Anthropology

Overview

While anthropologists have traditionally studied in small scale, non-Western societies, today we apply our participatory research methods and a combination of humanistic and social scientific perspectives to all kinds of situations: if people do it, you can study it as an anthropologist.

The Anthropology BA program at Carleton University specializes in socio-cultural anthropology, which is the study of contemporary societies and cultures through direct engagement, participant-observation and other qualitative methods. Our faculty work in various contexts and communities in Alaska, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Thailand, the Andes, and Sub-Saharan Africa, among others. 

The faculty specialize in a range of topics including:

• the study of Indigenous people’s lives in context (e.g. indigenous-state relations; governance & colonialism; language; urban indigenous communities).
• environmental issues (e.g. human-environmental relations; subsistence politics; the Anthropocene; climate change; natural resources)
• transnational & global issues (e.g. transnational adoption; development; migration; diaspora; sex tourism)
• race, ethnicity, and nationalism (e.g. ethno-history; ethno-politics)
• selfhood, personhood, subjectivity, identity, psychiatric anthropology, and phenomenology;
• genders and sexualities (e.g. motherhood; reproductive health; gendered childhood; feminist theories/methodologies).
• political economy (e.g. global capitalisms; processes of commodification; capitalist and non-capitalist societies)