The subdiscipline of sociocultural anthropology is distinguished by a concern for sociocultural changes and the unique human capacity to create and use symbols. Our faculty members’ interests in cultural systems range from language and cognition, literature, understandings of the body and personhood, ethnicity, conflict resolution, and folklore to ritual, communication, cosmology, health care, notions of space and place, architecture, as well as issues of representation. A key factor underlying all of these interests is the desire to understand how humans create and express the worlds in which they live, whether it be via material culture, state rituals, modes of attire, life-cycle ceremonies, styles of speaking, healing practices, or oral traditions.

Topics key to the study of how societies or cultures change over time include shifts in modes of subsistence, cultural ecology, political economy, and development. Scholars in these areas are concerned with production, distribution, and consumption in market and non-market societies, as well as with how contemporary economic institutions change, drawing our attention to market and capitalistic forces within the world economy in which we all live. Most applied anthropologists explore the interface between comparative sociocultural analysis and problems of planned and spontaneous socioeconomic change, including policy making, planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. A key contribution of anthropologists to such projects is a qualitative, combined micro- and macro-level, bottom-up orientation that meaningfully enhances the dialogue about various paths of development.

Three threads run throughout these fields, whether the concern is symbolic systems or cultural and economic change. One is gender. Another is poverty. And, the third is human rights. Almost all the populations with whom we are concerned are poor. Obviously, at least half are female (except in South Asia where the relative lack of females is a key research question). And, many of those we study are more or less powerless in their own societies and/or face significant human rights issues. Accordingly, Women’s Studies, concern with poverty, and human rights are three significant bridges that join the anthropology faculty to the wider Maxwell and all-university pool of scholars.

This page current as of: August 1, 2004