Anthropologists have acted as experts and educators on the nature and life ways of people worldwide, working to understand the human condition in broad comparative perspectives. As a discipline, anthropology has been advocate - and even defender - of cultural integrity, authenticity, and autonomy of societies across the globe. Public anthropology today carries out the discipline's original purpose, grounding theories in lived experience and placing empirical knowledge in deeper historical and comparative frameworks. This, then, is a vitally important kind of anthropology with the goal of improving the modern human condition by actively engaging with people to make changes through research, education, and political action.