ANTHROPOLOGY AT HAVERFORD
What is Anthropology?
Anthropology is the holistic and comparative study of human beings. Anthropologists study people from a variety of perspectives--historical, biological, social, and cultural. At Haverford we teach socio-cultural anthropology: the comparative study of social organization, family life, subsistence, exchange, politics, ritual, religion, and expressive culture in diverse human communities. Socio-cultural anthropologists aim to promote knowledge and broaden intercultural understanding through sustained participant-observation fieldwork; they study small-scale indigenous and rural communities, state societies and urban populations, and, increasingly, transnational polities and cultures.
Anthropology at Haverford
The Anthropology Major at Haverford teaches students the methods of social and cultural analysis and introduces them to the history of Anthropology through a combination of courses in social theory and ethnography. Students are encouraged to think critically and self-reflectively about several areas of theoretical concern and intellectual inquiry, including:
(1) The problem of ethnography: the interpretive skills, analytic frameworks, and descriptive genres through which anthropologists have sought to represent their own and other societies.
(2) Comparative social structure and comparative social process: how persons are linked, related or opposed in various social orders or social fields, and how such relations are reproduced over time; modes of production, power, and knowledge.
(3) The "person" as understood or constituted in various cultural systems: gender and sexuality, age and generation, caste, ethnicity, national affiliation, and race.
(4) Meaning, communication, and symbolic process: the department encourages interest in material culture and visual anthropology (e.g., art, architecture and spatial order, film, video and cassette media, etc.).
(5) Anthropological understandings of history: problems of historical transformation, and the intellectual legacies and limitations of social evolutionist models, including theories of progress, development and modernization.
The Haverford Department of Anthropology does not teach archaeology or physical/biological
anthropology.
Courses in those areas may be taken at Bryn
Mawr College.
Curriculum
Students majoring in Anthropology are required to take the following 11 courses:
1) One 100- level course in Anthropology:
Anthropology 103 (Haverford)
Anthropology 102 (Bryn Mawr)
Anthropology 110, Anthropology 155
2) Anthropology 210 History and Theory of Anthropology (preferably in the sophomore
or junior year)
3) One Area Study course (at Haverford or another campus), examples include:
Anthropology 241 Anthropology of the Mediterranean
Anthropology 245 Culture, Power, and Identity in Africa
Anthropology 243 Anthropology of East Asia
Anthropology 247 Anthropology of Literature: Ethnography of Black South African
Writings 1888-1988
4) One other 200 level course in the Haverford Anthropology Department
5) One 300 level course in the Haverford Anthropology Department
6) Senior Thesis Seminar 450a and 450b
7) Four additional courses in Anthropology
Courses offered in the department, in an anthropology department on another
campus, or in approved related fields.
For complete course descriptions and listings
Requirements for Honors
Honors are awarded in anthropology based upon overall excellence in the major.
"Excellence" is defined by three criteria: outstanding work in the
senior thesis (final written work and oral presentation), strong cumulative
performance in all anthropological coursework (typically a grade point average
of 3.7 or higher), and a record of consistent intellectual commitment and participation
in the department. High Honors will be awarded, upon occasion, for exceptional
contributions in all areas.