Anthropology and Public Policy

Since anthropology was born amidst the controversy of abolition, it would be no surprise that the discipline has long had a concern with public issues. The debates over slavery were so acrimonious that the ethnographic societies of London and Paris both split apart over the issue, some members insisting that the new science should remain aloof from moral problems, other members insisting that any humane science must take a moral stance. This controversy continues among anthropologists today; it is often reflected even in the works of an individual. For instance, Edward B. Tylor made one of the earliest pronouncements of the need for anthropology to be culturally relative. Although he did not use the term, he (1871) stated the issue as clearly as it has ever been expressed by saying that anthropologists "must not measure other people's corn by their own bushel.