Department of Anthropology

Anthropology studies human populations and cultures in comparative, historical and evolutionary frameworks. The curriculum promotes understanding the variety of past and present human groups, the cultures and societies people create, the processes that animate cultural production and social life, and the processes that underlie human biological development and evolution. Students learn and apply the research methods and theoretical constructs used by anthropologists to investigate peoples and their social worlds. Excavating and analyzing the remains of past cultures, studying the interaction of biology and culture, and examining global social and cultural changes are but a few of the approaches anthropologists use to investigate the human way of life.

The department offers the BA and BS degrees in anthropology. Students majoring in the BA receive excellent training for undertaking graduate studies in anthropology or related fields or for careers outside of academia. The BS degree combines anthropology with natural science approaches associated with biology, chemistry, geology, environmental science and medical/health-related fields, and is directed toward students who require formal scientific training within the major to prepare them for careers or advanced studies with a scientific focus in anthropology or other disciplines, including medical school.

Sequences of courses enable the student to move from a broad understanding of anthropology to more focused topics of study. Only courses passed with a grade of C- or better are counted toward fulfilling the requirements of a major in anthropology; transfer courses also must be C- or better to count toward the major. No more than one course taken under the Pass/Fail option is accepted in fulfillment of the requirements for an anthropology major. The Anthropology Department’s residency requirement stipulates that a minimum of seven courses (28 credits) in the major must be taken in residence at Binghamton University.

Graduate Programs

Anthropology seeks to understand the forms and processes of social and cultural production and the nature and origins of human biological variability through systematic exploration and scientific examination of human groups and their artifacts and lifeways, past and present. Anthropology’s traditional emphasis is on the study of small-scale societies, but practical and theoretical concerns have broadened the scope of anthropological research to include the entire range of globally interdependent societies of the world. Ecological, physiological, psychological, historical, economic, artistic, technological and political phenomena all fall within the current purview of anthropology. The discipline thus draws freely on various fields of study in the humanities, physical and natural sciences, and various social sciences in its exploration of the patterns of human social life and adaptation.

There are four traditionally recognized subfields of the discipline: archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology and sociocultural anthropology. Binghamton University’s faculty represent the four subfields, and this coverage is key to the training of its students.

However, departmental research and graduate training is also structured around four domains of research and theory that cross-cut the subdisciplines. These approaches are:

Ecological and biobehavioral anthropology, an approach that employs ecological, biomedical, evolutionary and population paradigms in conjunction with natural science and sociocultural perspectives;
Political economy, which seeks to understand the ways that forces at the state and suprastate levels interact with local-level institutions and practices;
Materialism and Semiotics, which encompass analyses of the body, objects, languages, as well as other species. These analyses share an interest in critically reassessing, and in some cases challenging, our assumptions about the physical and/or non-human; and
Critical anthropology, which attempts to analyze the influence of culturally-instituted power in the structuring of social science practices, including methodologies and theory building.

The programs leading to the degrees of Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology contain a requirement of study in all four of the subfields. The exceptions to these four subfield requirements are the Master of Arts in the Public Archaeology (MAPA) track and the MS in biomedical anthropology.

A central objective of graduate training in anthropology is the ability to develop and communicate original thought and research. To this end, all recipients of graduate degrees submit original written work in demonstration of their ability to apply appropriate findings, concepts and analytical techniques of anthropology to a problem identified by the individual student.