The Department of Anthropology is one of the country's leading graduate and undergraduate centers for cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropologythe four principal subfields studied in the undergraduate curriculum. The department considers its greatest assets to be the various individual areas of faculty expertise: archaeological specialties such as medieval archaeology and European, Near Eastern, and South Asian prehistory, biological anthropology areas such as molecular primatology, primate behavioral ecology, and paleoanthropology, linguistic anthropology foci such as discourse analysis and language socialization, and sociocultural anthropology specialties such as the ethnography of North America, Africa, India, China, the Near and Middle East, Russia and the former Soviet Union, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, Australia, and the South Pacific. Major theoretical emphasis is on the systems of thought and symbolic representation of the self and society, the relation between female and male domains of interaction, changing patterns of social organization and hierarchy within small-scale societies, urban settings, and bureaucratic institutions, medical anthropology, evolutionary approaches to the study of primate and human origins, religion, art, science studies, race and ethnicity, and the problem of ethnographic representation in film and other media.
This field is the study of social organization and the systems of thought and values that both reflect and inform social practice in different cultures. Sociocultural anthropology is interdisciplinary in orientation, analyzing and synthesizing religious, artistic, economic, and political practices through the common medium of culture. Traditionally, cultural anthropology emphasized the study of small-scale societies in non-Western settings. Contemporary sociocultural anthropology maintains such interests but increasingly applies its insights and methods to urban and industrialized societies and attends more closely to the production of culture. An emphasis of the department is the ethnographic study of cultural, social, and political processes that shape our lives and those of other people, especially as we are drawn together and influence one another in increasingly transnational and global interactions.
