Anthropology

The department covers three subfields: archaeology; sociocultural and linguistic anthropology; and physical anthropology. Archaeology focuses on ritual complexes and writing, ceramic analysis, warfare, ancient civilizations, origins of agriculture, and museum studies. Sociocultural anthropology provides a range of courses: classics in ethnography and social theory, religion, myth and ritual, kinship and descent, historical anthropology, culture and political economy, agrarian studies, ecology, environment and social change, medical anthropology, emotions, public health, sexual meanings and gender, postcolonial development, ethnicity, identity politics and diaspora, urban anthropology, global mass culture, and alternate modernity. Linguistic anthropology includes language, nationalism and ideology, structuralism and semiotics, and feminist discourse. Physical anthropology focuses on paleoanthropology, evolutionary theory, human functional anatomy, race and human biological diversity, and primate ecology. There is strong geographical coverage in Africa, the Caribbean, East Asia (China and Japan), Latin America and South America, Southeast Asia (Indonesia), South Asia and the Indian Ocean, the Near East, Europe, and the United States.