Finding Anthropology in Unexpected Places
How anthropological thinking appears naturally in medicine, journalism, and the arts.
Anthropology as a method for creating knowledge occurs beyond the walls of university departments and academic journals. It appears in the detailed case notes of neurologists; in investigative journalism; and in documentary filmmaking. This is accidental anthropology – instances of anthropological practice emerging organically in unexpected places, enhancing understanding across diverse fields of human endeavour.
The essential features of anthropology – deep observation, sustained engagement with people's lived experiences, and attention to the contexts that shape human life – turn up in surprising places. When Oliver Sacks documented his patients’ experiences of neurological conditions, he wasn't just practicing medicine; he was producing rich anthropological accounts that illuminated how people navigate radical alterations to their perception and cognition. His work demonstrates how anthropological methods can emerge organically when practitioners commit to understanding human experience in all its complexity.
This newsletter explores these instances of accidental anthropology, examining where and how anthropological approaches appear outside traditional academic discourse. By identifying anthropology's methods and insights in non-academic work, we can better understand both the versatility of anthropological approaches and their vital contribution to human understanding.
What makes and approach anthropological?
At its core, anthropology is distinguished by its commitment to understanding human experience through direct engagement and careful observation. While academic anthropology typically involves extended periods of fieldwork, the anthropological approach can emerge anywhere people take time to deeply understand how others experience and make meaning of their world.
Understanding others in this way requires more than just watching or interviewing. It demands what anthropologists call participant observation – a way of learning that comes from being present in people's lives, sharing their experiences, and paying attention to the details that shape their reality.1 When done purposefully in academia, this involves fieldnotes, systematic observation, and theoretical analysis. But these same practices appear naturally when people commit to understanding others' experiences from the inside out.
Consider a journalist who spends time embedded in a community to understand a story, or a doctor who takes time to understand how illness affects every aspect of their patient's life. These practitioners might not use anthropological terminology, but their approach – careful observation combined with direct participation in people's lives – mirrors anthropological methods. They're not just collecting information; they're learning through engagement, allowing their understanding to emerge from real relationships and shared experiences.2
Participant observation is absolutely not a technique of data collection. Quite to the contrary, it is enshrined in an ontological commitment that renders the very idea of data collection unthinkable. This commitment, by no means confined to anthropology, lies in the recognition that we owe our very being to the world we seek to know.
(Tim Ingold, 20053)
Each week, this newsletter will examine instances of accidental anthropology across different domains – medicine, journalism, literature, film, and beyond. We'll analyse how these practitioners, while pursuing their own objectives, employ anthropological approaches that deepen our understanding of human experience.
The analysis will focus on specific works and projects, examining how they demonstrate anthropological methods and insights. Rather than merely identifying surface similarities, we'll explore how these examples push us to think differently about both anthropology and the fields in which they appear. From Oliver Sacks's detailed case studies of neurological patients to Joan Didion's deep explorations of American cultural life, we'll see how anthropological approaches enhance understanding across disciplines.
These examples demonstrate the enduring value of anthropological approaches, while suggesting new possibilities for how we might understand and document human life. Through exploring instances of accidental anthropology, we discover something important about both anthropology and human understanding. While anthropology emerged as an academic discipline with its own theories and methods, its core approaches – deep observation, sustained engagement, and attention to lived experience – appear whenever people truly commit to understanding human life. These unofficial anthropologists remind us that the tools of anthropology are available to anyone wanting to make sense of human experience.
Join me each week as we uncover these hidden instances of anthropological thinking and practice. Whether you're an anthropologist interested in seeing interdisciplinary applications of established approaches in unexpected places, or simply curious about different ways of understanding human experience, Accidental Anthropology offers fresh perspectives on how we observe, document, and make sense of human life.
1 Drawing from anthropologist Tim Ingold's (2024) discussion of studying with people in American Ethnologist.
