ANTH - Anthropology Major

The anthropology major at Trinity focuses on cultural anthropology, which is the interpretive study of human beings as they are culturally constituted and as they have lived in social groups throughout history and around the world. Anthropology is a comprehensive and comparative discipline that embraces human life in all of its diversity and complexity. Broad in focus, it seeks to understand in a non-ethnocentric manner why people—in both “exotic” and familiar settings—do what they do and what accounts for human differences as well as similarities. It asks how people use material and symbolic resources to solve, in often varying ways, the problems of living in the world and with each other. To arrive at their interpretations, anthropologists interweave the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, engaging in continuous dialogues with other disciplines.

Students majoring in anthropology study the discipline’s history, methodology, and contemporary concerns such as globalization, the environment, medicine and public health, urbanization, and economic upheavals. Since non-ethnocentric interpretations require familiarity with a particular cultural context, students also take courses concerning distinct ethnographic areas such as the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, North America, and South Asia. In addition, they take courses that emphasize issues of broad human concern, because interpretations of human similarities and differences can be achieved only through cross-cultural comparison. In selecting electives, students may choose either additional anthropology courses or appropriate courses in such cognate departments and programs as international studies, classics, religion, educational studies, music, sociology, and women, gender, and sexuality. Students will learn to write research proposals, design and carry out research projects, and analyze and disseminate research results in a variety of formats and channels.