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 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 transnational polities and cultures.

The discipline of anthropology:

• 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.