While most people probably associate the study of social policy with disciplines such as economics, politics and sociology, it is in fact an area with which anthropology has been involved, if not always happily, for almost a hundred years. Cambridge University in 1906 used the term ‘practical anthropology’ in describing a programme it ran for training colonial administrators and, in 1929, Bronislaw Malinowski (1929: 36) called for a ‘practical anthropology’ which would be ‘an anthropology of the changing Native’ and ‘would obviously be of the highest importance to the practical man in the colonies.’ While, according to Ferguson (1996: 156), Malinowski used this claim mainly as a means of raising research funding, in general, anthropologists maintained what can only be described as an uneasy cooperation with colonial authorities in many parts of the world.

Anthropology and policy: a long yet uneasy relationship

Although the effect on policy of the work of the anthropologists varied greatly from region to region (see the papers in Asad 1973), most subsequent commentators, such as Said (1978) and Foucault (1972), have not perceived the role of anthropologists in the colonial context favourably. Ben-Ari (1999: 387) summarises succinctly this view of the relationship when he writes that: ‘Even if there was no direct correspondence between anthropological theories and systems of colonial government, anthropology did, it could be argued, participate in producing the assumptions upon which colonialism was based’.