Department of Anthropology

Anthropology is the comprehensive study of human nature, culture, and change in the full range of the world’s sociocultural systems. One of the qualities making anthropology different from other academic disciplines is its insistently cross-cultural, or comparative, perspective. By extending our vision beyond the confines of familiar social contexts and experiences, this perspective guards against culture-bound theories regarding human nature. Thus, historically, anthropologists played a leading role in undermining the intellectual credibility of racist social theories. Today, in an increasingly global world, where humankind’s most difficult problems are at least as frequently social as technical, a cultural perspective on human diversity is an urgent priority.

Anthropology’s characteristic methodology—long-term field research— creates an understanding of human behavior that illuminates the inter-dependence of diverse types of activity: expressive and pragmatic, sacred and secular, individual and collective. Because of its holism, anthropology has been likened to “the carrying frame onto which may be fitted all the several subjects of a liberal education.” And indeed, the discipline of anthropology has been influenced by multidisciplinary approaches integrating the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Historians, comparative political scientists, literary critics, psychologists, biologists, and others regularly draw on anthropological research and theory. Princeton anthropology department faculty and students have particularly strong interdisciplinary interests in politics, history, science, medicine, law, gender studies, religion, the analysis of literary texts, human origins, and media.

The Department of Anthropology at Princeton has a faculty of 10 full-time professors. Its size enables it to provide a variety of approaches to this vast subject of study and give students personal attention. Anthropology faculty and graduate students are active in research on topics including nationalism, race and ethnicity, gender, ritual, language, law, violence, refugees, medicine, science, media, and the interrelation of history and culture. Faculty bring to classroom teaching the immediacy of field experiences that span the globe: the Americas (the United States and Latin America), Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

Course offerings of the department center on cultural anthropology. The department emphasizes the study of the processes by which human beings create meaning in their lives. The emphases on meaning and change constitute the core of contemporary anthropology and will provide students with an excellent understanding of the field. There are also courses in biological anthropology, including human evolution, physical variation, and biomedicine.

Many anthropology majors have chosen to spend the summer before their senior year, or one of the junior year semesters, away from Princeton through the Study Abroad Program. While fieldwork is certainly not required of all majors, it is a unique experience and a refreshing change from the laboratory or library research more commonly part of college work. The anthropology department welcomes and encourages students to develop field projects or plans for study abroad. The department has a six-week summer program on human origins held in the southwest of France.

Juniors in the department write a spring term junior paper in consultation with a faculty adviser. Fall term junior independent work involves drawing up a research proposal and bibliography in preparation for the spring junior paper, giving students a chance to explore their interests with faculty guidance. Senior theses have focused on a wide variety of subjects and have been based on both library and field research. Some students have added creative components to their written theses. Examples include a theater production, a dance performance, a photography exhibit, and a video. Recent theses have included studies of social change and development (in Brazil, France, and Nepal); studies of identity; a comparison of Japanese and American business cultures; a documentary film with a written thesis on life and death in an AIDS hospice; a look at urban renewal in a New York City neighborhood; a study of museum-making and museum-going; an analysis of law and gender equality; an examination of Western Muslim women and the hijab; studies of ecotourism in Ecuador and of the health policy of the Maori; discussions and analyses of prehistoric cave art, the origins and evolution of bipedalism in humans, and the new creationism movement and the evolution/creation debate; a study of “the blues” in the Mississippi delta; a discussion of the relation between fiction and anthropological writing; and a study of North African immigrants in France.

While anthropology department concentrators are well prepared for graduate study in the social sciences and humanities (leading to employment as university teachers and researchers), they also go on to professional schools in business, medicine, dentistry, and law. Anthropology also offers an excellent foundation for many other careers. It is an asset for anyone whose work will involve international or interethnic communication, public health, and education. Anthropology graduates have included a vice president of an international trading company; a foreign affairs journalist; lawyers involved in community, immigration, and international law; physicians in a variety of specialities; an epidemiologist; high school teachers; an international energy consultant; a program director for the International Research and Exchanges Board; a computer applications analyst for the National Geographical Society; administrators of community development organizations; and an ecological tour operator in Nepal. Anthropology students have also found work as media and market research consultants and as educational and health care policy researchers.