What is Anthropology?

Anthropology is the study of people, how they developed physically and culturally, and how they live and interact among themselves and with others. Anthropology uses a four field approach that includes cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology and linguistics.

The courses of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology present the richness in human variation and cultural diversity, and offer the anthropological and archaeological perspective as a way of thinking, a way of problem solving, and as a model for future learning. For many students, anthropology becomes a framework for integrating knowledge and a system of organization for their formal education. The anthropological perspective is holistic; that is, each piece or aspect of a culture is viewed within the context of the whole culture. Unique among the social sciences and humanities, anthropology studies people and behavior in a cross-cultural perspective. It has accumulated the world’s largest database of knowledge about humans living in hunter-gatherer, horticultural, herding, nomadic, peasant, island, urban, industrial, and post-industrial societies. It combines sciences with humanities, biology with culture, history with prehistory, in both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the human condition. Anthropology studies commonalties as well as differences in the cultural behavior of humans. This aspect of the discipline has wide ramifications for expanding the students' world-view and approaches to other studies by increasing their awareness of ethnocentric bias.

The evolution of human life and its varied expressions on the face of the globe today is the result of an interplay of physical, social, and cultural factors. Anthropologists and archaeologists study various aspects of this development, whether in the remains of ancient civilizations, or in the isolated mountains of New Guinea, among nomads of the Middle East, or in urban areas of industrialized societies like New York City, in order to further understand the human experience. Anthropology studies humanity in the broadest sense. With a methodology developed over the past 150 years, anthropologists study different cultures by living with the people, experiencing their lives as they themselves do, developing an empathetic knowledge, which allows a total balanced view of a way of life

Undergraduate majors in our department have ongoing opportunities to do hands on research in a number of laboratory and fieldwork studies conducted by full-time members of the department. Graduates go on to a number of different areas of endeavor, which require a background in human dimension, and diversity of behavior, and lifestyle.