Anthropology Department

Department of Anthropology

Core principle: we do not study people from the outside. We work alongside them, in relationship.
The big idea

What makes this anthropology different?

Most people picture anthropology as a science that examines other people, their bones, their languages, their rituals, as objects of curiosity or data points in a larger theory. That is not what we do here.

This department starts from a different place. We believe that knowledge is built through relationship, not extraction. We do not arrive somewhere with our clipboards and theories and leave with conclusions. We show up as participants, as guests, as collaborators. The people and communities we engage with are not subjects. They are co-thinkers, teachers, and partners in making sense of the world.

What does relational mean in practice?

Relational anthropology means:

• We ask questions together, not about each other.
• We recognize that the researcher is always part of the story.
• We value forms of knowledge that have been excluded from mainstream academia.
• We hold ourselves accountable to the communities we work with, not just to the academy.

What does decolonizing mean?

Anthropology has a complicated history. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was used to justify colonial projects, rank cultures on imaginary scales of progress, and erase Indigenous knowledge systems. Researchers took stories, remains, objects, and data from communities that had no say in how any of it would be used.

Decolonizing means being honest about that history and actively doing something different. It means asking whose questions are being answered, who benefits from the research, and who has authority over the knowledge being produced. It means centering voices that were pushed to the margins and giving back what was taken, not just symbolically, but in the way we structure our work.
This is not a buzzword. It changes everything from how we read our sources to how we run our classrooms.

The four subfields, with a relational lens

We teach all four traditional subfields of anthropology. In each one, the relational and decolonizing approach changes what we pay attention to, who we listen to, and why it matters.

Cultural anthropology

How do people build meaning together? What are the values, rituals, tensions, and stories that hold a community in place? And how do those things shift when communities are under pressure, in motion, or in conversation with other worlds?

We do not observe culture from a distance. We participate in it, reflect on it alongside the people living it, and stay curious about what we might be missing.

Linguistic anthropology

Language is not just a tool for communication. It shapes what we can think, who gets heard, and how power moves through a conversation. The words a community uses, and the words that get taken from them, tell us something essential about how the world is organized.
We explore how language carries history, identity, and belonging, and how it can be reclaimed.

Biological anthropology

Our bodies carry the stories of everything that has happened to us and to the generations before us. Biology, culture and environment shape each other in ways that are still being understood.
We approach this subfield with care, particularly because biological anthropology has been misused to justify racism and determinism. Here, we use it to understand how social conditions become embodied, how stress, displacement, and care leave their marks on us across time.
This subfield also invites us into relationships with other species, particularly our primate kin. Primatology sits within biological anthropology, and it approaches other primates not as specimens to decode but as living beings with their own social worlds, bonds, cultures, communication, and ways of making sense of life together. What we learn, we learn in their presence, on their terms as much as possible. Students who come in curious about great apes or other primates often find that anthropology is the discipline that takes those questions most seriously and asks them with the most humility.

Archaeology

The past is not finished. What people left behind, their tools, their homes, their refuse, their art, gives us access to voices that never made it into written history.
We do this work in partnership with descendant communities, not over their heads. We ask who has the right to interpret the past, and we take that question seriously.

The thread running through everything: health

A holistic, four-field view of wellbeing

Health is not only a medical question. It is shaped by history, language, land, relationships, and the distribution of power. A person's wellbeing cannot be understood apart from the community they belong to, the structures they are living inside, or the wounds their ancestors carried.
This department takes that seriously. We look at health through all four subfields at once, because that is the only way to see the whole picture.

Why does one community carry a heavier burden of illness than another? The answer lives in history, in food systems, in language loss, in land dispossession, in the stress that accumulates across generations. Anthropology can hold all of that at once.

Why any student should care

This is not just for anthropology majors

Wherever you are headed, you will work with people. You will encounter systems that were designed with certain people in mind and not others. You will need to listen across difference, recognize assumptions you did not know you had, and ask better questions in rooms where easy answers are being offered.

Anthropology trains exactly those skills. Because we ask big questions from many angles at once, you leave with something genuinely rare: the ability to sit with complexity and still be useful.
Students from this department go on to careers in healthcare, education, law, policy, environmental work, social services, community organizing, design, and more. What they carry with them is a way of seeing.