Chair’s Welcome

Humanity has never been as simultaneously connected and fragmented as it is today. We need anthropology now more than ever to navigate our understanding and appreciation of both human diversity and our common humanity. Anthropology embraces all of humanity in all of its complexity as its subject. In doing so, anthropology de-centers the self to consider other ways of being in the world, so that the strange may become familiar, and the familiar may become strange.

Anthropology is also defined by its holism. It is the integrative study of human beings in all times and places, from humanity’s dawning to the present. Rather than trying to understand culture and society by splitting it up analytically, we seek connections among political, ideological, economic, religious, and biological aspects of human relations to come to multidimensional understandings of the workings of culture.

Anthropology invites all to consider how so much of what may take for granted as “natural” is in fact contingent on culture, history, and the social context of the moment. In doing so, it provides tools for thinking through the most vexing challenges facing us today. It is not for the faint of heart. Anthropology will change your mind.

Leveraging this expertise, our students learn about humanity long before the onset of writing, about the cycles of coalescence and dissolution of complex societies in the past, and about how humans and things interact to produce social formations through time via archaeological coursework. In our cultural anthropology course offerings, students learn about perennial topics: what makes a community; how language mediates social relations (and vice versa); how seemingly “natural” categories such as “race” get constructed and deployed in today’s discourses; contemporary Indigenous cultures around the world; the experiences of Latinx immigrants in the U.S.; gender and cultural politics today; and society and climate change, among many other topics. In our biological anthropology courses, our students learn about how inequality can biologically inhere in the body; health and society in the past; death and the body; and forensic anthropology, forensic science, and human rights. Our courses appeal to diverse interests also because they draw from humanistic, scientific, and social scientific approaches.

Steve Wernke
Chair of the Department of Anthropology