Anthropologists have a key role in contributing to a better understanding about local forms of ownership and tenure, and people’s relationships with places. This can be communicated in a variety of ways, many of which could be described as ‘participatory action research’ (PAR), which involves members of the community in a collaborative research process that enables them to achieve their own aims: ‘Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a research strategy whereby the community under study defines the problem, analyzes it, and solves it. The people own the information and may contract the services of academic researchers to assist in this process’ (Szala-Meneok and Lohfeld 2005: 52).
Such collaboration between local communities and anthropologists is becoming more common, and anthropological training increasingly provides access to the methods entailed. For example, medical anthropologist Patricia Hammer runs an ethnographic methods training centre in the Peruvian Andes, which emphasizes PAR methodologies, and enables students ‘to engage in ongoing investigations in local agricultural communities’ in relation to local issues around ‘health, ecology,
For example, along with many anthropological colleagues in Australia, I have been involved in the compilation of evidence for land claims. The methods used in this context also have wider utility, as a way of recording important cultural knowledge. I have therefore spent much of my time with Aboriginal people in north Queensland doing ‘cultural mapping’,5 which involves travelling with the elders around their
‘country’, much of which lies outside the reserve area held by the community, in neighbouring national park areas and cattle stations. Cultural mapping entails recording, in a variety of media, all of the information about each group’s sacred sites and important historic places, and their traditional knowledge about the land and its resources. This collaboration has resulted in a detailed collection of cultural information, which is now archived in the community, and provides a key teaching resource for younger generations, as well as a body of evidence for indigenous claims to the land. These are ongoing, but in the meantime the community has been able to negotiate a joint management agreement with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, and to substantiate their ownership claims sufficiently to persuade local graziers to co-sign Indigenous Land Use Agreements.
However, a fully successful land claim is a faint hope, at best, for most indigenous groups, and many have been displaced. Along with land appropriations, political conflicts, environmental degradation and other pressures have created many refugees and economic migrants, and such groups often need support, most particularly when they are forced to relocate to areas geographically and culturally distant from their own. There is often a useful role for anthropologists in providing advocacy and cultural translation for these communities. For example, Lance Rasbridge worked with Cambodian refugees in Dallas, as a ‘refugee outreach anthropologist’ for a health organization:
My search for an applied position was in a large part a response to the profoundly emotional experience of conducting research with refugees . . . the situation of refugees demands involvement . . . I coordinated both the medical team and the refugee clients and their sponsors and caseworkers, occasionally protecting one from the other and often mediating between them. My role as a coordinator frequently centers on compromise: sensitizing the agencies, medical providers, and refugees to each others expectations and limitations . . . A common scenario involves sensitizing the medical community to non-Western medical beliefs and practices. (Rasbridge 1998: 28–9)
Jeffery MacDonald notes that there are approximately 20 million war refugees living in the United States. He worked with Iu-Mien people from Laos, who had fled to Oregon:
Like many refugee researchers, I soon became an applied anthropologist, first providing services for the Iu-Mien. Later, I took a position in a refugee resettlement social service agency, where I began to work with other Southeast Asian ethnic communities, providing direct client services and training, doing needs assessment research, and managing and designing culturally specific programs for Southeast Asian refugees . . . As my reputation has grown in the Southeast Asian community as an expert sympathetic to community needs . . . I have had to take on the roles of advocate for individuals and of community political activist. (Macdonald 2003: 309)
As these examples show, advocacy can take a variety of forms. At times it becomes very formal, for instance when anthropologists act as ‘expert witnesses’ in the legal arena. This happens regularly in land claims, where they conduct research, compile evidence, and present this to the land claim court or tribunal. It is also becoming a more frequent role in relation to refugee communities. Thus Stephanie Schwander- Sievers, who had conducted lengthy ethnographic research in Albania and Kosovo, found herself much in demand as a cultural translator and expert witness in legal cases involving asylum seekers – people seeking political refuge – from these areas:
In both types of cases, I was asked to explain various issues involving ‘Albanian culture’, either in a written report or, on some occasions, as an expert witness in court during trial . . . I was usually asked to comment on the risks involved if an asylum seeker were to be returned to his or her home country, and how socio-cultural issues at home would affect that risk . . . Regarding criminal cases I was often approached by police detectives during the criminal investigation process . . . I was usually asked to explain . . . particular aspects of Albanian culture and how these would give cultural sense to a violent deed and help explain its motives . . . In legal procedures and in court, particularly in asylum cases, individuals from different cultures and legal background come into contact. Here the anthropologist both participates in, and observes, relations of power. (Schwander-Sievers 2006: 209–17)