and act on needs the communities themselves had defined. The discipline’s guiding values during this period, academic documentation and scientific objectivity, meant that the people at the centre of every study were treated primarily as subjects to be understood, not as participants with a stake in the outcome. That gap between studying people and working with people is precisely what later phases of applied anthropology would try, imperfectly, to close.

What do you think? Does knowledge produced to serve a government or an employer stop being valuable simply because of who commissioned it, or does the purpose behind research always shape what gets studied and what gets left out? And looking at colonial-era ethnographic surveys from today’s vantage point, what responsibility do modern researchers have toward the communities whose data still sits in old government archives?

References

1. https://www.si.edu/object/archives/sova-naa-xxxx-0155
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/A-R-Radcliffe-Brown
3. https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691000435/colonialism-and-its-forms-of-knowledge
4. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/economics/hawthorne-studies-examine-human-productivity
5. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/9566/chapter/5
6. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/oneworld-char.html
7. https://appliedanthro.org/about/