BA in Cultural Anthropology

The major is designed to empower students with anthropological knowledge and skills that are both immediately valuable as well as a foundation for further intellectual development. A broad understanding of human culture around the world and across time is achieved through three types of classes. The first set of classes, the foundations of anthropology, provides a solid grounding in the principles, theories, and methods of anthropology. The second set of classes, the anthropology major electives, offers students opportunities to explore a variety of specific anthropological themes. Students complement these anthropology classes with a third set of classes that are drawn from disciplines outside anthropology yet focus on the themes of society and culture. The major thus offers students ample opportunity to develop and pursue their particular interests while acquiring a solid foundation in anthropological principles, methods and theory. Anthropology students should be able to: Understand the history of anthropology‘s development and the historical contributions of major anthropologists to the social science; Show command of cultural anthropology’s disciplinary perspective; Able to use anthropological research methods to gather data on an ethnographic area including research in contemporary journals, field work, and the systematic analysis and presentation of findings in a thesis driven model; Demonstrate ability to analyze ethnographic data; Able to use cross-cultural comparison to analyze social issues in student’s own society.