<p>No, it is not.</p>
<p>Virtually all American PhD programs in anthropology will require you to take 1-3 years of coursework in the field, regardless of whether or not you have a prior master’s in anthropology. At most of these schools you can earn a non-terminal MA along the way, if you fill out the right paperwork.</p>
<p>The difference is that in a regular terminal MA program, you are not expected to continue on into the PhD program. You can if you want, but it’s not expected. In a PhD program with the option to do a non-terminal MA, you aren’t admitted to the MA with “acceptance” into the PhD conditional on your performance; you are actually admitted into the PhD program itself. You are considered a PhD student from Day 1, with the expectation that after you finish coursework you will take language and qualifying exams, write a proposal, go do fieldwork and then write a dissertation.</p>
<p>The concomitant problem is that good anthropology PhD programs fund their students. Nobody wants to fund a student with zero background and experience in anthropology. You say that you are very confident that this is what you want, but even though you may feel that way, your confidence comes from a place of ignorance. Quite frankly, you don’t know much about the actual field of anthropology because you don’t have much formal coursework in it, and you don’t know anything about doing research as an anthropologist. Some of your marketing research skills will transfer over, but doing formal research as an anthropologist (and using the theories and techniques from that field) is VERY different from corporate market research. In a professor’s eyes, you may take a sophomore-level ethnographic research course and decide you hate it; or you make do a semester of anthropological research with your advisor and decide you hate it. Then they have spent a year of funding on you that they could’ve spent on a better prepared student.</p>
<p>OR maybe you decide that you like it, but because of your lack of preparation they have to spend a lot more time and money educating you on the foundational basics that all of your classmates know. There are certain texts and scholars that anthropologists are expected to know before they begin grad school (I’m in an interdisciplinary department with a lot of anthropologists). It’s a theory-driven field. You may struggle in your courses, or struggle in your research.</p>
<p>Think about it this way: if your company was hiring a software engineer, would they hire someone with only one computer science class? If you were hiring a new market research associate on your team, would you want to hire someone who didn’t understand even the basics of behavioral research?</p>
<p>With that said, there are two things that you need to do:</p>
<p>1) Take some anthropology classes. Most likely you will need to begin at the undergrad level, but there may be some MA programs in anthro designed for people with little to no anthro background who want to transition. At the bare minimum you will likely need 5-7 anthro courses; most undergrad majors have taken 10-12. To see what you should take, you should look through the course catalog of a nearby college. At minimum the 5-7 classes you take should be the minor requirements. (Like I know in my field it would be difficult enough to get admitted with just 5 courses in psychology, but even if you did it would have to be 5 specific courses. You couldn’t just take a bunch of electives; you wouldn’t get in without intro, basic statistics, research methods, etc.)</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>2) Get some anthropological research experience. Your market research MAY transfer/count depending on the nature of it - if it’s very qualitative and is mostly focus groups and interviews, AND you are interested in doing something that is somewhat related to the market research you’ve done. If it’s mostly surveys and quant stuff, anthropologists won’t really care because it will still be like starting from scratch when you do research with them.</p>