The Inventions of Practice

The integration of applied and practicing anthropology into the professional mainstream has never been as apparent as in recent years. As this integration has proceeded, little attention has been paid to the variety of interpretations offered to describe current modes of anthropological practice. The authors suggest that the idea of practice is still in the process of being invented and devote their attention to discussing differences in some of the major ways in which applied and practicing anthropology has recently been represented. The article focuses on three components of practicing anthropology, beginning with a discussion of the institutionalization of practice in the last decade. The authors then examine the extent to which recent reports on the employment of practicing anthropologists might help us identify different models of practice. The article concludes with a discussion of a variety of issues related to practice, each of which has yielded different models and interpretations.