Anthropology and Policy-Preparedness

This paper considers the relationship between anthropology and public policy by looking at differences between national-level discourses about indigenous relationships to land and their informing of public policy and the view that one gets of indigenous relations to land as an anthropologist, gathered from familiarity with particular situations and people. In view of the clear disparities, how may anthropology contribute to public policy? Anthropology's principal posture should remain a contributory one, rather than one of policy-readiness, based on the discipline's particular combination of ethnographic immersion and critical perspective.