Anthropology provides students the skills to navigate a rapidly changing world, marked by globalization and political turmoil. The anthropology major or minor helps students understand these global transformations and create bridges between different worldviews. Anthropology’s distinctive way of studying the world through intensive ethnographic fieldwork provides key insights into how people around the world experience gender, race and class hierarchies in their daily lives, but also how they challenge those hierarchies. Anthropology not only provides a diagnosis for the present, but also offers possible solutions to our pressing human problems. Students go on to use their anthropological skills in the realms of international business, education, law, diplomacy, public health, human rights, journalism, medicine and many other fields.
Majors: Students who are considering a major in Anthropology should enroll in ANTH 101, Anthropological Perspective, during the fall or spring of their first year. ANTH 101 courses are usually limited to first- and second-year students only.
Courses
ANTH 101
Anthropological Perspective
Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies or Social Science
A one-semester introduction to the main modes of cultural anthropological analysis of non-Western cultures, such as those of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Melanesia, Polynesia, sub-Saharan Africa and Native America. Topics include: ethnographic methods; concepts of culture; symbolic communication; ecological processes; introduction to anthropological approaches to kinship, religion, gender, hierarchy, economics, medicine, poLiteratureical life, transnational processes.