Overview and Learning Goals

Overview

Anthropology explores the incredible diversity of cultural and social experience and the complexity of human life, centering inquiries on the distinct perspectives and practices of individuals and groups. As a foundational part of a liberal arts education, anthropology challenges students to think critically about the world and offers tools for understanding how people everywhere both shape and are shaped by complex identities, power hierarchies, global connections, and cross-cultural interactions. Anthropology examines past and contemporary cultures to understand how and why social, economic, ideological, environmental, and political relationships are reproduced or transformed.

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, Europe, North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania. Students deepen their understanding of intersecting relationships of power and inequity (including gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age). They study cultures from various perspectives, considering the social textures of everyday life, long-term processes of adaptation and innovation, and the global circulation of people, ideas, and goods. Throughout the curriculum, students are exposed to the discipline’s concepts, theories, and methods, including 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 sophisticated understandings of cultural differences and the dynamics of social and historical transformation and become skilled communicators and collaborative and critical thinkers.  Graduates mobilize these capacities and in a variety of fields, such as education, medicine and public health, environmental stewardship, research and consulting, international and non-governmental policy, cultural heritage, journalism, law, media and technology, museum administration, public policy, humanitarianism, and social advocacy and justice, as well as in graduate and professional studies. 

Learning Goals

• To develop understanding of human cultures and diverse ways of life across time and space
• To gain familiarity with anthropological concepts, methods, theories, and ethical frameworks (within and across the subdisciplines) and to utilize these to understand past and present issues, relationships, and systems 
• To develop the skills to collect and analyze various types of information (including material, visual, oral, and textual) and to critically consider their use in ethnographic and archaeological research 
• To develop critical perspectives on relations of power and inequality as they manifest in specific cultural contexts, global connections, and historical trajectories
• To communicate effectively using various forms of communication, with emphasis on clear writing

Options for Majoring or Minoring in the Department

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

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