Department of Anthropology

Department Website:
https://www.haverford.edu/anthropology

Anthropology is the holistic and comparative study of human beings from a variety of perspectives—historical, linguistic, biological, social, and cultural—in pursuit of a deeper understanding of humankind and the promotion of informed social policy. Anthropologists:

• conduct “participant-observation” ethnographic research with diverse social groups in different parts of the world, examining how people imagine and structure their lives and aspirations.
• study social life and organization, modes of subsistence, exchange practices, the family, politics and power, ritual and religion, gender, and all forms of expressive culture.
• study social, economic, cultural, and political systems: how these systems are inhabited, contested, changed and reproduced over time.
• pay particular attention to the relationships between local contexts and broader global social, geographic and historical regimes and ideas.
• aim to address through ethnographic and documentary research the most pressing issues of our times, especially with reference to the effects of globalization, the challenges of social and ethnic diversity, and the pursuit of social justice in the domains of health, the environment, and human rights.

At Haverford we teach socio-cultural anthropology, which has three central traits:

• It is comparative: we compare social and cultural phenomena in one place to those in another and in relation to general theories about humans and human societies. This comparative method allows us to tease out what is unique and distinctive about the subject we are studying and what more generally tends to be true.
• It is holistic. We study practices and institutions as they are embedded in context.
• It involves participant-observation fieldwork. Social and cultural anthropologists live in the communities they are studying for extended periods of time, to build a perspective that integrates an insider’s and an outsider’s points of view.

Anthropologists have long studied both Western and non-Western civilizations, including people and social institutions re-imagining modernity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, paying particular attention to the value and diversity of the full human cultural record as well as to the contemporary predicaments of marginalized peoples. Ethnographers work on small-scale communities as well as processes of globalization. More recently scholars in anthropology have begun to focus their work also on powerful metropolitan and cosmopolitan social actors, both in the United States and globally. As ethnographers study the work of business people, planners, state officials, doctors, artists, and professionals in transnational institutions such as Wall Street and the World Bank, the discipline has made key contributions in critical debates about globalization, financial reform, public health, education, environment, and urbanization. Our curriculum is fully engaged with these areas of research and study.

Learning Goals

The anthropology major teaches students the methods of social and cultural research and analysis and introduces them to the history of anthropology. Students are encouraged to think critically and self-reflectively about several areas of intellectual inquiry, including:

• The discipline of anthropology:
  • To understand the unique contribution of anthropology to the study of the social, and the ways in which it addresses the most pressing issues of our times.
  • To learn how to situate strange and familiar social practices and cultural categories in shifting and contingent historical, economic, and political formations and structures.
  • To recognize the impact of the position of the scholar in the production of knowledge.
  • To know the key figures in anthropology and their specific theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the history and development of the discipline.
  • To understand key contemporary debates in the field and how older categories of race, culture, nation, and language have shaped recent theoretical innovations.
  • To be familiar with the subfields of the discipline (e.g., political and legal anthropology, medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, environmental anthropology, visual anthropology, etc.) and their contributions to interdisciplinary knowledge production.
• The craft and theory of anthropological research:
  • To have first-hand experience of data-collection methods, including ethnographic field research, interviewing, and archival research.
  • To understand the ethical obligations of an ethnographic researcher and to be able to engage others with respect and compassion.
  • To be versed in the ethnographic record of more than one society; to develop a capacity to think comparatively across cultures; to problematize and analyze familiar practice and “common sense” in a new light.
  • To understand the relationship between theory and empirical data, i.e.:
    • how specific anthropologists have used theory to interpret and explain social and cultural formations, and
    • how particular ethnographic situations and circumstances have allowed or required specific anthropologists to revise, critique, and improve theoretical models.
  • To understand ethnography as a methodology and a genre of writing.
• The basic skills of anthropological writing and communicating anthropological knowledge:
  • To be able to write a critical essay, a fieldnote, an academic book review, and a review of the literature for a topic of anthropological interest.
  • To understand the difference between a scholarly argument that proves a particular point (interpretive, explanatory), and an argument that advocates an attitude or action.
  • To be able to construct a sound argument supported by evidence and to be able to engage in scholarly debate.
  • To understand the diverse media and forums through which anthropological knowledge is communicated to the public.

Haverford’s Institutional Learning Goals are available on the President’s website, at http://hav.to/learninggoals.