Anthropology Minor
As an anthropology minor, you’ll study human existence in the present and the past to explore how and why humans vary in their behaviors, cultures, and biology. Students choose to study anthropology because they want to understand some of the most intriguing and troubling issues faced by modern society: the origin and meaning of ethnic and gender differences; the role of institutions in social, political and economic life; learned vs. innate behavior; the similarities and differences among human societies; and the meaning of religion, community and family.
sample courses:
This course is the required second-semester sequence of the introduction to medical anthropology and cultural anthropology for students enrolled in the Medicine and Society Program. The course builds upon material introduced in Anthropology 141, and provides greater ethnographic context for the cross-cultural study of health and illness. Topical areas include analyses of disease, illness and sickness at micro and macro levels; impact of personal and interpersonal factors on health; health effects of social, political, and economic factors; relationship of anthropology to biological and social sciences approaches; ecology of health and development; and cross-cultural health studies of language, gender, and race/ethnicity.
This course examines the many ways that people around the world make urban life meaningful. We will focus on the intersections among anthropology, urban studies, social theory and human geography to explore the theoretical, social, and methodological approaches to understanding the culture(s) created in cities. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from cities around the world, we will explore issues pertaining to race and ethnicity, gender, youth, poverty, diversity and "super-diversity," gentrification, urbanization, and illusions and realities of modernity.
