“How can you leverage anthropology to make an impact?” At one of Europe’s leading impact investing conferences delegates repeatedly asked us variations of this question, seemingly curious and critical at the same time. 

For several years now the financial industry has been enrolled, more or less voluntarily, in the global quest for sustainability. Sustainable finance is currently a complex, variegated field of practices and discourses which claim to invest in projects that have a positive impact on society and the planet, or at least avoid having a negative one. Impact investors differentiate themselves within this field by arguing that they contribute intentionally to a positive social and environmental impact, while also delivering financial returns. Moreover, they claim that they can proof the impact their investments had through reliable measurements.   as well as proofs of the impact their investments had through reliable measurements. 

As the only anthropologists amongst social and environmental entrepreneurs, sustainable officers from corporations, and people employed in NGOs, foundations, banks, investments funds the staff of foundations, banks, and investment funds, we were asked why anthropologists would we were attend such aning the event. This is not something specific to research on impact investing. Wherever anthropologists do fieldwork, the interlocutors are always inquiring about the purpose of the anthropological endeavor. And it’s not only interlocutors who ask these kinds of questions. With research funding for academic anthropology having always been in a precarious state, anthropologists and anthropology graduates have been summoned to prove their usefulness ever since the institutionalization of the discipline. Either, initially, by training colonial government officials or consulting colonial governments, or, more recently, consulting or working for public administrations, development agencies, NGOs, the military, and business corporations. 

We tried our best to answer how we can make an impact and recycled a lot of common places about anthropology’s unique way of looking at complex situations arising from interactions between groups and individuals with different ways of thinking. Although the number of anthropologists doing business consulting grounded in user experience (UX) research has been on the rise, it is still the case that in general what anthropologists do and how they can help businesses remains unknown, or unwanted. 

Much of this has to do with the historically rooted reluctance of anthropologists to venture beyond the ivory tower. The question about how anthropology can be useful has always been intertwined with the moral dilemma of getting involved or not, involved in the first place. A dilemma which puts anthropologists in an ambivalent position, with no clear resolution in sight, straddling between academia and the world outside depending on employment opportunities and the scope of the research they are conducting.

Anthropological encounters outside academia

From its beginnings, the search for anthropology’s applied relevance has produced a rift between those willing to produce and apply anthropological knowledge and those who avoided this ‘vulgarization’ of knowledge and actively loathed the former. This occurred mainly because in the initial stages of articulating an usefulness for anthropology beyond academia, anthropology was marketed by Malinowski, one of its founding fathers, as a science that can be put in the service of the colonial administration (Stocking 1992). But the tension between the two sides intensified with the 1980s boom in anthropologists’ employment in development agencies and projects aimed at what was then called “The Third World”, which most times led to, largely unintended, negative impacts. 

It was Arturo Escobar (1991) who delivered at that time one of the harshest critiques to anthropologists working in development. He argued that their work legitimizes the global spread of an “ethnocentric, patriarchal and ecocidal” ideology and, as Marxists anthropologists insist in pointing out (Ferguson 1997), capitalist development. 

In parallel, but also often overlapping, a tradition of public anthropology emerged in connection to advocacy. Here the accent was put on enabling those in vulnerable and marginal positions to voice their predicaments in the public sphere. Franz Boas’ academic and public criticism of racism stands as an early, if not the first, model for the public anthropologists (Beck and Maida 2015). As one would imagine, Unlike applied anthropology, academic anthropologists were more inclined to engage in this kind of useful anthropology, than working for the colonial administration, development agencies, or corporations. 

Whereas many of those anthropologists who went to work in development were pushed in this direction by a growing absence of employment opportunities in academia, they were also motivated to bring anthropology’s public mission into thea changing development institutional context of development agencies that showed signs of a willingness to embrace cultural and environmental complexities. 

However, although he acknowledges the intention of development anthropologists to have a positive impact, Escobar argued that they are constrained to think and act according to the development goals of the institutions which employ them. Critiques of the development projects in which anthropologists were involved were largely forgone. As part of their self-marketing effort, anthropologists, preferred to in order to market themselves, preferring to emphasize the way in which their participation led to successful implementation rather than showing the projects’ shortcomings. When some efforts to make a change were successful, it was successful but mainly because whey they perpetuated mainstream development categories and their inherent assumptions. And, when some sort of critique was formulated by anthropologists directly working in the the development projects, it was largely ignored (Gow 1993).   

Impact investing is not the same as the development world of the 1980s, although many of the institutions involved in both fields overlap. At the Italian impact conference events held at the automobile museum and in a refurbished 19th century trains repair workshop, nobody shied away from talking about polycrisis, criticizing financial short-termism, greenwashing, the rise of the right-wing, urging for systematic change, or dropping other concepts from the left-liberal repertoire. Between panels, video art was shown, like the recorded performance of the artist of Romani origins Selma Selman repeatedly screaming “You have no idea” as she walks from Black Lives Matter plaza to the White House during election day in 2020. And, the impact champion award was given to Lama Amr, the executive director of Build Palestine, an organization with the “mission to empower Palestinian changemakers and mobilize a global community for impact.” 

Many of the ethnocentric, patriarchal, and ecocide explicit assumptions held by development practices in the past seem to have melted into thin air. Indigenous knowledge, women, and the environment are not only taken into consideration, but prioritized in impact investing projects. It is as if Escobar’s (1997) recommendations have been heard. 

In some sense, the ideological and political economic context of today’s impact investing resembles the situation of the development field in the 1980s. Impact investing seems to provides anthropologists with the hope that they can help an organization whose values align with what the discipline deems ethically important, while avoiding the inevitable postgraduate unemployment condition. Yet, whereas the old development paradigm replaced local knowledge, enforced gender hierarchies, and threatened fragile ecologies, the new development paradigm amended by sustainability aims to transform these in productive assets (Brightman and Lewis 2017). Impact investing might not be guided anymore by the high modernist ideology (Scott 1998, cf Brightman and Lewis 2017) that defined development up to the 1990s, yet impact investing is still circumscribed to a capitalist logic. It is still capitalist development.  

The capitalist conundrum

Since the critique of development has always been also a critique of capitalism, anthropologists working in and with capitalist corporations face similar predicaments development anthropologists did, and, to a great extent, still do. In a 2006 research done for the purpose of advising the American Anthropological Association on how it can help anthropologists working outside academia a respondent said: 

“The last time I attended an American Anthropological Association meeting (in San Francisco about 1999/2000), I had an appalling experience with other anthropologists there who were openly critical and hostile to me about where I worked (a large corporation). One person turned her back on me and walked away. I was told that I had sold out. This attitude is pervasive. This was a repeated encounter experience for me at the meeting, and I got tired of being insulted.” (Brondo and Bennett 2012)

Things hardly changed in the span of more than two decades. Few days before the impact investing conference in Italy, at the joint American and Canadian Anthropological Association annual meeting, Stefan visited the Careers Expo of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology. This is the largest applied anthropology association in the world. But the pavilion, in the basement of the Toronto Convention Center, was relatively empty compared to the neighboring exhibition of publishing houses. Approaching the stands of anthropologists and organizations willing to share their knowledge on anthropologists’ career paths outside academia , many introduced themselves with apologetic disclaimers about their work outside academia. After introducing herself, one anthropologist working for an US food corporation asked Stefan: “you must think I work for the Devil, right?”

Trained to be critical thinkers, it’s impossible to not to feel the visceral effects of considering the use of anthropology for development (Li 2014), albeit development with the added dimension of sustainability and couched in the new impact investing discourse. Ultimately, to leverage anthropology to make an impact, in the sense in which impact investors understand it, one must work directly or indirectly for capitalist entities whose willingness to give away returns in favor of impact remains uncertain. 

Look closer at the question:  “How can you leverage anthropology to make an impact?” 

The term ‘leverage’ connotes the overarching presence of the financial industry in the impact investing field, where impact itself is conditioned by the financial returns it can generate. All of our colleagues in the IMPACT HAU project have shown that no matter where or to what purpose, impact oriented finance tends to fail on its promises (Maso, Tripathy, and Brightman 2022):. Ffrom delocalized blockchain- traded carbon credits, social impact bonds in Columbia, or agricultural social enterprises in Ghana, to development impact bonds in indigenous cooperatives in Peru, bonds underlined by carbon credits issued by a nature conservation NGO in Kenya, and pandemic relief funds in Senegal;. fFrom renewable energy projects in Portugal financed by a Chinese state owned company through a corporate bond traded in London, to the offices of professional financial associations working on the establishment of unified frameworks of defining climate bonds or sustainability Key Performance Indicators. Behind the intention of doing good seems to always lie hidden the extractive drive of financialized capitalism. 

The moral dilemma of getting involved or not remains. Should we stand aside, criticizing while waiting or indirectly creating the favorable conjecture for world revolution, or should we change the system from within, through incremental improvements? Or, as Ben points out, is it even possible to stand aside?

Few anthropologists nowadays would consider standing aside. Many anthropologists do engage in some form of public anthropology by collaborating with human rights organizations, labor unions, or by joining social movements, participating in their organization, and championing their list of demands. The most know recent case of the latter kind of public anthropology is probably David Graeber’s involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement. But, the impact of this kind of engagement is of course hard to asses. Did it really generate positive change or did it only articulate a moral critique that has now been incorporated by the financial industry through claims of morally orientated investment, such as impact investing and other forms of sustainable finance?

Capitalism has always been able to re-work its critique into value, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (2005) showed. The quest for authenticity and autonomy of the 1968ers have become the values which disciplines labor under the current iteration of capitalism. The uniformizing, standardized, authoritarian, Eurocentric values of the welfare state/ Keynesian capitalism have been replaced by the diversified, situated, libertarian, post-colonial values of the flexible financial global capitalism. 

Without overstating their relevance, business anthropologists might have a role in transforming the critique addressed by public and academic anthropologists into capitalist values. Take for instance the business consulting ReD Associates. It describes itself as “a strategy consultancy rooted in the humanities and social sciences” which “[s]ince 2005[…] has worked with global companies and foundations, C-suites and boards, advising them on growth strategy and organisational change.” In a recent post on their LinkedIn page they show how social theory can provide business insights. They chose Karl Marx to show how his notion of alienation can improve productivity: “How to prevent employees from feeling demotivated at work?”, the inevitable answer is to “Let people see the fruit of their labor.” “Overcoming alienation”, they say, “is achieved by involving employees throughout the entire process that they are part of, letting them see how their work is part of a collective effort to create something that has a real impact on the world.[…] By making work more meaningful and engaging, creativity and initiative is boosted, and employees are more likely to thrive in their jobs.” 

At the same time anthropologists critical of capitalism and its institutions have recurrently been reprimanded for the reification of the system. In an effort to address this, anthropologists have moved towards researching institutions of power: government organizations, development agencies, or financial institutions, and their entanglements. However, as several have pointed out, these anthropologists have often deferred critique, sometimes indefinitely, either because of an epistemic conviction in collaboration or in order to gain research access (Bear 2020; Gilbert and Sklair 2018; Souleles 2021). 

But whether a study of these institutions can be done while maintaining a critical approach and still leave open a space for discussion is not necessarily clear. David Mosse’s (2006) critique of a development project in western India in which he was involved resulted in his colleagues trying to stop the publication of his research. While this might be an extreme case, it is not unheard of such kind of critiques being met with defensive reactions. As Tania Li (2014) argues, “fieldwork in service of critique often creates tense relations, because critique may be interpreted as hostility or attempt at demolition.”

Can anything be done?

Ben has argued that critical accounts of impact investing and capitalism in general are out of touch with the realities of the people they purportedly try to emancipate. Not because anthropologists are not there, in the field, but because academic outputs are the priority, instead of “producing useful and actionable insights” (Eyre 2022). Ben has argued that impact investing is a field that provides the opportunity to anthropologists to reconsider their engagement with these kinds of institutions, while also remaining critical of their approach. One entry point he suggests is through the measuring dimension embedded into this type of investments. Qualitative ethnographic data can be complementary to big data, offering insights into how to read patterns in context and transform the latter into actions. Coincidently or not this is also something argued by John Curran (Curran 2013), a business anthropologists who teaches a course entitled “Leveraging Organizational Culture for Impact” for EPIC, the main organization that promotes the use of ethnographic practices in businesses (see also Tett 2021). 

Ben’s suggestion would not preclude critique, but it would defer in time. Not to snatch the ethnographic goods from research subjects which would otherwise refrain from engagement with anthropologists. Instead, this deferral relates to taking part in a project without one being in the service of critique, but in the service of those who are targeted by these projects. Nonetheless, how to do this within the institutional constraints of capitalist corporations is a challenge that cannot be addressed using a pre-established blueprint. Maybe one of anthropology’s strengths is to provide tools to navigate the various epistemological and politico-ethical relations emerging in these kind of situations, much like one is required to do whenever fieldwork research is being conducted, or when the outputs of such research becomes public and contested (Fassin 2017). 

What is more certain is that with the number of anthropology graduates increasing, while funding seems to be more scarce than ever, competition over academic jobs is fierce. Moreover, anthropology programs are being removed from the curriculum and precarious working contracts and unemployment have become the norm in academia. Being a public anthropologist engaged in social movements might be an option reserved for those who benefit from the comfort of a secure academic job or the safety net of a middle or upper class family. Many of us though, in an effort to make ends meet, might end up working for the Devil or the Leviathan. In the process we might learn something or even make some improvements towards a more sustainable world. We might equally fail.  

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