Bachelor degree in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University

 

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Bachelor Degree in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University

Duke University
Bachelor degree
Cultural Anthropology

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About
Cultural anthropology focuses on the study of cultures around the world. Understanding and living with diversity is one of today's urgent challenges. Our planet has grown much more interconnected. Yet people everywhere continue to maintain different languages and customs, from places as diverse as Pakistan and Zimbabwe to Kansas and New York. Cultural anthropology is the discipline that studies how people create and define these distinct ways of living.

Today is an exciting time in cultural anthropology. The discipline no longer limits itself only to "primitive" lifeways, having expanded to encompass the study of both non-Western and Western societies. Topics of study now range from ethnic and race relations to gender, sexuality, nationalism, law, medicine, and popular culture. New methods and theories have arisen to understand these complex phenomena, influenced by such currents of thought as feminism, postmodernism, political economy, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis. Among the broad concerns of cultural anthropology today are:
  • Under what conditions is culture invented?
  • Under what conditions do cultural understandings gain force, persist, and spread?
  • How does culture intersect with history, economics, and politics?

    Mission Statement
    Our program is based on the commitment to developing the intellectual skills, cross-cultural fluency, and sense of civic and moral engagement of our students that defines the broader mission of Trinity College.

    All our courses promote independent thinking, and prioritize giving students the critical tools and skills to make sense of culture and politics in the contemporary world. We introduce students -- and allow them to explore – key debates in anthropology and social theory about the interpretation of culture.

    As much as any discipline, our program also emphasizes the importance of cross-cultural understanding. Our courses focus on both the United States, and cultures everywhere around the world. They underscore that human behavior is always shaped by cultural background. Cultural Anthropology examines how globalization has made the world into an evermore interconnected place, and yet also the processes that lead to the persistence and sometimes sharpening of differences in values, politics, and culture across the planet.

    Our program also encourages students to consider the themes of civic and moral engagement. Many Cultural Anthropology classes examine the questions of social inequality and efforts at change, and the more specific challenges of understanding global poverty, democracy and authoritarianism, and social movements and political activism.

    By focusing on global interconnections, they also examine the varied dimensions of mutual responsibility and interaction, and our shared fate as common inhabitants of the planet.

    Educational Objectives
    Our central objective for Cultural Anthropology majors is to help them develop their intellectual skills, cross-cultural fluency, and sense of civic and moral engagement.

    1) Intellectual Development: Our majors will leave the program with greater analytical and critical skills, and to think with greater depth about the world. As part of this, every major will gain knowledge of the most important theories and debates about globalization and its effects, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, mass culture and mass media, and class inequality and conflict, among others.

    2) Cross-cultural Knowledge: Our majors also gain a qualitatively better knowledge of key issues in different parts of the world, both of societies in the northern hemisphere and those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This means understanding how cultural beliefs and social structures vary from place to place and over time. The objective is for students both to better understand the culture and society around them and those worldwide in their connections, similarities, and contrasts, a truly global view.

    3) Social Awareness Majors will also come away with a greater awareness of the challenges of social change and civic engagement. Although we do not want our students to imagine that there are any simple or neatly agreed upon solutions, Cultural Anthropology does encourage greater knowledge and critical thinking about the world to which we belong. It emphasizes the need to recognize injustices and patterns of inequality of all kinds and a sense of shared planetary citizenship.

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