Undergraduate program

Broadest in scope of the social sciences, anthropology contributes to an understanding of the human condition through interpretations of human biological and cultural variation. The several major branches of the discipline of anthropology focus on different aspects of human populations and their works:

Archaeology attempts to document and interpret the course of human cultural evolution and to trace the development of cultural traditions in various areas of the world. Archaeologists attempt to determine how specific prehistoric societies were adapted to the past environment. They analyze the major changes in human cultures that have occurred with the development of food production, urbanization, and the emergence of states and civilizations. The goal is to achieve an understanding of the processes involved in human cultural evolution.

Social/Cultural anthropology is concerned with the analysis of historical and contemporary human societies in all parts of the world. Social/Cultural anthropologists study variations in human lifestyles. Focusing on particular societies and cultures, they attempt to document, to interpret, and to achieve an understanding of the patterned interrelationships of economic, technological, political, and social systems and the symbolic systems relating to language and ideology. A major concern in contemporary social/cultural anthropology is interethnic relationships, how different societies with distinct cultural traditions interact with each other in the modern world. The goal of social/cultural anthropology is to explain human cultural variation.

Linguistic anthropology is concerned with all aspects of language and language use, including the evolution of human language and the development and spread of language families. A particular interest of linguistic anthropologists is ways in which language affects and is affected by culture and social relations, for example in situations of multilingualism, in the construction and employment of cultural categories, and in rhetorical uses of speech. Anthropologists concerned with language also conduct comparative studies to reconstruct past languages in order to gain insight into prehistoric cultures and social systems.

Biological anthropology attempts to document and interpret the course of human biological evolution and to analyze the processes giving rise to physical variation in contemporary human populations. Our place in nature is considered through study of our closest living relatives, the primates. Fossil evidence of our ancestors is interpreted according to evolutionary theory. Variability in contemporary human populations is analyzed in terms of adaptation and the factors of population genetics. All these studies contribute to the goal of understanding human biological variation in space and time.

In all fields of anthropology, emphasis is placed on understanding in context. Human individuals, societies, and cultural traditions are viewed in their total setting or matrix of environmental, biological, social, and psychological conditions. Anthropology takes a broad view, considering all aspects of the human situation in a holistic approach that is both scientific and humanistic in its implications.