BANC 112 Solved Guess Paper 2026: Anthropology in Practice for IGNOU B.Sc. (Honours) Anthropology (BSCANH)

Challenges and dilemmas in practicing anthropology

Question: Analyse the challenges and dilemmas faced by practising anthropologists in doing anthropology.

"Practicing anthropologists cannot stand outside and critique the situation but they have to be in the situation and bring about the desired change."

The specific nature of practicing anthropology, being defined by clients and embedded within structures, brings distinctive challenges and ethical dilemmas.

Key challenges

1. Source of problems: unlike self-driven academics, practitioners work on problems largely defined by the needs of the client.
2. Limited critique: they cannot critique the entire structure but must provide solutions within the given structure to bring about change.
3. Simplification: they must simplify and shorten their description for policymakers who want quick solutions.
4. Representation: it is difficult to define the anthropological nature of their work each time, as the word "anthropology" may not appear in their job profiles.
5. Heterogeneous environment: the world outside academia is very diverse, with anthropologists occupying a wide range of positions and roles.
6. Difficulty in specialising: projects assigned by agencies define the work, so practitioners switch specialisation often.
7. Working in teams: management decides the team, which brings professionals from diverse backgrounds whose views must be accommodated.
8. Soft-science status: the craft is treated as a "soft science" and may not get the funding it needs, with few anthropologists on bodies like the IPCC.

Conclusion: Practitioners face client-defined problems, restricted critique, the burden of self-representation, shifting roles, team accommodation and limited funding, all under result-oriented accountability.

Short notes: action anthropology and forensic anthropology

Question: Write short notes on (a) Action Anthropology and (b) Forensic Anthropology.

(a) Action Anthropology

Action anthropology owes its origin to the Fox Project (1948-59), conducted by Sol Tax and his students at the University of Chicago among the Meskwaki ("Fox") tribe.

1. It began by involving the "native" population in finding solutions to their own problems, with emphasis on what the community wants.
2. Its method rests on trial and error, since the community is left to make its own decisions.
3. The action anthropologist uses research and analytical skills to explain the sources of problems and share possible consequences with the community.
4. The anthropologist facilitates community change and development rather than directing it (Rubinstein 2018:2).
5. It was one of the first steps towards anthropology in practice, moving from assigned intervention towards desired intervention.

(b) Forensic Anthropology

"The applied field of physical anthropology which focuses on the identification of skeletal remains for the purpose of legal or forensic issues."

Forensic scientists use physical anthropology techniques to estimate age, sex, stature and ethnic group from long bones and the skull for medico-legal purposes.

1. Charles Snow (1973) defined it as applying the physical anthropologist's specialised knowledge of human variation to medico-legal jurisprudence.
2. Thomas Stewart (1979) defined it as the field of physical anthropology that identifies skeletonised remains for forensic purposes.
3. Douglas H. Ubelaker (1996) explained it as applied physical anthropology used in the legal and court process.
4. Skeletal remains are examined in three situations: unidentified remains in criminal cases, mass-disaster identification, and mass graves from war or genocide.
5. Its function is to help establish the cause of death and support law-enforcement agencies in medico-legal cases.

Anthropology in advocacy and policy research

Question: Discuss the role of anthropology in advocacy and policy research.

"All anthropologists are in some ways acting as advocates through documenting and communicating their informants' perspectives to others."

"Advocacy" comes from the Latin advocare, meaning "to call out for support". Policy, in Merriam-Webster's sense, is a definite course or method of action selected to guide present and future decisions.

Anthropology and advocacy

1. Layton (1996:40) holds that advocacy grows naturally out of anthropological practice and is integral to representing other people's views.
2. Hastrup and Elsass (1990:307) point to an inherent dilemma: anthropology is concerned with context, while advocacy means choosing among interests within that context.

Anthropology and policy research

1. Bronislaw Malinowski argued for anthropologists as policy advisers to colonial administrators, while Evans-Pritchard urged them to keep their distance from administration.
2. In India, the English anthropologist Verrier Elwin was appointed Adviser on Tribal Affairs in 1953 for the North East Frontier Area.
3. The state commissions anthropological expertise for recommendations on "scheduled" status, which decides eligibility for constitutional provisions.

Features of policy research (Cochrane 1980)

1. Work is done over a short or restricted duration rather than long, time-intensive fieldwork.
2. The aim is adoption of a report by policymakers, not publication for colleagues.
3. Policy studies look ahead and must assess future events.
4. The researcher often takes a position and makes friends and enemies; the sponsor controls what is published, and studies must be impact-oriented and quantifiable.

Conclusion: Anthropology serves advocacy by carrying community voices and serves policy by advising the state, though it must balance contextual understanding against the choice of interests.

Medical anthropology and theories of health and illness

Question: Define medical anthropology. Discuss the theories of health and illness.

"Medical anthropologists study the impact of culture on health and the influence of customs and rituals on the development of personal care."

Its scope covers people's beliefs about health, the evolution of healthcare across cultures, theories and causes of disease, healthcare systems, medical pluralism and the influence of socio-economic and political factors (Hassan 2012).

Theories of health

1. The IGNOU unit sets out ten perspectives: Functionalist, Ecological, Bio-cultural, Critical, Cultural Interpretationist, Biomedical, Behavioural, Communication, Cognitive and Self-regulation.
2. The Functionalist perspective treats medical and healthcare institutions as social institutions that maintain social control.
3. The Ecological perspective reads health and disease within the framework of human ecology and adaptation.
4. The Bio-cultural approach joins biological and social ideas, seeing health as the ability to adapt to the environment.
5. The Critical perspective (CMA) holds that differences in power and wealth decide health status and access to care.

Theories of illness

1. Naturalistic causation explains illness as a physiological outcome, in five types: infection, stress, organic deterioration, accident and overt human aggression.
2. Ayurveda, the Indian system of medicine, rests on the belief in natural causation of illness.
3. Supernatural causation traces illness to fate, spirit aggression, ominous sensations, contagion, mystical retribution or witchcraft.
4. Emotionalistic causation links illness to emotional experiences.

Conclusion: Medical anthropology studies how culture and health shape each other, reading illness through naturalistic, supernatural and emotionalistic theories and health through ten complementary perspectives.

Demographic anthropology and demographic processes

Question: Describe the rise and development of Demographic Anthropology and explain the demographic processes.

"The scientific study of the size, composition, and distribution of human populations and their changes resulting from fertility, mortality, and migration."

"Demography" joins the Greek demo (people) and graphy (to write) and was coined in 1855 by Achille Guillard. Demographic anthropology uses anthropological theory and methods to understand demographic phenomena (Bernardi 2007).

Rise and development

1. In the late 19th century anthropologists tried population surveys; Radcliffe-Brown's (1922) work on the Andaman Islands is one example.
2. By the 1930s, British anthropologists Meyer Fortes and Raymond Firth took up population issues while studying kinship.
3. The two fields met in the 1950s, when anthropologists joined the IUSSP Committee on Population Problems in Non-industrial Societies.
4. The Princeton European Fertility Project (1963) found that cultural settings shaped fertility decline independently of socio-economic conditions.
5. John Caldwell launched micro-level demography, urging demographers to drop the "armchair approach" and go to the field.

Demographic processes

1. The three basic processes are fertility, mortality and migration (Dumond 1965:302).
2. Fertility is the actual production of children, shaped by social, cultural, economic and psychological factors.
3. Mortality refers to deaths in a population; migration is the movement of people across space.
4. Kingsley Davis and Judith Blake (1956) gave a full framework of intermediate variables that influence human fertility.

Conclusion: Born from the meeting of demography and anthropology, demographic anthropology studies population size and change through fertility, mortality and migration while tying them to social and cultural settings.