Students who complete introductory courses in anthropology are equipped to understand those complex interactions between human biology, culture, technology and language that have enabled our species to evolve and adapt to the natural world—a foundation important for their future success as upper-division and graduate-level university students. They may also acquire deep convictions about the oneness of the human species and an unprejudiced appreciation of the different life ways and alternate world-views that characterize contemporary human cultures and the need to preserve such diversity. Anthropology courses provide a broader context for meaningful discussion about significant contemporary issues such as sustainable development, economic globalization, overpopulation and the effects of climate change and a basis for relevant, evidence-driven alternatives to prevalent anti-science, pseudoscience and “junk” science ideologies.

 

Sub-Fields of Anthropology

• Physical (biological) anthropology studies humans and their animal relatives, both living and extinct, primarily as species originating in the natural world. It examines mammal, primate and human history as an interrelated process of descent with modification from a common ancestor. It attempts to reconstruct successful (and unsuccessful) adaptations to changing environments and traces historic movements and migrations through geographic space and time using evidence from the genetic, paleontological, primatological, geological and climatological record. The course concludes with an examination of the major bio-cultural variations among local populations of the single remaining species of modern Homo sapiens and the resulting adaptations made during the past 100,000 thousand years.

• Cultural (social-cultural) anthropology compliments physical anthropology through the observation and recording of the broad range of human diversity using ethnographic data collected from participant observer field studies and ethno-historical accounts. This evidence allows for accurate and holistic descriptions of surviving whole cultures and further enables meaningful comparisons to be made between cultures over a broad continuum of human experience. Cultural anthropologists also seek to help preserve the rich legacies of individual cultures, while also providing practical assistance to endangered peoples in a rapidly-changing world.

• Archaeology, the study of human life ways in the past, adopts a strategy similar to cultural anthropology but relies mainly on evidence from the material culture of a people--as well as on the use of specialized field, laboratory and preservation methods--rather than upon ethnographic information provided by informants. The goal of archaeology is to explain the past of particular cultures and possible connections to existing cultures, through reconstruction of the behavior and activities of everyday life at local sites and within and between broader culture areas.  

• Linguistic Anthropology studies human communication and language in terms of their evolutionary history and the history of specific languages and language families, as well as in relation to the observed interpersonal, social and cultural context of living speech communities. Human language is the primary symbolic expression of culture and its functions in representing and reproducing unique cultural forms are carefully studied from speech performance data collected and recorded in the field by linguistic anthropologists. Natural spoken languages and their various derived forms are primary data for anthropological linguistics, a sub-discipline guided by the principle that living languages, like biological species and cultures, change through time and, like them, may also face extinction.