Overview and Learning Goals

Overview

Anthropology explores the astonishing diversity and complexity of human life and culture in the contemporary moment and in historical and prehistorical times. A foundational part of a liberal arts education, anthropology challenges students to think critically about the assumptions we make about the world and the power hierarchies that shape our everyday lives. Anthropology examines how social, economic, environmental, and political relationships are reproduced and transformed in the present and across much longer timeframes (millennia as well as decades).

Through the subdisciplines of cultural anthropology and archaeology, students develop holistic and empirically based knowledge of local cultural practices and processes of change in regions including Africa, the Arctic and North Atlantic, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Students deepen their understanding of relationships of power and inequality (including gender, ethnicity, race, class, sexuality, age, etc.). Students consider the particularities of local everyday practices and the global circulation of people, ideas, and commodities. Throughout the curriculum, students are exposed to the discipline’s analytical concepts and tools, theoretical perspectives, and field-based qualitative and quantitative research.

Anthropology promotes intellectual curiosity, creative and interdisciplinary thinking, empirical and ethical scholarship, and respect for our common humanity. Our students develop skills that may be mobilized in a variety of fields, such as education, environmentalism, humanitarianism, journalism, law, media, medicine, museum administration, public policy, and social justice, as well as in graduate and professional studies. 

Learning Goals

• To develop understanding of human cultural and biological diversity across time and space
• To gain familiarity with anthropological concepts, methods, and theories (within and across the sub-disciplines) and to utilize these to understand issues, relationships, and systems in the present and the past
• To develop the skills to collect and analyze various types of information (e.g., material, visual, narrative, oral, etc.) and to evaluate the use of qualitative and quantitative data in social science research and in everyday life
• To develop critical perspectives on relations of power and inequality through attention to local (ethnographic and archaeological) particularities, global connections, and historical trajectories
• To communicate effectively through written and oral communication

Options for Majoring or Minoring in the Department

Students may elect to major in anthropology or to coordinate a major in anthropology with digital and computational studies, education, or environmental studies. Students pursuing a coordinate major may not normally elect a second major. Non-majors may elect to minor in anthropology.

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