Anthropology

The first interdisciplinary discipline, it synthesizes the disciplines of a liberal arts education and applies them to the real world.  Anthropology is not just done in the jungle.  As different ethnic groups come together and break apart – from Los Angeles to Bosnia – anthropologists strive to understand cultural difference and social change.   Why do people care about their heritages?  Why do they fight for the right to practice their religions?  How are cultural traditions invented, maintained, and transformed?  These are anthropological questions that demand understanding of the cultural landscapes that, as humans, we create and inhabit.

Anthropology is a comprehensive and comparative discipline that embraces human life in all of its diversity and complexity. Broad in focus, Anthropology seeks to understand why people in both exotic and familiar settings do what they do and what accounts for human differences and similarities. It asks how people use material and symbolic resources to solve, often in very different ways, the problems of living in the world and with each other. To arrive at their interpretations, anthropologists interweave the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, engaging in continuous dialogue with other disciplines that enrich the learning experience.