Anthropology is the study of humanity. Its subject of study encompasses the range of human experience among the peoples of the world, and its aims are to understand what people do or have done, and why. Every aspect of human beings from their DNA molecules to their beliefs about the supernatural, in every part of the world, from the beginnings of primate evolution to the present, pose anthropological questions. Some of the most interesting of these questions remain to be answered.
For these and many other reasons, anthropology is central to the liberal arts. The anthropology program is designed to cultivate a lively curiosity about the human experience, a deeper understanding of cultures and diverse ways of life including our own. It works toward developing an informed sense of the human experience, past and present, and of the many ways of knowing, understanding and communicating. These studies encourage critical reasoning abilities and skills that promote a life of continuous learning, which are of immeasurable value in pursuing a range of careers and goals in a world in which global diversity has become, more than ever, an inescapable aspect of life.
LEARNING GOALS
By the time they graduate, all anthropology majors should be able to:
- understand how all the sub-fields—archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics—have been defined, fit together, clashed, challenged each other, and complemented each other through time;
- articulate how the fundamental ideas in anthropology—of evolution, culture, structure, function, and relativism—have developed through time and always come back to address the essential question of what it means to be human;
- analyze and articulate the importance of language in the life of humans through time, as biological species and as active participants in living cultures, as evidenced in their anthropological work and co-requisite study of a foreign language;
- appreciate cross-cultural and inter-cultural difference as an inherent part of what it means to be human, through coursework preferably complemented experientially by participation in at least one overseas program;
- engage in comparative work within and across all four sub-disciplines;
- articulate and use important theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues in each of the four subfields with an eye toward distinguishing cultural relativism from moral relativism in analyzing and understanding human behavior of all kinds, and of recognizing that in cultural anthropology and linguistics we are working with live human beings, with all the ethical responsibilities that entails;
- demonstrate critical reading, thinking, writing and speaking skills;
- master American Anthropologist citation conventions and other “nuts and bolts” issues of competency and ethics of scholarly reportage in anthropology;
- distinguish and use critically many different kinds of sources, whether they be primary, secondary, or popular sources;
- distinguish good scientific inquiry from bad, both in and outside of anthropology, using all of the aforementioned understandings and skills.