Prepare for the Iceman Cometh: The Employment Issue in Anthropology

This review of anthropology's current employment crisis explores the problems perpetuated by the popular view of the discipline as a catch-all category for the quaint, the exotic and the bizarre. Further, the continuing schism between academic purists and applied "non-academics" has only exacerbated the "survival of the fittest" environment dominated by the force of fang, claw, and connection. To reverse the trend toward a group identity as an increasingly atomistic, self-serving and insentitive discipline, remedies must be proposed and experimented with on many levels. The paper proposes some avenues for experimentation inside and outside of academia, at the group and the individual level.