Public Interest Anthropology at Penn

Paula L.W. Sabloff sees Public Interest Anthropology as the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, perspectives and ways of knowing to the general public.

The goal of PIA "is to educate the public sphere in order to modify some aspect of our culture. It is then the responsibility of the public to bring social laws and practices into line with the modified culture."

PIA complements applied/practitioner anthropology, which directly influences policy-makers to modify group policies (hopefully making them more humane). PIA also complements academic anthropology, whose major goal is to develop and teach knowledge about Culture/cultures, by enabling scholars to test abstract concepts and hypotheses on new situations. Her interest in PIA is combining it with academic and applied/practitioner approaches.

Her current project, "the culture of democracy in Mongolia," combines all three approaches. The academic component of the research tests the theories of the French anthropologist Dan Sperber and American sociologist Edward Laumann. It also compares different methodologies within cognitive anthropology. The PIA component occurs in Mongolia and the U.S.: The very act of asking Mongolians for their definition of democracy (and additional surveys on the topic) has stimulated further family discussions (sometimes very heated!) on the topic, thus raising to the conscious level Mongolians' concerns for building their incipient democratic system. In the U.S., the museum exhibition based on the research, "Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan," is stimulating public awareness of

(a) what democracy means in another country and
(b) the value of maintaining democracy here in the U.S.

The applied component was initiated by distributing a preliminary report of the research to policy-makers in Mongolia: to both political parties, international NGOs (e.g., World Bank, Asia Society, USAID) and national NGOs (e.g., Women for Social Progress).