Mission

The Anthropology major and minor offers courses in key areas of the discipline: ethnographic thinking, writing, and analysis, field methodologies, and socio-cultural theory. In our courses and work with students, we teach students the interpretative and critical skills needed to conduct theoretically sound, methodologically rigorous and multifaceted analyses of human social, cultural, and political phenomena at both the local and global levels. We offer students direct opportunities to develop and apply those skills through research and experiential learning activities in the Washington, D.C. community.

In our courses and individual research, we explore the public nature of anthropology through engagement in and beyond the classroom with pressing issues surrounding the new economy, gender, human rights, legal systems, transnational migration, war, violence, bioethics, politics, race, class, incarceration, religion, and social justice. 

We bring to our core and elective courses a common vision of anthropology as a political and ethical endeavor engaging methodologies and concepts that are both discipline-specific and interdisciplinary, and that address issues of cultural and political importance. We train and prepare students to understand and communicate the complex linkages between culture and power in changing, local, national, and global circumstances.