College of Arts and Sciences
Departments
Sociology and Anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology gives students a holistic understanding of human existence in an ecological, evolutionary perspective. It studies the interrelationships of human biology and human behavior, particularly that behavior which we call culture, both in the past and in the present. In its four traditional subfields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology, it covers all the aspects of being human, making use of almost all of human knowledge. Anthropology is also the only discipline that focuses on the study of the origin and nature of human biological and cultural diversity. Courses in anthropology are thus of value to students in virtually all fields; they relate those disciplines to a broader view of humankind as a whole.