PanThe Baffler... this being a book geared towards businesspeople, Anthro-vision jettisons ethnography and instead adopts the trappings of the business book genre ... It’s telling that the most concrete result Tett relays is not even attributable to corporate anthropology per se, as is the fact that every other example of creating a better world through anthropology she provides is a counterfactual, not something that actually happened ... What Tett’s certainty about the value of anthro-vision misses is the possibility that people don’t want to see alternate perspectives, or that they just don’t care, not that they don’t have the tools to see them. This also seems true of the climate crisis, in which the problem is less an inability to foresee and more of an inability, or unwillingness, to act ... Is it possible for a corporate anthropologist to speak “truth to power” without getting co-opted by it? Tett glances by this question in the postscript, the only time she directly addresses other anthropologists. She acknowledges that the idea of working for businesses might leave a sour taste in the mouths of many...But she has no answer to their ethical concerns, as she can only imagine the anthropologist’s fate as one caught between academic irrelevance and real-world impact, no matter how minimal or detrimental ... Perhaps the idea of the corporate anthropologist lures so many because it straddles perceived opposites: wild/civilized, academia/business, impractical/practical. But its longevity is evidence of anthropology’s potency as a marketing tool more than a measure of business’s use to the humanities and social sciences—which is as illusory as Suchman’s green button.
