barefoot anthropology

is an approach to anthropology focusing on the local, the specific, and most importantly, on human suffering... themes which have become obscured with the rise of abstract theorizing about borderless cultural and financial flows.

Scheper-Hughes calls for a 'barefoot anthropology,' which eschews the view of an 'imagined postmodern, borderless world' (1995:417). In Scheper-Hughes's account, a focus on the transnational, the borderless nature of cultural and financial flows, and postmodernist concerns with the diffuse and complex nature of power has distracted anthropologist from the local and specific, and the evidence of profound suffering. As an alternative, Scheper-Hughes calls for a new cadre of 'barefoot anthropologist' [who] must become alarmist and shock troopers the producers of politically complicated and morally demanding texts and images capable of sinking through the layers of acceptance, complicity, and bad faith that allow the suffering and the deaths to continue. . . (1995:417).

barefoot anthropology, n.All

barefoot anthropology