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Agar’s Ripping and Running (1973) argued that, through ethnography, the unstated assumptions governing the drug-procuring behaviour of male heroin addicts could be made explicit and more understandable to treatment counsellors and policymakers trying to help the men shake their habits. His occupational ethnography of long-haul trucking represents another high point in a career devoted to practical anthropology Agar’s study of independent truckers demystified a mythologised occupation, transmitting the insider’s view of how trucking works.

In 1952 he moved to Columbia’s graduate department of anthropology, where he stayed until his retirement in 1979, after which he continued at the university in the Joint Program in Applied Anthropology at Teachers College. Arensberg Award of the Society for the Anthropology of Work. In 1945–6 he served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and in 1980 he was president of the American Anthropological Association. Arensberg is justly remembered as an inspirational leader in the growth of anthropological method, theory, and teaching, whose erudition and imagination helped make both the USA and Western Europe acceptable locales for ethnographic research, thus helping to liberate anthropologists from the constraints of a past imperialist science.

In 1976. This book introduced the term ‘the new applied anthropology’, which is still widely used in the literature; it also launched the course of over twenty years of exploration in the world of applied anthropology, particularly with social policy implications of advocacy at the grassroots level. His focus is in the area of qualitative research methodologies, especially life history and intensive participant observation, which he has employed over the years on a variety of applied projects, particularly in the area of medical anthropology.