Did you know that many well-known people in a variety of fields majored in anthropology, including Steven Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble, actors Thandie Newton, Glenn Close, Hugh Laurie and Tea Leoni, authors Kurt Vonnegut and Zora Neale Hurston, musicians Will Champion (Coldplay), Frank Black (The Pixies) and Tracy Chapman?
Anthropology is the study of human groups, both ancient and modern, in their cultural and biological context. The field takes a global look at human cultures from prehistoric times to the present, integrating findings from the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. Although anthropology is related to subjects like biology, classics, geography, history, psychology and sociology, the discipline is unique in its attempt to synthesize and compare knowledge about the human experience.
If you are interested in:
- Getting to ask the big questions about humanity;
- Understanding what it means to be human through time, from our earliest ancestors and across the many cultures of the world;
- Gaining a different perspective of the world and it's citizens; and
- Hearing the voices of other peoples who share this world with us, but whose lives are often far different from our own
Then Anthropology is the major for you!
At CU Boulder, there are three possible specializations for undergraduate students:
- Archaeology:
- The archaeology subdiscipline provides continuous geographic coverage of ancient societies from the Plains of North America through the Southwest and Mesoamerica to the Intermediate Area. The native societies the department focuses on range from egalitarian hunter-gatherers through middle range societies to the city-states and empires of Mesoamerica. The faculty’s theoretical and topical interests include human ecology, ethnoarchaeology, agency and social theory, lithic and ceramic analyses, remote sensing, disasters in ancient and modern times and geophysical applications in archeology.
- Biological Anthropology:
- The biological anthropology—or physical anthropology—subdiscipline focuses on the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their related non-human primates and their extinct hominin ancestors. At CU Boulder, the biological anthropology faculty have interests and research strengths that cross sub-disciplinary boundaries and foster collaboration with faculty and graduate students in other disciplines and sub-disciplines. We share an interest in human ecology, the broad integrative area of anthropology that focuses on the interactions of culture, biology and the environment. They also share an interest in the processes of globalization, which are rapidly changing many aspects of the modern world.
- Cultural Anthropology:
- The cultural anthropology subdiscipline, on the other hand, is the study of human societies and cultures and their development. Among the topical interests of the cultural anthropology faculty at CU Boulder are gender and sexuality, culture and power, modernity and consumption, kinship and relatedness, tourism and popular culture, medical anthropology, science and technology studies, human and political ecology, pastoralism, conservation and sustainability, museums, semiotics, concepts of “care,” nationalism and ethnic identity, racial constructs, post-colonialism, refugees and citizenship and history and memory. Areas of regional expertise in the department include Latin America and the Caribbean, Native America, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, East Africa, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Papua New Guinea, as well as their respective diasporas around the world.
And the department is home to a number of excellent and award-winning faculty, including a CU Distinguished Professor, a number of Fulbright scholars and numerous fellows for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as numerous book award recipients.