Why Anthropology?
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Why Anthropology?Anthropology explores sewage systems. Anthropology watches lions who are bred to be hunted. Anthropology listens to Nepali FM radio. Anthropology seeks the spatial configurations of artifacts left by people who came to the Northeast centuries ago—from three continents.
The field of anthropology considers the wide variety of human expression and practice around the globe. With an emphasis on difference—cultural difference—anthropology students ask the biggest possible questions about creativity, community, and inequality. They ask these questions using ethnographic fieldwork, linguistics, biology, and archaeology. At Bard, we specialize in sociocultural anthropology and archaeology, and we also offer some courses in linguistic anthropology. We do not offer biological or physical anthropology.
Photo: Emma Weiss Holyst's Senior Project: "Fashioning Seoul: Everyday Practices of Dress in the Korean Wave" -
Anthropology Thinks BigAnthropology wants to know why New Zealand turned from rain forest into grassland. Anthropology learns about German green cards and African religions in South America. Anthropology makes movies with activists who occupy plantations. Anthropology considers the meaning of baseball. Anthropology records oral history during civil wars.
Anthropology does all this in order to consider a big puzzle: what is it that makes humans human? How can humans—and nonhumans—change what “human” means?
Photo: In Mexico City’s pink subway section, only women and children can ride. Does the policy fight sexism or worsen it? Ella McLeod ’18 investigates.
The Core of the Program
The core of the program consists of courses that examine everyday experiences in relation to a range of societal issues, such as development and the environment, medicine and health, religion, language, kinship and reproductivity, sports, mass media, visual culture, and aesthetics. Anthropology offers a way to understand patterns and contradictions of cultural meaning within a transnational and transcultural world. Area strengths include sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia, Australasia, the Middle East, and United States.
Faculty Spotlight
Laura Kunreuther, associate professor of anthropology at Bard College, looks at the association between voice, speech, and sound in the context of mass politics and modes of authoritarian power. What does it mean to write about the sounds of participatory democracy at this divisive political moment around the world? Democratic soundscapes draw our attention toward the affective and embodied nature of political performance, aspects of democracy that are often disavowed or disparaged in mainstream discussions of a rational public sphere and the political ethics of communication. There are many critical approaches to understanding the relationship between emotional and aesthetic expression within mass politics and modes of authoritarian power. Kunreuther suggests novel ways of understanding such relationships by tuning our attention to sound.
Further Reading: Sound as Strategy: An Interview with Laura Kunreuther
Student Spotlight
Alana Rodriguez majors in anthropology and global and international studies at Bard College. A native of New Bedford, Massachusetts, Alana was immediately drawn to these fields as a first-year student, and chose her majors early. This semester, Alana is studying at Bard's Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City, where she is an intern at Catholic Charities Community Services, in the Special Projects Department. She supports the Immigration Court Help Desk, Legal Clinics, and the Pro-bono Project.
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