Anthropology

Overview

At Haverford College we teach socio-cultural anthropology, which has three central traits:

• It is comparative: we compare social and cultural phenomena in one place to those in another and in relation to general theories about humans and human societies. This comparative method allows us to tease out what is unique and distinctive about the subject we are studying and what more generally tends to be true.
• It is holistic. We study practices and institutions as they are embedded in context.
• It involves participant-observation fieldwork. Social and cultural anthropologists live in the communities they are studying for extended periods of time, to build a perspective that integrates an insider’s and an outsider’s points of view.

Students of the Anthropology program from Haverford College are encouraged to think critically and self-reflectively about several areas of intellectual inquiry, including:

• To understand the unique contribution of anthropology to the study of the social, and the ways in which it addresses the most pressing issues of our times.

• To learn how to situate strange and familiar social practices and cultural categories in shifting and contingent historical, economic, and political formations and structures.

• To recognize the impact of the position of the scholar in the production of knowledge.

• To know the key figures in anthropology and their specific theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the history and development of the discipline.

• To understand key contemporary debates in the field and how older categories of race, culture, nation, and language have shaped recent theoretical innovations.

• To be familiar with the subfields of the discipline (e.g., political and legal anthropology, medical anthropology, the anthropology of religion, environmental anthropology, visual anthropology, etc.) and their contributions to interdisciplinary knowledge production.