Program Description

Anthropology is the study of human differences and commonalities in a world of global and transnational connections. Cultural anthropologists study a wide range of contemporary concerns from identity and community formation to popular culture and political economy. They engage in long-term ethnographic research in rural, urban, and suburban environments around the world and apply critical cultural analysis to their field experiences.

Anthropology at Purchase College takes the study of culture to be an inherently interdisciplinary practice, drawing not only on other social sciences, but also the natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Courses in the Anthropology Program provide the core of a broad liberal arts education for students majoring in anthropology. These courses also introduce students from a range of other disciplines to the vital connections between anthropology and their own fields of study.

Our graduates go on to careers in social work, development, and activism for nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, curatorial and archival work at museums and historical societies, consumer research and creative communications for marketing and advertising firms, end-user practices for product design firms, and teaching at colleges and universities.

Program Faculty

Requirements for the Major

• Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Classics in Anthropological Literature
• Fieldwork: Qualitative Methods
• Current Anthropological Literature
• Four anthropology electives in the student’s chosen concentration
• Senior Project in Anthropology

Anthropology majors are encouraged to undertake an internship, study-abroad opportunity, or community-action independent study. Students may petition to take credit-bearing internships with anthropology faculty sponsors in place of one upper-level elective for the major.

Concentration 1: General Anthropology
The four anthropology electives must include at least one course in the each of the other three concentrations (listed below)

Concentration 2: World Cultures
Nigerian/Hausa Language and Culture I
Nigerian/Hausa Language and Culture II
Urban Life in Africa
New Immigrants in the United States
Islam in the American Imagination
Urban Anthropology
Archaeological Issues in the Southern Levant
Anthropology of Europe
Informal Economies
Environment and Sustainable Development in South Asia
Special Topic: Geographic Area (semester topic: Culture and Media in Italy)

Concentration 3: Anthropology and the Arts
Film and Anthropology
Performing Arts in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion
Museum Anthropology
Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Global Media, Local Cultures
Myth and Ritual
Theatre and Performance in Africa
Anthropology of Art and Aesthetics
Anthropology of Music and Sound
Gender and Popular Culture in South Asia
Los Angeles/Mumbai: Cinematic City Cross-Culturally
Contemporary Japan: Aesthetics, Politics, Modernity

Concentration 4: Kinship, Identities, and Power
Language, Culture, and Society
Drugs, Bodies, Design
Global Sexualities
Sexuality and Society
Critical Perspectives on Language and Culture

Representative Alumni

• Jay H. Bernstein ’80, PhD, University of California, Berkeley; associate professor, readers services librarian, and head of interlibrary loan, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York; author of Spirits Captured in Stone: Shamanism and Traditional Medicine Among the Taman of Borneo
• David R. Graeber ’84, PhD, University of Chicago; reader in social anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London; author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
• Lalena Howard ’05, MSW, Hunter College School of Social Work, City University of New York; Single Stop program coordinator, Fifth Avenue Committee
• Lisa Hoyes ’94, JD (Sinsheimer Public Service Scholar), New York University School of Law; criminal defense attorney, Bronx, NY
• Ana Magdalena Hurtado ’80, PhD, University of Utah; human evolutionary ecologist; director of the Global Health Program and professor of anthropology and epidemiology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University
• Steven Stapleton ’02, editor, The Nielsen Company
• Harvey Wang ’77, award-winning filmmaker and photographer; www.harveywang.com
• Catherine Ziegler ’96, PhD, The New School for Social Research; author of Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System; www.catherineziegler.com

For more information, visit the Anthropology site in Academic Programs.

Updated Oct. 7, 2011

Updates
Please direct updates for this page to the managing editor in the Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs. Because internal and external links may change or expire from time to time, please report any changed or broken links to the managing editor as well.