Going Public: Responsibilities and Strategies in the Aftermath of Ethnography

This paper examines professional responsibilities following the fieldwork and writing stages of anthropological work. After reassessing Boas’s public anthropological stance with respect to Native and African Americans, it identifies an alternative history that includes Morgan, Cushing, Wilson, Goldschmidt, and recent practitioners of advocacy anthropology. It then discusses the author’s experiences with public audiences and media following publication of an ethnography of political change in a multiracial Queens, New York, neighborhood. It concludes with an overview of anthropological approaches to engaging “society as a whole.”