When I was in grad school, a family member once asked me what I did during my research trips to Central America. Was I on digs the whole time?
That did sound fun, but there was a problem: my degree was in cultural anthropology, not archaeology. My typical day looked more like this:
As an anthropologist, I trained to watch, listen, record, and interpret. We call this participant observation, a research method in which practitioners engage in the activities, rituals, and behaviors of daily life. This might be in a community, as was typical of the early anthropologists like Margaret Mead or Claude Lévi-Strauss. The true potential of the discipline, however, lies in its breadth. Anthropologists can work anywhere — because culture is everywhere, and everything is potential fieldwork.
These days, fieldwork increasingly occurs in the institutions and settings of contemporary life and power. Plastic surgery clinics, urban medical centers, human rights organizations; on Wall Street or in poker halls, schools, NGOs, the UN. We study human-animal bonds, religious rituals, food, the sacred, death, love, money. We think deeply about what it means to belong to a group. We take culture seriously as a dynamic process that is always, by definition, in flux.
Anthropologists can work anywhere — because culture is everywhere, and everything is potential fieldwork.
But no matter the fieldsite or catchy title of our research projects, our task is always to probe bigger questions about the human experience. We study fundamental conceptions of race, gender, class, and the body; we interrogate assumptions; we make the familiar strange. As a discipline, our bread and butter is taking the belief systems that structure our world and revealing them as arbitrary works of human creativity and interpretation. My academic research examined shifting ideas of medical mysteries, with a focus on rare genetic syndromes that caused complex disabilities. It sounds complicated, but centered on a simple question: what does it mean to be visibly different but lack a diagnosis?
But I grew weary of anthropology. By the end of grad school I was tired of the jargon and the politics. Tired of a lingering reluctance for practitioners to do applied work or take their skills outside of academia. Tired of financial instability and unwilling to move my family for a short-term postdoc. I was increasingly unconvinced that publishing super niche articles in peer-review journals, many of which were paywalled, was an effective distribution strategy for research aimed at making a difference. And, as the child of an academic, I’d spent most of my life in this unique subculture. I needed a break.
I spent seven years working in global tech companies — swanky offices, catered lunches, parties with fire dancers, trapeze artists, and champagne fountains. I approached it from the start as an ethnographer. I was a participant observer — a fly on the wall watching the different dress codes and habits across teams, who sat where in the cafeteria, the vernacular of different parts of the organization, and the rituals. When I started, I had no idea what an “all-hands” was. I experienced my first “offsite” during my first full week of corporate life, complete with a former Disney animator in a white kaftan leading a group of marketers in some drawing and chanting; at the end, we each received an amulet and danced in circles around our VP. It was a hell of an onboarding.
I got to work, spending my days doing research, analyzing, and writing about job trends like ghosting, burnout, and supporting neurodiversity in the workplace. I spent a lot of time sitting with my laptop in a $1,300 egg chair while drinking lattes and looking at trees.
In the time that followed, I saw tech go from a sector positioned as a fun, tshirt-clad alternative to traditional corporate doldrums to more of the same obscured by different aesthetics and vernacular. The industry moved from championing DEI, accessibility, and inclusivity, and telling employees to bring our whole selves to work, to just another business model designed to maximize profit. As we’ve all seen, it dropped the veil almost instantly once the political moods shifted. It wasn’t necessarily surprising, but it did make many of us question whether we wanted to be there.
During the last few years, I thought a lot about Weber’s work on the rationalization of charisma in religious movements. The early leaders offer a start contrast to business as usual. They are charismatic and pull people in with their ideas, energy, and promises of a better world. And, as the movements get bigger, they become more rationalized and bureaucratic. To be clear, I never believed that a company could or should be my family — but was fascinated by the audacious concept, because anthropologists know that kinship claims are central to any culture.
Today, we’re in a pivotal moment. This feels hyperbolic, but I don’t believe it is. Working on the inside of the AI boom as a researcher and writer, I saw firsthand how the dominant narratives rested largely on aspirations, buzzwords, and whatever everyone else was saying. Yet there’s no question that these technologies are transformative — and that which frees us in some ways constrains us in others.
AI is the example of our time.
Which is why this is an incredibly powerful time for anthropology to show what it can do: capturing the uniquely human textures of our world in all their incredible nuance, messiness, and complexity.
My youngest child recently asked me what an anthropologist does. We study people and culture, I told him. I felt comfortable with the words, something I never experienced when trying to explain the hybrid space I took up as a writer-researcher in marketing departments.
So I’m getting back to basics. I’m asking what the distinctive methods and theories of anthropology can offer now, what it all means, and how to make it count.
The Participant Observer will explore anthropology’s potential in this unique moment. It champions anthropological insights that are accessible, timely, and jargon-free. It asks how the seemingly simple act of listening and paying attention can transform. Because we live in a world with more sensory and cognitive inputs than humans were designed for — and if it doesn’t make sense, it might be time to change perspectives.
Let’s take a pause from business as usual and a step back from common sense. Let’s suspend judgement and linear narratives, put cause/effect and problem/solution narratives on hold, and dwell in the messy reality of human life.
I ask you to rest here with me and see what we find.