Anthropology and anthropologists in the Indian New Deal

The use of anthropological techniques to analyze problems in American society was a product of the late 1920s and the New Deal era. A major stimulus to the development of this “applied anthropology” was a series of projects initiated by John Collier in the Bureau of Indian Affairs beginning in 1935. Four of these experiments, the Applied Anthropology Unit, the Soil Conservation Service experiment on the Navajo reservation, the Technical Cooperation-Bureau of Indian Affairs soil conservation work on other Indian reservations, and the Indian Education, Personality, and Administration Research Project, are the subject of this article.