Whither Anthropology?

Abstract In recent decades, anthropology has been characterized by an experiential turn that connects scholarship increasingly with practical application, on the one hand, and critical reflexivity, on the other. This article throws these trends into historical relief by synoptically considering past emphases in anthropology from the 1830s through the present. These prior developments contextualize recent trends vis-à-vis long-term patterns and permutations in the history of anthropology. In significant respects, current trends reprise in newly critical and reflexive ways aspects of anthropology that were prominent when it was first becoming a scholarly discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. Anthropology's present experiential turn is especially important as our field faces an increasingly uncertain future into the mid-twenty-first century, including dire challenges of funding for new anthropological research and teaching positions, and the risks of being deprofessionalized.